Affective legacies: narrating the intergenerational transmission of racial feeling in oral history interviews

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of affective legacies – the intergenerational transmission of affect through storytelling and embodied performance. I examine affective legacies as embedded in oral history interviews of school desegregation in rural North Carolina and what these oral history interviews teach us about how performances of memory shape our understandings of racism and racial integration as an embodied and affective practice. This study illuminates how affective legacies guide our relations, inform the way we perceive and remember, shaping an emotional meaning-making system that motivates our personal and cultural understandings and judgments as well as contemporary stories of racial struggles.