Affect: Discourse, politics, intersectionality

On 9 March 2015, a group of students spearheaded by political science senior Chumani Maxwele tossed a bucket of human excrement at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes towering over the campus of the prestigious University of Cape Town (UCT). The act of poo-throwing was the spark that started a protest movement which not only questioned the legitimacy of public memorials of colonial history such as Rhodes's statue but also advanced a broader critique of institutional racism, unequal access to tertiary education and Eurocentric university curricula. The student movement not only used a variety of embodied and material tactics on campus, but also successfully employed the discursive affordances offered by social media, especially the hashtag #RhodesMustFall in order to fuel a debate that rapidly transcended national boundaries attracting considerable global attention. This example captures three points that will be the foci of this state-of-the-art chapter: (1) emotions are at the very heart of what we call political; (2) affect does not exceed discourse but is expressed semiotically in different ways such as embodied actions, slogans, hashtags, emojis, etc.; and (3) nexus points of marginalization/privilege play a key role in the formation, circulation and/or blockage of affective flows.