Premediation and white affect: climate change and migration in critical perspective

Abstract

This paper extends existing debate about the relationship between climate change and migration by locating this debate within the registers of race and difference. The paper argues that the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular racial orientation to climate change called ‘white affect’. To make this argument, the paper connects up two related phenomena: racial neoliberalism and the relationship between affect and biopower. The white affect of climate change and migration discourse is here understood to be an ‘object-target’ of biopolitics. White affect thus becomes an important concept for understanding how racial neoliberalism functions through affective proxy.