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ABSTRACT
This article explores the concept of affective legacies – the intergenerational transmission of affect through storytelling and embodied performance. I examine affective legacies as embedded in oral history interviews of school desegregation in rural North Carolina and what these oral history interviews teach us about how performances of memory shape our understandings of racism and racial integration as an embodied and affective practice. This study illuminates how affective legacies guide our relations, inform the way we perceive and remember, shaping an emotional meaning-making system that motivates our personal and cultural understandings and judgments as well as contemporary stories of racial struggles.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 By bodies, what I am talking about in this essay is primarily human bodies. That said there is no need theoretically to limit as such.
2 In this essay, I focus on the theoretical work to develop the concept of affective legacies and provide illustrative examples of affective legacies within oral history interviews. Future work is needed on how the oral historian can write through the affective transmission of the interview event(s). For allied work on how one writes an interview transcript attuned to indiscernible affects and that jostles linearity see: Eisner; Shukri and Willink; Willink and Shukri.