Ugly Affects

Ugly Affects:Migritude and Black Mediterranean Counternarratives of Migrant Subjectivity Ashna Ali (bio) In The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail argues that dominant understandings of migrancy are narrated through a nation-state perspective that sees stasis as the normative human condition. Nail urges a reversal of this perspective toward a more realistic model that understands movement (rather than stasis) as the central driver of social expansion, thereby acknowledging that there is no social stasis. There are only regimes of social circulation. The reversal he argues for would foreground the migrant rather than obscure her. He writes, Since the state has all too often written history, the migrant has been understood as a figure without its own history and social force. "In world history," as Hegel says, "we are concerned only with those peoples that have formed states [because] all the value that human beings possess, all of their spiritual reality, they have through the State alone." 4; (emphasis added) The Hegelian concept of a migrant spiritual reality that does not rely on the state for the value of its existence suggests that a just model of society requires new epistemologies that conceptualize the embodiment of undocumented persons not as lack, but an alternate ontological condition—a different fullness. Nail's well-intentioned intervention fails to acknowledge the very fullness he theorizes. Like many others before him, he fetishizes [End Page 376] the titular "figure" of the migrant as liberatory in its radical potential. Sara Ahmed exposes the seductive dangers of such figuration. She argues that metaphorizing migration in some sense repeats the very process of migration, which involves a dislocation from place. In this sense, to use migration as metaphor, is to migrate from migration such that it becomes an impossible metaphor that no longer refers to the dislocation from place, but dislocation as such (thought already dislocates). In this sense, the migrant becomes a figure: the act of granting the migrant the status as figure (of speech) erases and conceals the historical determination of experiences of migration, even though those experiences cannot be reduced to a referent. ("Home and Away" 333) In other words, figuring migration as a liberatory metaphor obscures the vulnerability to social and political violence that constitutes the migrant condition and reduces that experience to abstraction. In this essay, I argue that true liberatory conceptualizations require leaps of imagination grounded in the material, embodied, and affective experience of historically determined subjects who assert themselves despite and through this spiritual erasure. I find this possibility most richly in contemporary literatures of migration and in affective epistemologies that enact a queering of the unequal dialectic between the subject and the nation-state by offering new, complex visions of fullness and belonging. I interrogate how literatures of migration represent the erased "spiritual reality" posited by Hegel and cited by Nail through the expression of what Graziella Parati calls "negative affects" (9) in Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy and that I call "ugly affects," after Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings, in a comparative analysis of excerpts from Shailja Patel's Migritude and Igiaba Scego's short stories "Dismatria" and "Salsicce." These works fall within the frameworks of Migritude and the Black Mediterranean, respectively. The call for fuller counternarratives to political ontologies of stasis finds fertile soil in these two relatively understudied and overlapping fields of literary study. Patel and Scego's works express collective anger, ambivalence, and affective (un)belonging; negative or ugly affects challenge sanitized, degrading, or problematically liberatory narrative figurations [End Page 377] of the migrant, and work to queer normative epistemologies of what constitutes legitimate ontological fullness. Situating Patel and Scego within Migritude and Black Mediterranean frameworks allows for productive intersections with affect theory and its insights about how the circulation of emotions works to constitute the dialectic between nation-states and their subjects. In the first part of the essay, I probe the poetics and aesthetics of Shailja Patel's Migritude, a collection of poetry which expands the term beyond its original mid-twentieth century African contexts. In the second part, I argue that Patel's poetics find resonance with prominent Black Mediterranean author Igiaba Scego, whose writing expresses experiences of black, migrant

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