Affective spatialities of crisis: shame politics in Mexico City evictions
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Keywords: crisis, affect, shame, displacement, eviction
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Jess Linz, University of Manchester
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Abstract
An eviction is an intimate spectacle that clothes tenants in shame. It is a crisis in the life of an individual, but a passing drama for witnesses and neighbors, the juxtaposition of which only deepens the private feelings. Affect theory defines shame as the encounter with the strange: a moment of reckoning within the self about what has erroneously been taken for granted and which must be re-examined. This form of shame circulates widely in times of crisis, when the familiar no longer holds. Drawing on qualitative research about housing displacement in the wake of the 1985/2017 earthquakes in Mexico City conducted from 2018-2021 and informed by preliminary fieldwork in Manchester, England in 2022-2023, this talk discusses how shame operates politically to hamper the agency of urban subjects and weaken bonds of solidarity. Looking to postcolonial and decolonial thinking about shame, I discuss how people resist and mend from shame in crisis, and how some crisis discourses inhibit healing processes.
Affective spatialities of crisis: shame politics in Mexico City evictions
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Paper Abstract
