ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a somatic self-reflection on the phenomenology of racialization by seeking insight into the “strange sensation” of racialization and its multisensorial dimensions. It concludes by considering racialization in terms of affordance in space, or how we move through the world and how the world affords our movement. Taken together, the chapter illuminates how racialization engages and deploys multiple and intertwined assemblages of the senses. If race entails the politics of the skin, racialization generates a particular relationship between the racialized subject and their skin, in which they are constantly reminded of its appearance, meaning, and potential consequences. The face is a location of intersubjective encounter, as “the face is that essential fragment of the body that makes the social bond possible through the responsibility and recognition with which it endows the individual in his or her relationship to the world”.
