Description:

Regimenting Perceptions: The sensory sign and its racialized trajectories

Regimes of racialized perception and uptake rooted and emergent in and through colonial racial orders are entrenched across scales of interaction ranging from bureaucratic institutions to everyday interpersonal exchanges. These regimes and orders impact the ways that perceivable signs of embodiment ranging from smell and taste, to sight, touch, and sound are expressed, interpreted, and contested, as well as the limits of their interactional expression and interpretation. Drawing on my own work in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and recent research by scholars in anthropology, Caribbean studies, and Carceral studies that consider concepts such as racial orders and rights, saliency and visibility, multi-sensoriality, materiality, and embodiment, as well as raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic approaches to anthropology, I consider the historical emergence of multiple forms of racial-sensorial-perceptual regimentation and the impacts of these different (yet often overlapping) regimented forms of perception within social exchanges. Lastly, I contemplate how official bureaucratic and unofficial quotidian encounters contribute to their hierarchization, re-entrenchment, and contestation.