ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors draw attention to sensing race in the practice of sensory ethnography. By drawing insights from Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized embodiment, they bring sensorial awareness to the implications of race in ethnographic inquiry. First, they articulate racism as a formation of racialized relations of sensing between the sensing subject and the sensed object, which cumulates into a community of sensing/sensed bodies along the color lines. Second, they bring attention to the racialized body—and how it learns to feel and be felt in the social world. Finally, they discuss the notion of emplacement through the phenomenology of racialized embodiment. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of racialized sensory awareness in the practice of sensory ethnography and considers how sensory ethnographers may exercise critical self-reflexivity with their racialized embodiment, emplaced bodies, and relations of sensing that are formed in ethnographic practice.
