Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period or national tradition. Instead, the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts from the United States to Mexico, France, and Japan and in a range of different media, including films, novels, video games, and manga.
The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: These are narratives centered on loss, sadness, rage, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, humiliation, resentment, resistance, and refusal. Moreover, noir often asks us to identify with those on the losing end of cultural narratives, especially the criminal, the lost, the compromised, the haunted, the unlucky, the cast-aside, and the erotically “perverse,” including those whose greatest erotic attachment is to death. Drawing on contemporary work in affect theory, while also re-orienting some of its core assumptions to address the resolutely negative affects narrated by noir, Noir Affect is invested in thinking through the material, bodily, social, and political–economic impact of the various forms noir affect takes.
If much affect theory asks us to consider affect as a space of possibility and becoming, Noir Affect asks us to consider affect as also a site of repetition, dissolution, redundancy, unmaking, and decay. It also asks us to consider the way in which the affective dimensions of noir enable the staging of various forms of social antagonism, including those associated with racial, gendered, sexual, and economic inequality. Featuring an Afterword by the celebrated noir scholar Paula Rabinowitz and essays by an array of leading scholars, Noir Affect aims to fundamentally re-orient our understanding of noir.
Contributors: Alexander Dunst, Sean Grattan, Peter Hitchcock, Justus Nieland, Andrew Pepper, Ignacio S�nchez Prado, Brian Rejack, Pamela Thoma, Kirin Wachter-Grene

About the Authors

Christopher Breu (he/they) is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities. He is also co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Hatmaker) of Noir Affect (Fordham).

Elizabeth A. Hatmaker was a poet, theorist, and teacher. She was instructional assistant professor at Illinois State University. She was the author of two books of poetry, Infrastructures (2015) and Girl in Two Pieces (2009). She passed away in 2015 due to complications from ALS.

Paula Rabinowitz is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and serves as editor-in- chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Her publications include numerous essays and books on mid-twentieth-century American culture, including Black and White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (2002) and the prize-winning American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (2014). She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Into the Image” and a double biography of two fathers, “Cold War Dads: Family Secrets and the National Security State.” She lives in Queens, New York.

Alexander Dunst is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century cultural history, the digital humanities, and contemporary visual narrative. He is the author of Madness in Cold War America (2016) and is currently writing a book on the rise of the graphic novel.

Sean Grattan is lecturer of American literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (2017) and coeditor (with Christian Haines) of the special issue on “What Comes After the Subject?,” Cultural Critique 96 (Spring 2017).

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