Decolonial Mood Work

Abstract

Abstract: This essay develops "decolonial mood work," a political project that changes affective orientations toward crises in settler society and prospects for decolonization. Decolonial mood work is a crucial supplement to scholarship that has focused on demystifying the ideological dimensions of settler colonialism. This essay shows that the regulation of affect is a central, though less addressed, operation of settler state and society. Its case is the management of houselessness in Hawai'i, which is shown to be a settler project that further dispossesses Indigenous peoples by enforcing the affects of settler home.