This class investigates intersections of race and affect in the city. We’ll explore theoretical models of affect and its effects as an entry point to the nature of human response to incursions of violence and displacement on community, subjectivity, and politics. The course takes Los Angeles as a case study providing a specific location from which to consider race and urban experience in the nation and the world as racial difference and structures of otherness continue to determine human experience in cities around the globe. In Los Angeles’s history of gang warfare, police brutality, riot, geographical segregation and space-based inequality, we find a an opportunity to theorize racial, class, and immigration experiences that grate roughly against wealth and privilege. Literature becomes a site for reflection and imagination of feeling in the shaping of the subject, the city, and racial knowledge. Attention to affect reshapes racial, social, and interpersonal knowledge, an attention vital to projects of diversity and inclusion in the project of democracy.