The Burden of Anti-Racism Spokespeople
If there is one thing that the people who denounce racism and the people who deny its existence can agree on, it’s the intensity of the emotional load generated by controversies surrounding this issue.Footnote 1 On one hand, many critical whiteness studiesFootnote 2 reveal white people’s reluctance to hear about racism and the fact that they experience the least allusion to this topic as an attack and an insult against their own moral integrity and that of “the nation” (DiAngelo, Reference DiAngelo2011; Eid, Reference Eid2018; Hage, Reference Hage1998; Hesse, Reference Hesse2007; Taher, Reference Taher2021). On the other hand, there is a growing body of literature that documents the emotional cost of these debates on anti-racism activists who bring anti-racist discourse into majority white spaces (see Adjokê, Reference Adjokê, Zaazaa and Nadeau2019; Almeida and Lopez, Reference Almeida, Lopez, Kuptsch and Charest2021; Gorski and Erakat, Reference Gorski and Erakat2019; Hadj Kaddour and Waldispuehl, Reference Hadj Kaddour, Waldispuehl, Dufour, Bherer and Pagé2023). To compound the difficulty, for these activists, of talking about racism, racialized people are also underrepresented in media and political spaces. Underrepresentation in spaces of visibility and power is a reality in Canada, and many studies have proven its persistence in Quebec despite many initiatives to “promote diversity” (Conseil des relations interculturelles, 2009; Humanov·is, 2021; L’Association canadienne des journalistes, 2023; Picard, Reference Picard2016; Savić, Reference Savić2021). Consequently, for the few racialized people who succeed in penetrating these spaces, the terms “representation fatigue” and “representation burnout”—variations on the classic “burden of representation”—are increasingly used to describe the feeling of having to carry an entire community on their shoulders and of being the person who has to represent their “race” (Dans les médias, 2023; Détours. 2022). “Burden of representation” is a common expression that refers to the pressure—real or imagined, sought or imposed—on minoritized individuals to represent the entire community or group they are associated with (Feng, Reference Feng and Lopez2020; Mercer, Reference Mercer1990, Reference Mercer1994; Nyong’o, Reference Nyong’o2014).Footnote 3 This expression covers a wide variety of experiences at the intersection of representation and minoritization, where people feel implicit or explicit pressure to speak and act on behalf of a minority, play a role or fill a function of political representation.
This burden surfaced in semi-directed interviews I conducted with anti-racism activists who serve as spokespeople in Quebec. Acting as the voice of collectives, organizations and groups of individuals who have appointed them as spokespeople or who recognize themselves in their advocacy, these spokespeople, most of whom are racialized,Footnote 4 are often from the marginalized communities they defend, breaking the practice, long denounced by racialized people and groups, of talking “for them without them” (Alcoff, Reference Alcoff1991; Benhadjoudja, Reference Benhadjoudja2018; Spivak, Reference Spivak2008). Although their role is crucial for bringing forward the claims and demands of the anti-racist movement and giving a voice to racialized populations, the anti-racism spokespeople I interviewed shared very mixed feelings about their role. Sometimes, those feelings took the form of a fairly explicit aversion to advocacy. More often, they took the form of implicit reluctance, expressed through the lexicon of the “burden,” “load” or “ordeal” of being the voice of anti-racism.
The emergence of the theme of burden in my interviews raised a dual line of inquiry. First, how can the work of anti-racism advocacy—often performed on a volunteer basis by activists dedicated to the cause and who have gained media and political visibility through their engagement—constitute a burden? Second, how has this impression of a burden formed a collective affective experience that is shared by the majority of spokespeople I interviewed, even though they are from different racialized minorities and are defending varied anti-racist themes? In other words, what lends the spokesperson’s anti-racism work this “ambience” of burden that affects all these activities, the weight of which came through in most of the interviews (Brennan, Reference Brennan2004)?
While the literature on the burden of representation has clearly established the links between this burden and the underrepresentation of minoritized groups (Feng, Reference Feng and Lopez2020; Nyong’o, Reference Nyong’o2014), very little research examines this burden using an affective reading grid (with the exception of Mercer, 1990, Reference Mercer1994; Puwar, Reference Puwar2004). And yet, as a critical approach to affect demonstrates, “that which energizes or drains us is already bound up in networks of power, replete with images and symbolic representations that attach and entrench us in various asymmetrical relations” (Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2019: 86). In short, even the most intimate affects are not isolated psychological states but the result of our encounters with others (Ahäll, Reference Ahäll2018; Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019; Brennan, Reference Brennan2004). This understanding of affects echoes the analysis by Kobena Mercer (Reference Mercer1994), who draws our attention to the structural dimension of this sensation of burden. He says that the burden of representation does not stem from an individual feeling but is, rather, a consequence of the minoritized and racialized representation that structures access to spaces of power and visibility (cultural, intellectual, political, etc.). A critical structural and affective analysis of the burden of representation allows us to shed light on how the mixed feelings expressed by spokespeople about their role and the impression of a weight and load stem, in part, from the non-egalitarian organization of spaces of visibility and, particularly, the racialized conditions in which the practice of anti-racism advocacy unfolds.
To trace the boundaries of the experience of the burden of representation as lived by the spokespeople, this article embraces a critical phenomenological approach that considers the materiality of race and its embodied and affective effects. Critical phenomenology is an approach that illuminates, on one hand, the mechanisms through which racism persists despite the negation of its biological basis and, on the other, the agentive possibilities of anti-racist action (Bernasconi, Reference Bernasconi2012; Guenther, Reference Guenther, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020; Lee, Reference Lee and Lee2014). In this way, I focus on the meaning that the spokespeople give to their experience of racialized representation and the way that racialization (re)shapes their “sensory grid” (Mills, Reference Mills and Lee2014: 37) by requiring them to adopt certain “affective practices” (Wetherell, Reference Wetherell2012).
This article is organized into four sections. First, I conduct a review of the literature that rethinks the intersection of the concepts of political representation and racialization. Second, I discuss the affective dimension of racialization, which I explore through the concept of affective practices. Third, I outline my methodological and analytical affective process, offering a different—and wonder-filled—view of the data. Fourth, I describe the four affective practices (sensitization, adaptation, protection and protest) that anti-racism spokespeople implement. I conclude by linking the four affective practices and providing a general summary of my findings.
Spokespeople in the Literature: Representation and Racialization Blind Spots
The term spokesperson is often associated with an official role—paid or volunteer—that arises through a process of delegation by a group or organization after an election or appointment (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu2001; Hadj Belgacem, Reference Hadj Belgacem, Juhem and Sedel2016; Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016). Nevertheless, it is also sometimes attributed to people who self-appoint and play the role informally—in other words, with no delegation process—in order to speak out and defend the interests of marginalized groups (Montanaro, Reference Montanaro2012; Saward, Reference Saward2009; Vieira, Reference Vieira and Vieira2017). In many social justice movements, including the anti-racism movement, these two types of spokespeople, formal and self-designated, are conflated. The role of spokesperson within these movements is often held on an ad hoc basis by volunteer activists who do this work both officially and unofficially (Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016).
The literature that documents and theorizes the role of spokesperson underscores the importance of political representation to defend the interests of social groups that do not have social legitimacy, electoral representation or the means of political participation (Disch, Reference Disch2008; Jones et al., Reference Jones, O’Toole, DeHanas, Modood and Meer2015; Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016; Latour, Reference Latour2002; Montanaro, Reference Montanaro2012; Talpin, Reference Talpin2016; Weldon, Reference Weldon2011). Some studies show that being the voice of a marginalized group does not entail the same challenges as being the voice of a political party, institution or organization with extensive resources (Jones et al., Reference Jones, O’Toole, DeHanas, Modood and Meer2015; Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016).
Structural asymmetry impacts the access to public speaking spaces, and the prerequisite criteria for evaluating the credibility of the spokespeople are profoundly unequal (Jones et al., Reference Jones, O’Toole, DeHanas, Modood and Meer2015; Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016; Voirol, Reference Voirol2005). With few exceptions, however, the literature on spokespeople does not directly address the concept of the burden of representation, much less the issues of racialized representation (see Jones et al., Reference Jones, O’Toole, DeHanas, Modood and Meer2015; Severs et al., Reference Severs, Celis and Erzeel2016). As a result, the literature that documents the problems faced by spokespeople and other representatives of social movements mostly focuses on the democratic processes leading to the appointment or election of the representatives (Giraud et al., Reference Giraud, Mischi and Penissat2015; Hadj Belgacem, Reference Hadj Belgacem, Juhem and Sedel2016; Nez, Reference Nez2012; Talpin, Reference Talpin2016). As such, it does not sufficiently consider how the cause defended by the political representative reverberates into this already complex relationship that spokespeople maintain with the outside world (to which the message must be carried) or how the experience of representation may be lived differently based on various lines of social differentiation (Severs et al., Reference Severs, Celis and Erzeel2016). For a critical understanding of political representation—and, by extension, the spokesperson’s role—it would be more useful to turn to research anchored in Cultural Studies that examines the concept of the burden of representation through the prism of minoritization and, in particular, racialization. Before broaching this literature, I will first position the concept of spokesperson theoretically, especially in terms of its relationship with political representation.
Political representation: The challenges of a polysemic concept
Representation is a polysemic term, and in the social sciences, it has at least two meanings: one political and one symbolic. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Reference Spivak and Harasym1990) points out that these two meanings are expressed by Karl Marx (Reference Marx1937) using two separate words in the German language: Vertretung and Darstellung. While Vertretung relates to the political dimension, namely, speaking on behalf of another person as their delegate, proxy and agent, Darstellung relates to the symbolic dimension of painting a portrait of the other, depicting them, representing them and portraying them. The role of the spokesperson refers essentially to the political dimension of representation, Vertretung. It is a term that harkens back to a formal function where spokespeople are mandated or delegated by people, collectives or organizations to speak in their name (Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami, Reference Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami2018; Giraud et al., Reference Giraud, Mischi and Penissat2015; Hadj Belgacem, Reference Hadj Belgacem, Juhem and Sedel2016; Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016). Nevertheless, the role of spokesperson is also intersected by the symbolic dimension, because anyone who plays that role is also required to embody the collective they represent, to give it “a unique body and voice, a singularity, allowing it to appear and act as a specific collective entity” ([translation] Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami, Reference Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami2018: 83). As Pierre Bourdieu describes, “when the spokesperson speaks, it is a group that is speaking through them, but a group that exists as a group through that speech and that person” ([translation] Reference Bourdieu2001: 10). This representation does not unfold solely through the oral statement, because the spokesperson also “expresses the group through their body, that is, through the way they behave, occupy space, dress and do their hair” ([translation] Sedel, Reference Sedel, Juhem and Sedel2016: 42).
Due to this superimposition of the symbolic and political dimensions, in this article I will use the terms “spokesperson” and “representative” interchangeably to mean both the official function through delegation by a collective or group and the self-designated or informal function. This superimposition has often been a source of confusion and tension, making representation—in the minds of some people—a synonym of mimesis (d’Allonnes, Reference d’Allonnes2016). The mimetic understanding of representation relies on the idea that it is used “as another way of talking about how one imagines a reality that exists ‘outside’ the means by which things are represented” (Hall, Reference Hall, Morley and Chen1996 : 443), in other words, the way this reality is supposed to actually exist. Consequently, the concept of representation is the root of certain unrealistic and, in fact, impossible expectations of the spokespeople’s work: they are expected to stand in for the multiplicity or collectives they represent, to replicate them and make them present faithfully and authentically (Latour, Reference Latour2002). This expectation of mimesis is accentuated by various minoritization processes, including the one I am focusing on in this article, racialization.
Racialization, mimesis and injunction to political representation
By racialization, I mean the process by which racial categories are created, (re)produced and consolidated, based on differences that allow them to be classified and placed in a hierarchy (Hall, Reference Hall and Cervulle2019; Mazouz, Reference Mazouz2020). This concept is useful because it “sheds light on the (re)production logics of racial hierarchies in a given society; it reflects the production of groups subject to racial assignment while examining the mechanisms that lead one group to benefit from the logics of racialization” ([translation] Mazouz, Reference Mazouz2020: 48–9). Racialization is established and maintained, in part, through generalization and homogenization, such that all the people associated with a racialized group are amalgamated to the point of becoming interchangeable. Consequently, each of them is saddled with the expectation that they can and must faithfully represent the racialized group in question. By emphasizing the blurring of the symbolic and political dimensions of representation, racialized mimesis “sutures” together Darstellung and Vertretung (Nyong’o, Reference Nyong’o2014: 75). With these two dimensions superimposed, any symbolic visibility or performance of racialized people is understood as an act of political representation in the names of everyone assigned to that group (76). Rey Chow (Reference Chow2002) even uses the expression “coercive mimesis” to describe the process by which racialized minorities are expected to not only resemble each other but also replicate the biases held against them. The author notes that coercive mimesis can provoke a feeling of self-hatred and impotence in people who are subjected to it because “however conscientiously they attempt to authenticate themselves—and especially when they attempt conscientiously—they will continue to come across as inferior imitations, copies that are permanently out of focus” (Chow, Reference Chow2002: 127).
The connection between political representation and racialization provokes confusion between “speaking for” and “speaking as” and even “appearing as.” Consequently, people who are not delegated by any group and who do not consider themselves to be a representative of a collective or a community are assigned this role against their will.
Many studies anchored in Western settings, including Quebec, document the experiences of racialized representation among groups that include racialized Black and Asian artists (Diversité artistique Montréal, 2018; Feng, Reference Feng and Lopez2020; Gilroy, Reference Gilroy1989; Mercer, Reference Mercer1994); people considered to represent “minorities” and to embody “diversity” in their workplace (Almeida and Lopez, Reference Almeida, Lopez, Kuptsch and Charest2021; Centre des organismes communautaires, 2018); and racialized people whose visibility is constructed as a threat or public problem, such as Muslim women who wear a headscarf (Benhadjoudja, Reference Benhadjoudja2018; Zoghlami Reference Zoghlami2015). Finding themselves in a representation situation they did not choose, these people often exert increased control over their appearance and especially over the emotions they display, to avoid reproducing stereotypes that already are associated with the racial group they have been assigned to (Almeida and Lopez, Reference Almeida, Lopez, Kuptsch and Charest2021; Mercer, Reference Mercer1994; Zoghlami, Reference Zoghlami2015).
Nirmal Puwar (Reference Puwar2004) examined the injunction to represent among elected political representatives in the UK who are already in a role of formal representation. The racialized members of parliament that she interviewed are not perceived as representatives of their political party or their constituents, as is the case for white MPs, but as speaking for and embodying the racialized people they resemble. The burden they experience is demonstrated subtly by a feeling of being “under the magnifying glass,” a sort of “super/vision”—a term Puwar borrows from Theo Goldberg (Reference Goldberg2002)—related to “hypervisibility.” This means that all their deeds and actions are closely monitored and the smallest deviations can be amplified and have consequences for the group with which they are racially associated (Puwar, Reference Puwar2004). As summed up by Olivier Voirol (Reference Voirol2005: 94), as soon as they access spaces of visibility, racialized people have their “appearance potential” confiscated. They no longer have control over the way they are seen and heard by others. Mercer (Reference Mercer1994) suggests, therefore, that the burden of representation is the result of this economy of minoritized and racialized representation, which “rations” access to spaces of visibility and power by limiting the resources available to racialized people, for example, and which restricts the modalities of their appearance in public spaces.
This critical literature foregrounds the emotional and affective cost of racialized representation for racialized people, both the cost of coercive mimesis and the cost of the emotional control required by hyper-surveillance. Whether these people are tempted to play the game of racializing stereotypes or try to overturn them, an emotional weight stems from their racialized visibility—representation. To make sense of this experience of racialized representation, I have adopted a theoretical framework with an affective reading grid. In this way, I approach racialization as an affective process of relationships and encounters (Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2021) and affects as social and cultural practices (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004a).
Affects of Racialization, Racialization of Affects
More and more studies inspired by the pioneering work of Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and his book Black Skin, White Masks (Reference Fanon1952) point out that race is constituted, in part, of emotions, feelings and affective forces (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004a, Reference Ahmed, Gregg and Seigworth2010; Al-Saji, Reference Al-Saji and Lee2014; Berg and Ramos-Zayas, Reference Berg and Ramos-Zayas2015; Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019; Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2019; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2015, Reference Zembylas2021). While the psychological and material consequences of racial oppression on racialized bodies have long been documented (see Fanon, Reference Fanon1952; McClintock, Reference McClintock1995; Memmi, Reference Memmi1957; Stoler, Reference Stoler1995), more recent research shows that affects are also building blocks of racialization, in that racial classifications and the related vocabulary have always carried an affective connotation and been part of an “affective imaginary” (Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019: 155). This leads philosopher Alia Al-Saji (Reference Al-Saji and Lee2014: 137) to define racialization as “the historical and social process by which races are constructed, seen and, when interiorized or epidermalized, lived.” This “epidermalization” can occur even before racialized people find the words to describe their experience: it is a pervasive discomfort, a heaviness, the impression of something sticking to the skin after certain interactions or encounters (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004a; Bonilla-Silva, Reference Bonilla-Silva2019). Racialization also associates “affective capacities” with certain bodies rather than others, thereby further naturalizing the ladder of humanity (Palmer, Reference Palmer2017; Ngai, Reference Ngai2005; Wynter, Reference Wynter2003; Yao, Reference Yao2021).Footnote 5 While whiteness is understood as “the standard measure of humanity and feelings” (Yao, Reference Yao2021: 20), racialized subjects are considered as deviations from the norm, thrust back into alterity and nature, caricatured as excessively emotional and expressive, reactive, carnal, childlike and devoid of rationality (Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019; Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2019; Hall, Reference Hall and Hall1997; Lorde, Reference Lorde1984; Lugones, Reference Lugones2019; Moraga Reference Moraga, Moraga and Anzaldúa1981; Ngai, Reference Ngai2005; Saïd, Reference Saïd1978; Wynter, Reference Wynter2003). This corporeal and affective classification and hierarchization of the human/non-human or subhuman is central to modernity and has always been rooted in a colonial knowledge system that makes it possible to maintain and justify several relationships of domination, including racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and ableism (Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2020; Lugones, Reference Lugones2019; Tlostonova, Reference Tlostanova2017; Wynter, Reference Wynter2003). To take account of the specificity of the affective experiences of racialized anti-racism spokespeople, in this article I use a conceptualization of affects that departs from the universalizing approach.
Upsetting the universalizing conception of affects
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Reference Gregg, Seigworth, Gregg and Seigworth2010: 3) point out that there are many—even infinitely multiple—theories of affect and yet that “there is no single, generalizable theory.” The various theories share the idea of disrupting the body/mind dichotomy and emphasize the importance of exploring our bodily connections with others and the way affect works in us and with us (Hemmings, Reference Hemmings, Sharma and Tygstrup2015). Two dominant conceptualizations of affect seem nevertheless to stand out in the literature, distinguishing themselves by the relationship they posit between the concepts of “affect” and “emotion.” The first clearly separates emotions from affects: while emotions are understood as “the expression of affect in gesture and language, its conventional or coded [and organized] expression” (Massumi, Reference Massumi and Massumi2015: 32), affects are conceived as preconscious, autonomic intensities, located beyond language (Brennan, Reference Brennan2004; Massumi, Reference Massumi1995). According to Brian Massumi (Reference Massumi and Massumi2015: 4), “when you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn”; nevertheless, “a body’s ability to affect or be affected—its charge of affect—isn’t something fixed. So depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down gently like a tide, or maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out.” This conceptualization of affect as resonance, energy and intensity has the advantage of viewing affects relationally and socially (Kouri-Towe, Reference Kouri-Towe2015), allowing us to “think through our encounters in the social and political as a relationship of resonance, rather than as a relationship of reaction-effect/polarity-opposition” (Kouri-Towe, Reference Kouri-Towe2015: 23). However, this approach has the significant limitation of adopting a universalist perspective, which tends to depoliticize biology and physiology (Palmer, Reference Palmer2017). This is, indeed, the criticism raised by the decolonial approach, which states that although the mechanisms of affective perception are universal, affects/emotions/intensities and their expressivity are far from being universal and are always locally, historically and culturally specific (Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2019; Palmer, Reference Palmer2017; Tlostanova, Reference Tlostanova2017; Yao, Reference Yao2021; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2015; Reference Zembylas2021). Consequently, the capacity to affect and be affected—Massumi’s “charge of affect”—is variable, entangled in relationships of power, and it circulates within colonial and racialized affective economies that reproduce the subjection of Black people and racialized bodies (Palmer, Reference Palmer2017; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2021).
These criticisms lead me to the second conceptualization of affect, inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed, who considers the gendered and racialized dimension of affects. Ahmed (Reference Ahmed, Gregg and Seigworth2010) shares a social conceptualization of affects and understands them as mediums that create meaning, weave relationships between bodies and constitute surfaces that they leave “impressions” on. Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004a, Reference Ahmed2004b) does not differentiate between emotions and affects, considering the separation to be purely analytical. Tyrone Palmer (Reference Palmer2017: 35) concurs, adding that the distinction between affect and emotion “often serves to obfuscate rather than elucidate the object of analysis, reinforcing the slipperiness and indeterminacy of affect as an analytic tool.”Footnote 6 Like Ahmed and Palmer, I am not interested in the distinction between affect and emotion. I do, however, share the observation of Andreas Reckwitz (Reference Reckwitz, Hui, Schatzi and Shove2017) that unlike the term “emotion,” which is often understood as something we have, the term “affect” explicitly designates the process and relationship of affecting and being affected. It is therefore only for this clear processual and relational connotation that I use the term “affect,” while also employing it in an overarching way that includes emotions, feelings, sensations and other visceral forces—conscious or otherwise—that can push people toward movement or inhibit any kind of action (Gregg and Seigworth, Reference Gregg, Seigworth, Gregg and Seigworth2010; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2021). I also draw inspiration from the idea of “affective economy” proposed by Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004b), which allows us to take account of the materiality of affects/emotions and the way they “circulate between bodies and signs,” “align individuals with communities […] through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004b: 119). Racialization understood through this conceptualization of affect is no longer a rigid essence, something that some bodies possess, but an event that occurs “within an affective economy of interracial encounters,” an event that is permeated by the circulation of affects and that is constituted by and during these interactions (Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2015: 146). These are dynamic relationships in which we affect and are affected at the spatial, geopolitical and environmental levels (Blickstein, Reference Blickstein, Slaby and von Scheve2019; Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2019; Zembylas, Reference Zembylas2021). This approach pushes us to question what makes these emotions, how they work in us and through us by “mediat[ing] the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004b: 119). I examine this making through the concept of “affective practices.”
Affective racialization practices
With few exceptions, the intersection of the literature on “practices” and the literature on “affects” is barely explored (see Gherardi, Reference Gherardi2017; Gherardi et al., Reference Gherardi, Murgia, Bellè, Miele and Carreri2018; Reckwitz, Reference Reckwitz, Hui, Schatzi and Shove2017). And yet the two theories share many things in common, including the importance placed on corporality and the way social activities and bodies are constituted through and by practices (Schatzki, Reference Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, Schatzki and von Savigny2001). The principal focus of theories of practice—despite the heterogeneity of their approaches—is studying the social through routine incorporated and embodied actions that acquire, over time, the status of implicit collective knowledge, what is known as “practice” (Reckwitz, Reference Reckwitz, Hui, Schatzi and Shove2017). From Reckwitz’s perspective, to fully understand the function of practices, we have to understand the specific affects that comprise them. Indeed, “every social practice is then affectively tuned in a particular way and has, as such, a built-in affective dimension” (Reckwitz, Reference Reckwitz, Hui, Schatzi and Shove2017: 118). By affective practice, I mean social practices, “body possibilities and routines” that are characterized by their emphasis on “the performance and modification of affect” (Wetherell et al., Reference Wetherell, McConville and McCreanor2020: 15). Studying affective practices requires us to investigate how certain affects are understood, how they can be articulated or legitimized and how they are amplified or suppressed depending on the context (Wetherell et al., Reference Wetherell, McConville and McCreanor2020).
Davide Nicolini (Reference Nicolini, Hui, Schatzki and Shove2017: 104) observes that practices only become intelligible within “the pre-existing set of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions,” which contribute to both the unfolding of those practices and their constraint. The practices are effectively “bound up with established power regimes and conditions of possibility set by social relations more broadly” (Wetherell et al., Reference Wetherell, McConville and McCreanor2020: 15). This conception of affects as practices leads me to consider what makes spokespeople adopt certain affective practices, how it happens, why, and what their lived experience is like (Barnes, Reference Barnes, Knorr-Cetina, Schatzki and von Savigny2001). The spokespeople arrive in spaces from which they are usually excluded and in which they have long been objects of representation, rather than actors of that representation. Puwar (Reference Puwar2004: 1) is of the opinion that their arrival is intriguing because it disrupts the status quo: “It is a moment of change […] that causes disruption, necessitates negotiation.” How do anti-racism spokespeople experience the disruption triggered by their public appearances? What characterizes the racial encounters in which they play their political representation role? And finally, what “affective practices” do the spokespeople implement to negotiate that disruption?
Methodological Affective Approach
Practices are what constitute the “unspoken and scarcely notable background of everyday life,” according to Nicolini (Reference Nicolini2009: 1392). They are generally what goes without saying, what is invisible because taken for granted. As Elspeth Probyn rightly notes, “What constitutes an affective response is hugely complex, and is in part the result of an embodied history to which and with which the body reacts” (Reference Probyn2004: 29). A methodology centred on affect takes relationships into account, not only relationships that the participants experience within their environment, relationships we weave with them as researchers, but also our own relationship with the research topic. Taking an interest in affects as a research topic is not “simply one more tool in the bag, but rather requires us to rethink what it is we do when we use any of our tools” (Gibbs, Reference Gibbs, Knudson and Stage2015: 224).
Spokespeople’s profiles and interviews
I conducted fifteen interviews with anti-racism spokespeople;Footnote 7 fourteen of them were racialized people and the other one was white. Ten identified as women and five as men. From the perspective of cultural and/or racialized identity, one of the interviewees defined herself as Indigenous, five as Black, five as Arab (some were Muslims and others racialized as such), three as Latinex, one of Indian origin, one of Chinese origin and finally one as white French-Canadian. As her experience was completely different from the racialized spokespeople, it was not included in this analysis. Several of the spokespeople placed themselves at the intersection of various membership groups and were involved in many struggles at the juncture between anti-racism, anti-colonialism and feminism. The topics they tended to campaign for are therefore varied: defence of Indigenous rights, combatting Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism, police violence, defence of people without legal status and migrant workers, advocacy for defunding the police. The type of spokespersonship that the interviewees were involved with is also varied: traditional or alternative/independent media, street demonstrations, press conferences or participation in public consultations.Footnote 8
The semi-directed interviews I conducted lasted on average 90 minutes (ranging from 60 to 150 minutes).Footnote 9 When the opportunity arose and the interviewee was open to it, some interviews took the form of a life story, recounting certain events and their activism journey and the trajectory of their engagement as a spokesperson (Bertaux, Reference Bertaux2005). Semi-directed interviews or life stories offer a better understanding of the way the representatives view their political environment and, by extension, round out and qualify the more “macro” analyses of structural inequalities in representation spaces (Severs et al., Reference Severs, Celis and Erzeel2016). The interviews I conducted were “guided conversations,” spaces of proximity where I took an interest in the challenges the spokespeople meet, their conception of political representation and what it means to them, and how they experience and negotiate the constraints (Blee and Taylor, Reference Blee, Taylor, Klandermans and Staggenborg2002: 92).
Wonder as an analytical approach to affective processes
During this inductive research process, the thread of affect began to come into focus first as a sensation inscribed in my body as a researcher and analyst. The critical phenomenological approach views the body as “our opening onto the world” (Kim, Reference Kim and Lee2014: 114). And as Mairi McDermott points out (Reference McDermott, Dei and McDermott2014: 223), affective signs are not transparent: “they are read through our own affective experiences as well as through our relationship and understanding of the other bodies we are engaging with.” I felt a weight pervading my data throughout my research, during both the interviews and the transcription and analysis. My first step on the affect trail was realizing, after a few interviews, that most of the spokespeople I was meeting did not like what they were doing. The weariness and/or aversion shared by the activists about their experiences as spokespeople coloured their testimonies and our meetings and left an imprint on me. When I replayed the recordings of the interviews, as the sighs added up, my shoulders tensed, bent and became weighed down. It was as if my data were also transforming into a burden that was becoming increasingly difficult for me to carry.
According to Jeanne Favret-Saada (Reference Favret-Saada1990: 9), there is an interval between the moment when we become “affected” by our data, the moment when we analyze it and the moment when, finally, we understand why we are affected, often spread out over time. The analytical process is an act of discovery where we inhabit our phenomenon and, over time, the sediments of meaning, nuance and texture are revealed (Finlay, Reference Finlay2013). It was the accumulation, repetition and persistence of these sensations of heaviness over time that led me to dig deeper into the concept of the burden of representation. Once the affect trail crystallized, the question of how to understand affects empirically quickly came to the fore.
Maggie MacLure (Reference MacLure2013a) proposes wonder as an entryway to the affective processes that animate our data and cut through the experience of research in general. She invites us to open up to the data’s potentiality to surprise us, to question us, to amaze us, a potentiality that can be felt through fragments of field notes, silences in an interview, an anecdote, an ironic tone or a “strange” facial expression. These moments enliven our data, grip us and preoccupy us; they “confound the industrious, mechanical search for meanings, patterns, codes, or themes; but at the same time, they exert a kind of fascination, and have a capacity to animate further thought” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2013a: 228). For me, the coding work was both a painstaking endeavour of classification into themes and a fascinating and uncertain immersion in the field data, a practice of searching for meaning and “making meaning” (MacLure, Reference MacLure, Coleman and Ringrose2013b). These data are comprised of (1) exhaustive retranscriptions of the interviews, (2) the audio recording which holds the tone of voice, the silences, the laughter and the sighs, and (3) my notes taken during and after the interviews and while coding.
It was because of my complete immersion in these data that affective practices began to rise to the surface or, to borrow MacLure’s term, to “glow” (Reference MacLure, Coleman and Ringrose2013b: 175). Empirically, affective practices appear as a “a meshwork of doings and sayings” (Reckwitz, Reference Reckwitz, Hui, Schatzi and Shove2017: 122) about affectively connoted activities, reflexes and routines performed on the basis of what people learn from one another. They emerge through advice or recommendations that these participants give or that they believe others should adopt or through the way these practices have changed or stayed the same over the years of their experience as spokespeople. As affect is social and relational, I paid special attention to the spokespeople’s descriptions of their encounters and relationships, the way they acquired some of their advocacy habits, and their preference for some affective practices over others. I took into account the participants’ discourse about what they experienced and felt and how that filtered through in their practice as a spokesperson. Consequently, it was important for me to consider not only what they said, but also how they expressed and communicated it, that is, the gaps, the silences, those moments where they struggled to find the right words and interrupted themselves (Ahäll, Reference Ahäll2018; Wetherell, Reference Wetherell2012). These various elements served as indicators while I was coding, to identify and highlight what seemed to me to relate to affective practices. While in some cases they were affective practices that the spokespeople did not view as such and that emerged when they were talking about their experiences and representation practices in general, other spokespeople talked of them more deliberately, to the extent that they are part of the range of practices that they deploy consciously in representation. Once all the practices were coded, I made thematic groups of affective practices that seemed to demand effort and of more or less routine bodily/emotional performances. Based on this analytical device, I identified the four following categories of affective practices: sensitization, adaptation, protection and protest.
Racialized Affective Practices: Between Sensitization, Adaptation, Protection and Protest
Analyzing the interviews through the lens of affect revealed that the affective practices of racialization implemented by the spokespeople appear especially in their interactions with the media, that is, in the interviews they grant. It was in discussions of this relationship that the affective dimensions of the spokesperson’s work were the most evident. Margaret Wetherell (Reference Wetherell, Maxwell and Aggleton2013: 236) comments that the boundaries between affective practices are often very fluid: “Participants might snap from one to another, or orientate slowly to changing activity flows, backtrack, move automatically or with resistance from one scene to another, combine and pull together different orientations, sometimes toying with them, sometimes deeply gripped and always customizing as they go for the context.” As we will see below, the identified practices overlap, complement each other or are sometimes in tension with each other.
Affective practices of sensitization: Carrying a community’s experience and pain
As the spokesperson of an organization that sensitizes and educates about the realities and outlooks of Indigenous peoples, Isabelle has been regularly invited to speak out in various media platforms for years. As she recounts the sensitization work she is trying to do among non-Indigenous people, she describes the lack of sensitivity in many journalists, especially in their coverage of topics that are traumatic for Indigenous people:
You know, we want to speak out because we want to raise people’s awareness, and it’s important. And at the same time, sometimes it’s bad for our mental health, because we address the kinds of topics that are really hard and … journalists … are not at all … I don’t want to generalize, there are some that are way more aware, appropriate, and all that, but there are still too many who take it lightly or underestimate those topics. They talk as if it’s just another topic, with no sensitivity […] What’s hard, too, is that people do not realize that in Indigenous settings, there are tons of “triggering” topics and they take it lightly. I know that I talk a lot about the media, but it can happen in other contexts. But they’re like, very simply, the hot topic is missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women, and they say, “Oh, we’re looking for women who have experienced violence or assault. Do you know any? How about you—have you experienced any?” [translation]
Although for decades topics related to Indigenous realities elicited very little media attention, the recent interest does not always seem to be accompanied by sensitivity to the intergenerational traumas experienced by the First Peoples, traumas caused by colonization, dispossession and physical and cultural genocide. One traumatic phenomenon raised by Isabelle is the missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women, femicides that have been going on in Canada for over 30 years and that target Indigenous girls and women (Bourgeoys, Reference Bourgeoys and Green2017; Walter, Reference Walter2014). Isabelle criticizes the fact that people can talk about this subject, long ignored and hushed up both politically and in the media, without any real sensitivity to or understanding of the affective charge it generates in First Nations people.
While, for Isabelle, the encounter with the media reveals a lack of sensitivity in the treatment of Indigenous realities, for other spokespeople, it is characterized by a lack of reciprocity or even, in some cases, by hostility. That is the experience of Hajar, a Black Muslim activist who wears a hijab, who has always been a spokesperson for issues concerning Muslims, first through her student association at university and then at a human rights organization. The young woman has therefore always enjoyed a platform to express herself, not only during the many controversies surrounding Muslim women’s headscarves that rocked the province of Quebec but also during fatal and Islamophobic incidents in Quebec and elsewhere around the world. However, when an attack happened in London, Ontario, in June 2021,Footnote 10 Hajar had a position that no longer allowed her to speak publicly: “I was really uncomfortable because for the first time […] I felt really disempowered. I could not … share the pain of the Muslim community […].” She does not have good memories of her experience as a spokesperson, however. She says:
I think my biggest challenge is that sometimes there are big things going on in terms of Islamophobia and I do not have the stomach to do the interviews. I don’t feel good, I am so discouraged and I no longer want to talk about it, but you’re obliged to … you’re not obliged, but you feel an obligation to face those interviews to try to share how the community feels, and you’ve got five, six, seven, eight journalists waiting to hear you and afterward, they don’t even publish what you said […]. And unfortunately, there aren’t many of us, but we’re always there as the spokespeople for the Muslim community, but no one listens to us […] yes, it may be a burden, but there is still so much work to be done, and if we give up now, it’s over. [translation]
During the past two years, Hajar granted several dozen interviews to Francophone media in Quebec, particularly to convey the voices of Muslim women experiencing the impacts of Bill 21 on their lives.Footnote 11 These radio or television interviews are always planned at very short notice (sometimes the day before or on the day itself) and require her to drop what she is doing and travel from one end of the city to the other. With a sad smile, Hajar explained to me that of all the dozens of interviews she has given, only two were relayed to the public by the journalists. The rest were simply not aired. She experienced that as an act of censorship on the part of journalists who were not satisfied with what she said: “They asked me questions that they wanted me to answer in a particular way. I did not give those responses, and so they just didn’t air me. I could see it in their tone, the way they talked to me. I remember, there was one time, it was for Bill 21, and what started as an interview turned into a debate […] they were coming after me.”
By forcing themselves to speak out, even when an emotionally demanding topic is not addressed with the appropriate sensitivity or when they do not feel up to doing it, both Isabelle and Hajar were doing what Arlie Hochschild (Reference Hochschild2003: 32) calls “emotion work.” This affective practice involves an effort—whether or not it is ultimately successful—to change the quality of an emotion or feeling. It involves both the attempt to foster or provoke a specific emotion in others and the management of our own feelings by, for example, repressing them (Mirchandani, Reference Mirchandani2003). Consequently, the emotion work Isabelle and Hajar are doing is twofold. By implementing these affective practices of sensitization, both spokespeople are repressing, hiding or containing their own emotions, injuries, sensitivities and frustrations. They are acting on “a disjuncture between the way in which they are expected to feel and the way in which they actually feel” (Mirchandani, Reference Mirchandani2003: 723). The outcome of this process is costly for them, however. While Isabelle clearly states that “it is bad for my mental health,” Hajar explains that this work is done in a context of a complete lack of reciprocity and even hostility, so her feelings and those of her community are erased.
The word “community” that Hajar uses in reference to the “Muslim community” seems revealing to me of the affective imprint of the spokesperson’s interactions with the media.
When spokespeople (re)consolidate the borders of affective communities
In its classic meaning in the social sciences, the term “community” evokes the idea of a solid, collective entity that shares rituals, beliefs and values (Zink, Reference Zink, Slaby and von Scheve2019). But Hajar and the other Muslim spokespeople I met are deeply aware of the heterogeneity of Muslims in Quebec, from the perspective of their interpretation of Islam, their practice, the languages they speak and their culture of origin. This pushes me to closely examine the way the term “community” is used by the spokesperson in both the following excerpts and at other points in our interview. I noticed that when Hajar uses the term “community,” it is to talk about the “community’s pain” that she would have liked to share through her role as spokesperson, the “community’s feeling,” the way “the community is touched” or “how the community feels.”
The “Muslim community” that Hajar mentions seems to refer less to a uniform and homogeneous religious community and more to an “affective community.” This “affective community” is a social formation built, in this case, from shared pain, grief and a temporal and spontaneous solidarity among bodies affected by the same event (Zink, Reference Zink, Slaby and von Scheve2019: 289). As Ahmed points out (Reference Ahmed2004a), we are also anchored to others by what moves us and by what touches us. The alignment of the manifestation of affects thanks to the sharing of pain and suffering creates a sense of belonging to a community of affect and, ultimately, identification with a shared cause (Picot, Reference Picot2021: 126). This affective community is also clearly described by Isabelle, who compares her experience as a spokesperson within Indigenous settings, which are extremely heterogenous from the cultural and linguistic perspectives, to her interactions with the non-Indigenous media:
For the Indigenous community, I always say yes [to invitations] because there is like a solidarity side, empowering, etc., it’s much more fun […] Indigenous media would never show up with that kind of approach. Because we are also approached by Indigenous media, like APTN, but it’s not … they know […] We share the same realities, too, so when anecdotes are shared, they just relate and … it’s not the same thing. [translation]
As Ahmed reiterates (Reference Ahmed2004a: 10), emotions are (re)actions of proximity or distance in relation to certain bodies and certain objects; they help create “surfaces” and “borders” that distinguish “us” from “them,” what is inside and what is outside. The lack of reciprocity and echo that Hajar’s and Isabelle’s testimonies elicit confirms a separation between, on one side, the Muslim and Indigenous affective communities that the two spokespeople belong to, respectively, and, on the other side, the white, non-Indigenous majority community that they are trying to sensitize by speaking out. Consequently, while one of the main objectives of public speaking is to elicit reactions that create a shift from an individual feeling to a feeling of collective belonging (Picot, Reference Picot2021: 115), the spokespeople experience speaking publicly as a moment that confirms the distinction between their affective communities and the white majority community. Paradoxically, instead of building an emotional connection, sharing their feelings becomes primarily a moment that fortifies and seals the affective borders. This does not prevent spokespeople from implementing other affective practices to negotiate those borders. As we will see, these practices fluctuate between adaptation, protection and protest.
Affective practices of adaptation: Placating, reassuring and performing self-abnegation
According to Bachir, a longstanding leader within the Muslim community in Québec City, anti-racism spokespeople “should not bow down, they should placate. In discussions they raise, there are topics that anger, there are topics that injure […] and this calls for lots and lots of abnegation too, because sometimes we have to quash our own ego to stop ourselves from saying something, when we could have said it. The objective is always the same: Will my community benefit if I say it?” By refraining from expressing certain ideas or saying certain words, Bachir’s main concern is to avoid harming “his community,” which could suffer backlash from his words. He compares his role to that of a “decompressor” that, while denouncing racism and Islamophobia, helps defuse tense situations by reassuring the Québécois majority that he does not represent a threat to their language and their culture. His attempts to reassure the Québécois majority include, for example, demonstrating perfect mastery of the French language, using Québécois expressions or even showcasing his knowledge of the history of Quebec and vaunting its culture: “Let me tell you, I have felt it in the questions I am asked. If I’m not really on the ball making connections […] I risk getting off on the wrong track and then they say, ‘Look at this guy, who does he think he is? This is our country’ […].” Sammy, the initiator and spokesperson for several anti-racism actions, agrees, adding, “You always have to try to find people’s reference points. You have to ask yourself, ‘What is this person afraid of?’” That means not saying words that “offend the ears of Quebecers” and “every time, whoever I am talking to, I ask myself, ‘What is acceptable? What will open people’s ears?’”
Hajar also continues to believe in the importance of affective practices that conform to majority norms in order to successfully convey an anti-racist message. She describes what it takes to be a spokesperson: “It takes cool-headedness, it takes professionalism, it takes the ability to share your idea or your vision professionally […] in a fully developed way and using good vocabulary.” In other words, you have to be able to express yourself without revealing “your frustration, maybe talking a little more rationally.”
Frantz is the spokesperson of an anti-racism organization, and over the years he has acquired extensive experience with the traditional media. He thinks that adapting to norms “isn’t a matter of comforting people” but of recognizing that “logic makes it impossible to go there,” that there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. Those boundaries are related to the expression of certain emotions, particularly anger, that have to be channelled in order to “invite the other to experience what I am experiencing.” In fact, the role of spokesperson, in Frantz’s opinion, is that of an “educator-translator” who seeks to teach, foster understanding and “connect on the human level.” The activist explains, however, that playing this role requires negotiating certain implicit norms that can be hard to identify: norms that he, himself, “cannot identify are negotiated in the exchange, and it becomes a skill, an awareness more than an explicit topic.” For him, there are two orders of norms: first, not appearing to be too much of an “activist” or “radical” in his discourse, and then, addressing primarily the white majority audience:
There is the entire issue of the radicalness of the message. For me, radical does not necessarily mean negative. But there is really that side where, in the norms, we have to accept that we can only go so far. And you know that this is a hard no. It is not stated, and I am not even sure that the media that agree to talk about certain topics are aware of what they are not prepared to accept. It just happens in the way you say it: “Oops, that’s too radical.” You know when you have overstepped, when it is becoming too radical. Radical is a code word that means “we don’t want that here” […] There are unsaid things that structure what is and isn’t acceptable […]
The other thing […] is that, in the traditional media, right now, messages have to be communicated with the understanding that the audience is the Quebecer of French descent, and therefore Francophone. […] It is rare for people experiencing [racism], like racialized people, to feel heard in what they are living […] and if there is any doubt that this [white] person will understand, the message will not be received and they’ll ask, implicitly or explicitly, for the message to be changed. [translation]
Spokespeople therefore have to develop affective practices, which Frantz describes as “awareness” and “intangible knowledge,” that allow them to both recognize what must be left “ unsaid”—the implicit norms and the “code words”—and adapt to or even internalize this knowledge. These testimonies clearly reveal that many spokespeople engage in affective practices of adaptation because of their conviction that aligning with the rules is one of the unavoidable and indeed foundational tasks of the role of spokesperson. They see this role as a delicate task of translation—easing tensions and negotiating standards—that requires enormous tact. They have to transmit an anti-racist message addressed to white people without ruffling their fragility, a message that does not appear to be too radical or activist, that does not allow any anger to filter through and that does not appear to be condescending and moralizing. This colossal undertaking is performed in direct interface with the denial of racism, which makes it all but impossible to succeed unscathed, as Bachir aims to.
Denial of racism, disparity and imbalance of affective power
The affective practices of adaptation performed by the spokespeople resonate with studies on the forms of advocacy that racialized people in Quebec and Canada engage in. These studies document how racialized people often live with the constant exhortation to reassure the white majority about their generosity and hospitality, preferably avoiding any denunciation of racism that could be considered “uncivilized” or “ungrateful” toward the nation (Mahrouse, Reference Mahrouse2018; Razack, Reference Razack, Dean and Failler2017). The speech of racialized people is solicited, encouraged and accepted especially when it confirms “the civilized and generous nature of their hosts” (Mahrouse, Reference Mahrouse2018: 482). The sociologist Gada Mahrouse (Reference Mahrouse2018) demonstrates how the denial of racism limited the discursive and expressive register of Muslims who spoke out after the murderous rampage at the Quebec City Mosque. She observes that these people had to show restraint in expressing their grief and lean into discourse centred on the importance of love, solidarity, gratitude and recognition rather than denouncing the clear Islamophobic nature of the attack. According to Mahrouse, paying attention to the affective charge in discussions around race can show the way “attachments to white innocence pre-empt any substantive discussions of race and [highlight] the emotional labour that people of colour are called upon to perform given the ways in which they are positioned within racial structures” (482). Sherene Razack (Reference Razack, Dean and Failler2017: 119–120) also asserts that Canada’s white majority is closed to anti-racist criticism to the point that “if we dare to say that racism exists in Canada, we will be met with contempt.” The predominant moral conception of racism means that criticism of racism is perceived not only as an attack against a tolerant and open nation but also against the individuals who constitute it (Mahrouse, Reference Mahrouse2018; Srivastava, Reference Srivastava2005, Reference Srivastava2006). Maha, an activist in feminist and anti-racism groups, describes a multitude of defensive reactions she faces that reflect questions such as “Why are you talking to us about racism and Islamophobia? We’re not racist! We’re not Islamophobic!” So anti-racist speech unfolds not only in a political configuration where it is scarce (or minoritarian) but is also perceived as an attack the majority must protect themselves against.Footnote 12
The denial of racism combined with the racialization process, including affective racialization, brings spokespeople up against the boundaries of their affective charge and the affective disparity that separates them from both journalists and their audience. This was clear earlier in the testimonies about the lack of sensitivity and reciprocity (described by Isabelle and Hajar) that crystallize and confirm the boundaries between racialized affective communities and the majority affective community. Maha also alludes to this affective gulf when she compares, on one side, the efforts she invests in advocacy and, on the other, the lack of feedback: “So while you put yourself through a lot of stress and give a lot of energy, on the other hand, you never know whether your message got through and, after all, it’s a minority message.”
According to Philippe Juhem (Reference Juhem, Juhem and Sedel2016: 113), the quality of a spokesperson’s discourse is not the only reason for the unequal attention paid to their cause or discourse. We also have to consider the way “the very forms of public speaking obey role restrictions and the institutional establishment of public credibility” [translation]. An anti-racist and decolonial approach to affect that accounts for the affective configuration in which spokespeople operate demonstrates how this lack of reciprocity is fuelled by the racialization of affect. Let us take the case of Hajar, for example, who, as a Black Muslim woman who wears a hijab, is caught between the stereotypes of the submissive, suggestible woman and the dangerous, fundamentalist woman (Al-Saji, Reference Al-Saji2008). Through this gendered affective racialization, the “affective power” of Muslim women who wear hijabs, and especially of Black Muslim women, is already sabotaged (Mugabo, Reference Mugabo2016). Consequently, Hajar’s inability to reach and touch the white audience is not necessarily linked to a lack of persuasive capacity on her part or to a lack of skill in the role of spokesperson. Her persuasive capacity cannot be separated from the racialization that deprives Hajar of all credibility and legitimacy, diminishes her “affective power” and restricts her to affectability (as the one being affected) (Palmer, Reference Palmer2017). To be able to affect and, by extension, exercise affective power over others, Palmer asserts (Reference Palmer2017), one must first be recognized as a Subject whose affective capacity has sociopolitical power. All these elements make the performance of affective practices of adaptation an exhausting task for spokespeople. Frantz admits that the work is “physically and mentally demanding,” “at high risk of exhaustion,” and that it requires “work on the self … self-care.” For some, “self-care” means sometimes taking breaks from representation work or placing limits on requests from journalists, and this calls for the development of affective practices of protection.
Affective practices of protection: Developing a thick skin, holding back, not feeling
Jeevan has not only been the spokesperson for several anti-racist collectives but also trained several spokespeople in left-leaning social movements in Montreal. He says that based on what he hears from people who speak in the media:
It’s the journalists who sometimes say to them, condescendingly, “Oh, you speak French so well” or “Wow, your English is great!” And that is when they need a thick skin […] they can’t take things too personally. They need a personality where, when someone asks a critical or even aggressive question, they don’t take it personally, they remain calm.
According to this anti-racism activist, spokespeople have to develop a thick skin to maintain their composure and ride above the microaggressions (both intentional and oblivious) that they experience in their political representation roles. This affective practice of protection was also mentioned by Bachir in describing learning self-control to avoid “exploding” and to stay calm. He attained this level of self-control by developing what he calls a couenne dure, a tough hide hardened by blows and tribulations endured over time. This Québécois expression means having steady nerves, being rugged, hard, resilient. The couenne is the equivalent of a barrier or emotional armour meant to protect the spokesperson, soften the impact of blows and allow them to endure difficult interactions with the media and with audiences in general.
The words of these spokespeople echo those of anti-racist, feminist activist-writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde. Anzaldúa said that “to cope with hurt and control my fears, I grew a thick skin” (Reference Anzaldúa, Moraga and Anzaldúa1981: 204), and Lorde wrote, “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone” (Reference Lorde1984: 158). Repeated exposure to the violence of racialized and gendered emotion work seems to be a condition for developing this “affective callus” (Yao, Reference Yao2021: 16). What seems to differentiate the “thick skin” or couenne dure of the habitual emotion work done by spokespeople is that it allows them not only to create distance between what they feel and what they display but also to develop greater control over their feelings or even to completely prevent themselves from feeling certain emotions, to repress them. According to Xine Yao (Reference Yao2021: 6), for many racialized people, “unfeeling” becomes “a quotidian tactic of survival and a counter-intuitive, sometimes counteractive, mode of care.” And yet it is not a passive affective practice that only lets people become hardened and endure blows. Of course, self-protection can go hand in hand with the affective practices of adaptation that allow the speaker not to lose sight of the purpose of their speech and not to be affected by the racialized interaction (as expressed above by Jeevan). But at other times, this affective practice takes on a subversive tinge in that it announces the refusal to submit to imposed affective schemas or become agitated when conforming to the needs and desires of majority affects (Guilmette, Reference Guilmette2020; Ngai, Reference Ngai2005). This “protective detachment” implies taking the risk of appearing insensitive, impassive, unsympathetic, anti-social or stony (Yao, Reference Yao2021). This is similar to the figure of Sara Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy” (Reference Ahmed2017), who refuses to take part in fuelling the racist or sexist affective atmosphere. To paraphrase Lauren Guilmette (Reference Guilmette2020), detaching, for certain spokespeople, means refusing to let themselves be drained for the pleasure of their interlocutor. It can, however, be costly for racialized spokespeople and put their position at risk. As Yao (Reference Yao2021: 4) so aptly says, “one must be recognized as sympathetic to be deserving of sympathy from those with the agency to sympathize. Thus, the marginalized do not have the luxury of being unsympathetic without forfeiting the provisional acceptance of their capacity for affective expressions and, therefore, the conditional acceptance of their humanity.” This conditional acceptance does not prevent some spokespeople from pushing their refusal—and lack of sympathy—even further through affective practices of protest.
Affective practices of protest: Reinstating anger, confronting, refusing
As we saw earlier, Bachir positions himself as a spokesperson who champions the importance of reconciliation. The activist admits, nonetheless, that sometimes in interviews he has allowed himself to show a little aggression: “In the beginning, I was even actually aggressive, and I said, ‘I don’t understand why you are asking me this question. Why should I have to explain to you what is happening in Iraq, in Mossoul or Bagdad? I don’t know […] I don’t know those countries, I don’t even know the purely political problems […] and you want me to be the bearer of…’ [sigh].” Here, Bachir is referring to requests that he and his organization have received to comment on news related to Islam elsewhere in the world and specifically acts of violence committed by Muslims. The spokesperson also relates another interview that particularly struck him, because the journalist tried to goad him, forcing him to deviate from his usual affective practices:
I didn’t cut the interview short, but I was pretty stiff. The way the questions were asked was cavalier, as if I were only there to respond. He got me out of my comfort zone to try to push me into saying things. And I felt it and I didn’t go along with it. On the contrary. The proof is that when they aired it, that entire part was cut, because he would have lost face. I took the upper hand […] but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. [translation]
During that interaction, the couenne dure that Bachir has tried to develop did not protect him from the pain of the goad. Instead of openly confronting the journalist, his bodily reaction of stiffening portrayed his refusal to cooperate and go in the direction he was being forced. Maha explained that she decided in advance not to answer questions about her hijab: “I decided not to answer that question anymore because it’s none of their business. I mean, I say to the person who is asking me that question, ‘But what do you really want to know? Do you want me to explain my spiritual journey? Do you want me to explain the traditional context? What is it that you really want to know?’” Like Bachir earlier, Maha shows her irritation and confronts journalists about their questions, not only by asking them to justify them, but also by demonstrating their absurdity or irrelevance. Not answering and refusing to cooperate is also a strategy used by Ashanti, an Afro-feminist activist who, when she was participating in an interview about Bill 21, was confronted by a journalist who insisted on asking her about the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal, which had been vandalized a few days earlier:
Instead of talking to me about the issues we were there for, the dude decided to ask me a question about the vandalism of the statue, because he wanted me to condemn it. I said that I was not going to answer, that I was there to denounce Bill 21. He asked the question again, and I said I did not want to answer, and ultimately I don’t know whether it aired or whether they just cut that part, but there are certain things I refuse to compromise on. [translation]
Whether it is challenging journalists about the aim of their questions or announcing their intention to not respond, these spokespeople show defiance and refuse to participate in the exchange. Affective practices of protest are characterized by a refusal to cooperate in certain interactions and, in so doing, they reveal clashing affects that deviate from the spokesperson’s image as a diplomat and mediator whose goal is to “give peace a chance” (Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami, Reference Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami2018: 88). These affective practices of protest, which are clearly less widespread than the others, reveal the transgressive and ambivalent desires of spokespeople caught between the normative conception of their role and their desire to upset the status quo and the denial of racism. Contrary to the practices of sensitization, adaptation and protection, for the majority of the spokespeople, they are a temporary and exceptional divergence that occurs when, as Bachir says, journalists push the envelope. This exceptionality can be seen in the testimony of Ashanti, who considers her affective practices of protest to be evidence that she does not have the “aptitudes” of a spokesperson. The activist believes that her incapacity to “compromise” and her “strong personality” mean that she is not a “professional” spokesperson. She considers herself, instead, an “accidental” spokesperson.
Complementary and Ambivalent Affective Practices of Racialization
The burden of representation is a concept that, while widely used, has rarely been studied. It is common knowledge: Everyone knows what it means and what kind of experience it refers to. Cultural studies research has also connected the weight of the burden with the tension that arises from the dual political and symbolic meaning of “representation” (Gilroy, Reference Gilroy1989). Many Black artists and intellectuals, such as James Baldwin, bell hooks and Stuart Hall, used the concept to describe the experience of being a minority in the artistic or academic realm and the multiple injunctions it entails. Consequently, not only is there no further need to prove the association between underrepresentation and burden, but structural racism has already been identified as one of the components fuelling this burden for racial minorities (Feng, Reference Feng and Lopez2020; Mercer, 1990, Reference Mercer1994; Puwar, Reference Puwar2004).
Likewise, many studies on the representation practices of the spokespeople for social justice movements have identified the asymmetrical access to spaces of visibility and the inequality of resources as foundational components of that burden (Juhem and Sedel, Reference Juhem and Sedel2016; Millette, Reference Millette2013). This literature on the representation of spokespeople also shows the complexity of the role and the many injunctions spokespeople must respond to. Nevertheless, while spokespeople’s bodily performance is recognized as being part of the representation process and one of the mediums through which representation occurs and by which its credibility is assessed (Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami, Reference Benoit-Barné and Zoghlami2018; Sedel, Reference Sedel, Juhem and Sedel2016), the experience of embodied representation—as experienced by the body—has rarely been examined.
In consideration of “body politics” (Mills, Reference Mills2022)Footnote 13 and the capacity of emotions to nourish action (Massumi, Reference Massumi1995; Ngai, Reference Ngai2005), this article bridges a blind spot in the literature and reveals the affective practices of racialization that undergird what is commonly described as a feeling of the “burden of representation.” By affective practices of racialization, I mean all the routine or improvised, forced or voluntary, conscious or unconscious affective practices that anti-racism spokespeople use to negotiate a relationship of racial representation that is characterized, on one hand, by a denial of racism and, on the other, by an affective disparity that separates them from their white audience.
An analysis of the interviews identified four affective practices. First, affective practices of sensitization that underpin the effort invested to attract the attention of the majority group, elicit a reaction from them and create a connection with them. These practices are oriented toward the white majority audience in front of which the spokespeople are sharing their affects and those of “their groups,” with the desire to expand the boundaries of their affective communities so they not only encompass people subjected to racial violence. Following on affective practices of sensitization, affective practices of adaptation include practices where spokespeople, aware of the limited affective range of their message, try to adapt their affective response so it is more easily received by the white public. Some take on the mediating role of “decompressing” and “defusing” tense situations or else play the role of “educator-translator.” These affective constraints illustrate “the implicit emotional and discursive parameters of expression set by racialized systems and structures” (Mahrouse, Reference Mahrouse2018: 485). They push the representatives to perform, to self-censor, to manage or adapt their emotions so they adhere to the “rules of feeling” that are predetermined by the social norms of the white majority (Hochschild, Reference Hochschild2003). These practices are psychologically costly. In addition to being exhausting to perform, they do not succeed in bridging the affective disparity that separates the racialized spokespeople from the people they are trying to reach.
This leads to the need for affective practices of protection. These involve creating a false sense of detachment and developing a shell—an “affective callus”—in order to feel the affective impacts of racial violence less intensely. These protection practices are preservation practices that some spokespeople use to deny access to their vulnerability. While adaptation practices are in line with sensitization practices, protection practices seem to be in tension with them: after all, how can you transmit, elicit and sensitize people to an emotion that you are striving to hide? Sensitizing—as Hajar does, for example—means offering access to a vulnerability, admitting that there is pain and asking the Other to perceive it, acknowledge it and share it. But affective practices of protection serve to mask that vulnerability. Yao (Reference Yao2021) sees this practice as a form of “affective opacity”—perceived from the outside as insensitivity or apathy—which is a form of defiance and protective disaffection. Some protection practices suggest a kind of renunciation of sensitivity. Still, Sammy, one of the spokespeople I met, tries to reconcile protection and sensitization by dissociating his spokesperson role (public persona) from the person he is in daily life: “I created two Facebook pages, so the differences for me are clear [laughter]. They don’t say the same thing about who I am. Not only is there a difference, it’s my defence mechanism.” In relation to the threats he regularly receives after speaking publicly about racism, he says, “My defence is that they’re not for me […] they’re for the guy they see on TV.” This dissociation lets Sammy negotiate the struggle between the need to sensitize, on one hand, and the need to protect himself, on the other.
Affective practices of protest push self-protection even further and are also in tension with (and sometimes even in contradiction to) sensitization and adaptation. They align with Anzaldúa when she says, “Those I don’t want, I starve; I feed them no words, no images, no feelings” (quoted in Yao, Reference Yao2021: 17). Affective practices of protest entail refusing to conform to the established affective schemas by taking the risk of declining interviews or interrupting intrusive or inappropriate questions. Protesting also means setting boundaries and sometimes displaying expressions that do not square with what is expected from a spokesperson: anger, aggression, impassivity. This impassivity differs from the kind shown in affective practices of protection. It steps beyond the quest for protection and refuses to participate in the interaction. It demands and imposes a redefinition of the terms of the racial relationship in which the spokesperson is engaged. Such protest practices are deviations from the norm, however, an undesirable slippage. They can lead to the breakdown of the “bridging” role, depriving spokespeople of their platforms and preventing them from being the voice of their “affective communities.”
In conclusion, these different affective practices seem to be both complementary to and in tension with each other. They are complementary because they are used by spokespeople at different times, depending on the requirements of the representation situation they find themselves in, and they are in tension because they reveal the spokespeople’s ambivalence about their role: between what they see as their mediation/translation role, on one side, and their desire to disrupt the status quo and the prevailing “rules of feeling,” on the other. By examining and articulating these practices, this article helps to document how racialized bodies’ access to political spaces, when not formally prohibited, can be subject to many restrictions that force those bodies to adhere to the majority’s affective norms. This research also sheds new light on the emotional resistance strategies deployed by spokespeople who, despite their status, allow themselves to lay claim to their discomfort, not seek recognition of their feelings or their legitimacy by the white majority, and break with the politics of affective respectability. In the opinion of most of the spokespeople I interviewed, there is no successful affective practice that guarantees they will “affectively” reach their audience. It seems to depend on the good will of the audience and on their capacity to lift their “blinders,” to borrow Al-Saji’s metaphor (Reference Al-Saji and Lee2014), or their affective barricades, to agree to question themselves and, ultimately, allow themselves to be affected.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to Wendi Peterson for translating this article from French into English, and to Naomi Pauls for proofreading and editing.
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