The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
In this novel, Hamid depicts the life of a successful Pakistani Princeton graduate, Changez, at an impressive finance firm, before and after 9/11, and how his life changes. Changez, after 9/11, begins to grow increasingly bitter and angry at the US and his American associates because of how Americans would treat him as a brown man, how American media would depict attacks against these "terrorist" countries, and the apathy that Americans had for his home country. I think how Hamid depicts the idea of collective anger is a bit less explicit than the other pieces because rather than a depiction of a group of minorities expressing their collective anger, Hamid depicts Changez as a bit of a model for this anger that is felt by a vast amount of people. I believe that Changez is representative of collective anger felt by brown communities: innocent and faultless, yet vilified and excluded from their own communities.

Cruising Utopia by Jose Esteban Muñoz
and
"Can Hope be Disappointed?" by Ernst Bloch
These two theoretical texts on hope help outline that hope should be seen as not only an affect, but rather also a methodology. Bloch makes distinctions between certain types of hope, like lower unmediated and well-founded hope. Bloch and Muñoz point at the hope that is needed for movements like the resistance against the AIDS crisis and really any movement in our lives. Bloch even likens hope to a kind of "salvation."

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" by Audrey Lourde
In this text, Lourde implores her audience to speak out. Lourde basically outlines why it is so important to speak out, and the most poignant reasoning, for me, was that as a minority, "we were never meant to survive." "And that visibility which makes us the most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak." (42).

Moving Politics Excerpt by Deborah Gould
In this text, Gould outlines ACT UP's rapid, powerful, and effective mobilization of anger against the AIDS epidemic that the government and mainstream media didn't seem to care about while the queer community lost someone they cared about seemingly daily. Gould puts quite a focus on how ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, mobilized the queer community through intensive emotion work that harnessed the widespread paralyzing grief into anger, into action. The Names Project Memorial Quilt project, a quilt with thousands of patches to honor victims of the AIDS Epidemic, is introduced by Gould to contrast to ACT UP's direct action activism and response to these deaths. While the quilt focused on public and collective grieving within the boundaries of respectability politics, ACT UP focused on action as a collective, collective grieving through collective anger, and began to change the homophobic, racist, and sexist narrative on the AIDS epidemic. "SHOW YOUR ANGER TO THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED MAKE THE QUILT POSSIBLE: OUR GOVERNMENT" (Gould 225).

Twilight: Los Angeles directed and performed by Anna Deveare-Smith
The cinematic rendition of this one-woman show about the LA Riots chronologically outlines what led to such an event, how it went down for vastly different people, and what it meant to be oppressed and angry. From the brutal beating of Rodney King by white cops and the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du, a Korean business owner, Deveare-Smith depicts the development of race tensions across all different lines and presents them with nuance, context, and quite a lot of diversity in viewpoints. In a complicated case of the LA Riots, it's extremely difficult to distinguish who is victim or perpetrator, but this anger that is carried by the minorities who were involved, shown through Deveare-Smith, permeates through every other emotion that is depicted, such as grief, disbelief, and alienation. Through Deveare-Smith's, the audience is able to understand collective anger within different contexts and groups: the lack of justice for the Black community, the hostility between the Latinx and Black community, the anger against the Koreans as a result for the lack of justice, the disbelief of the Koreans from the alienation from public authority, and other nuances. Anger, as the collective emotion for the LA Riots, served as a kind of coping mechanism for the people of color in LA whose systematic transgressions that they had been served pushed them over the edge.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong-Kingston
In this text, Kingston gives her audience glimpses of her life as well as the lives of her mother and aunts. Kingston, as a Chinese American, deals with the haunting melancholia that her mother Brave Orchid and her aunt Moon Orchid grapple with. Kingston's childhood is dictated by myths and stories from the motherland that she had never visited and seen. Kingston is never quite truly living and assimilating in America, but is definitely not in China and wouldn't fit there either.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
In this novel, Morrison mainly contrasts the lives of two little Black girls, Claudia and Pecola, and Pecola's life is ultimately ruined by her father Cholly who rapes her. For the relevance of this text, Cholly is actually the focus. This is not to defend his disgusting actions, but rather to associate the trauma he had as a little boy, but also as a Black man. The traumatic event he has a child where he had to have sex with a girl in front of disgusting older white men causes him to carry so much contempt for himself and this event is also a result of the intergenerational trauma that the black people carry with white people in positions of power over themselves.

Shame and Its Sisters by Silvan Tomkins
In this text, the ideas of shame and contempt are outlined by Tomkins as affects. The relevance of this text is the nuance it gives for all the emotions that are experienced within all the novels, but especially The Bluest Eye.

Get Out directed by Jordan Peele
In this horror film, follows Chris, a Black man, on his trip with his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, to her parents’ house in the suburbs, and ultimately, Chris realizes that the whole Armitage family is evil and auctions off Black people, that Rose seduces, to other white people that want to take over these bodies for their "physical advantages." The discomfort that both Chris and his best friend Rod have around white people is a result of past histories of associations: white people were either complicit, supported, or took part in slavery (by owning slaves), and black people still feel the repercussions of slavery to this day. This fear of white people and white authority is a result of lessons heavily influenced by the intergenerational trauma of being Black and what it means to be Black in America.

"The Affective Politics of Fear" by Sara Ahmed
In this text, Ahmed outlines a model of fear with a white subject that fears the object of fear, a Black man, and shows how this fear felt by the white subject is transmitted to the object of fear, who must inhabit less space at the result of the privileged subject's fear. These associations made are from "past histories of association," which gives the relevance of this text to inheritance and intergenerational trauma (63). These white subjects inherit their privilege and construct their objects of fear (Black or brown men) in a way that serves white supremacy systematically. On the other hand, Black men and brown men, in the context of a post 9/11 world, inherit the intergenerational trauma that has been passed through pedagogies of shame, fear, and anger and understand, through this transmitted trauma, the spaces in which they are inhibited within.

"Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination" by bell hooks
bell hooks turns the common representations of Blackness in the societal imagination on its head and focuses on how the black imagination perceives whiteness, built from concrete observations and lived experiences: "as a response to the traumatic pain and anguish that remains a consequence of white racist domination: a psychic state that informs and shapes the way black folks "see" whiteness" (169). The text combats the irrational and naive "disbelief, shock and rage" that white people may feel as a result of hearing representations of white people in the black imagination. However, it is also important to note that this naivety is not innocent and rational in anyway: "They think they are seen by black folks only as they want to appear. Ideologically, the rhetoric of white supremacy supplies a fantasy of whiteness." (169).

"Beyond Anger" by Mary Nussbaum
In this text, Nussbaum argues the counterproductivity of anger and how in times of injustice and situations where anger may arise victims should be rational and "turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, … and be really helpful." Nussbaum sees the retaliatory nature of anger as "deeply human, but fatally flawed as a way of making sense of the world." I think this piece is really important to this idea of Irrationality vs. Rationality because it asks the question itself and calls anger mostly irrational and counterproductive. However, we must note, for the relevance to this ongoing conversation of the "rationality" of emotions, that Nussbaum sees anger as irrational because there is nothing to gain from expressing such emotions. This note begs the question: why do we feel and express emotions? I simply can't be satisfied with the answer that people express all emotions to gain something from them.

"A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia" by David Eng and Shinhee Han
In this text, Eng and Han focus on the melancholia that Asian Americans deal with as a result of failure to completely assimilate, the lack of an American identity, the past histories of exclusions, and the very distant homelands that influence our childhoods and lives. The Asian-American identification with a lost object, our motherland, cause us to be melancholic subjects: not quite American, not quite Asian.

In the face of systematic oppression and daily injustices, minorities are equipped with two main emotions that drive the movements against these unjust systems: hope and anger.

After the experience with the waitress: "I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. " (99)

The anger that permeates from these raunchy works and references to past failures of the government give no space for respectability politics.