The Politics of Affect at Cambridge

Personal Essay by Ziyana Kotadia

I felt it in my stomach the first time I walked through the winding, cobblestoned streets of central Cambridge - a curious cocktail of awe, intimidation, and something sharp that I couldn't quite name. Affect: "feelings" that exceed our attempts to render them through words. Embodied emotions or sensations. Visceral forces and social energies humming beneath our skin, intensities in our organs that insist beyond language. The structures, relationships, and built environments we encounter in the world affect us. We all feel it in our own way, Dr. Ann Cvetkovich, a leading affect theory expert, offers that "experiences differ from person to person. White privilege is going to give you one one experience of walking through space while being someone who is visibly genderqueer might get you another experience." For people who live at the boundaries and collisions of race, gender, and other axes of power, the affective experience of navigating the pathways between age-old Cambridge colleges can be disorienting. At an institution where colonial and patriarchal power hangs heavy over ornate gates and dreaming spires, the weight of this legacy cannot be denied. Pain lingers unseen at our university, like a haunting or half-forgotten memory. Cambridge is widely considered one of the most beautiful cities in the United Kingdom: the "Bridge of Sighs" arches like a ribcage over the River Cam, Trinity College's famous fountain rises spectre-like from its sprawling courtyard, and the ostentatious King's College Chapel casts a formidable silhouette against the horizon. These monuments to Cambridge's legacy of intellectual exceptionalism stand tall. Magnificent. Malignant. Much of the wealth that Cambridge colleges have transmuted into grand architecture was built on the backs and bodies of people of colour. It is well-documented that Cambridge was bound up in the slave trade: receiving donations from investors in the East India Company and the Royal African Company, educating the children of wealth slave estate owners, investing directly into the Atlantic slave trade, and supporting academics in the pro-slavery movement. The Fitzwilliam Museum too - with its palatial white columns and stately entranceway - was paid for with 400-year-old generational wealth left for Cambridge student Richard Fitzwilliam from British colonial projects. Fashioned from blood money. How beautiful. Echoes of exploitation hum throughout Cambridge. This I feel every day as I walk through the city centre and find myself caught like a spider's meal in the shadows of our most striking structures. Affect: emotional experiences that surpass what we understand consciously. Valuing emotion as a "thinking" of the body. A source of knowledge, a way of witnessing how power flows through the world around us. The politics of space in Cambridge are palpable, leveraged to make clear who belongs and who does not in our ever-so-exclusive city. Cambridge is a collection of gated communities, spaces divided up by college walls that foreclose access to members-only grounds. When I first arrived at this university, it was a challenge to find the right classrooms among the twisting corridors and hidden entrances. It felt like the walls and stairwells were conspiring to ensure I became lost. This city is an elaborate series of secret doors, fences, and concealed passageways, crafted to ensure those unfamiliar with these spaces cannot venture too far into its carefully gatekept ivory towers. Cambridge was built by and for the people who drew the blueprints, built to recreate the conditions for those with power and privilege to retain that access unabated. As an international student, I notice a lack of security guards and police officers in Cambridge, compared to the spaces I am used to navigating in North America. Authority in this city is not expressed through physical force but through the differentiation of physical spaces. We need only look up at obtruding college facades, enclosing exclusive courtyards and stained-glass dining halls, to understand that we are not meant to feel welcome. We are meant to idealise access into these spaces, to covet it, to internalise the social hierarchy that Cambridge architecture imposes. Especially for people who have historically been denied access to education in these hallowed halls - for women, people of colour, queer and disabled people - there is no denying that the feeling of exclusion resonating in our bones is there exactly by design. These spaces were never made for us. Affect: a physical reaction to the structures we encounter. Our bodily reactivity to the world. Our capacity to be affected and affect others. Moving through Cambridge as a queer woman of colour means being affected by the living legacy of systemic oppression. It paves the cobblestone streets; it lines the bricks of lecture halls and meeting rooms. I can feel it writhing beneath by feet, grating in the walls, pulsing in the air. Driving into Cambridge that first day with my uncle, I remember him remarking sardonically that you could "taste the privilege in the air." As I rolled the window down, giddy with the anticipation of beginning my education, I couldn't taste it yet. I was grateful to be here; it felt like an act of power and resistance that my brown, femme body was occupying space in a university that, less than 80 years ago, I would not have been permitted to earn a degree from. It is, after all, an extraordinary privilege to move through these spaces. But the politics of affect at Cambridge complicates my gratitude. It is painful to walk through this city and feel tortured ghosts hover alongside me. It is painful watching many of my white and male peers navigate these same spaces completely unaffected. Affect: corporeal responsiveness to the remarkable vividness of the world. At Cambridge, affect is feeling the weight of the histories that precede and shape our emotional experiences. For me, it is an embodied attempt to grapple with the enormity of the injustice built into our infrastructure.