Noir Affect

Christopher Breu (he/they) is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities. He is also co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Hatmaker) of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020). Elizabeth A. Hatmaker was a poet, theorist, and teacher. She was instructional assistant professor at Illinois State University. She was the author of two books of poetry, Infrastructures (2015) and Girl in Two Pieces (2009). She passed away in 2015 due to complications from ALS. Paula Rabinowitz is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and serves as editor-in- chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Her publications include numerous essays and books on mid-twentieth-century American culture, including Black and White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (2002) and the prize-winning American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (2014). She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Into the Image” and a double biography of two fathers, “Cold War Dads: Family Secrets and the National Security State.” She lives in Queens, New York. Christopher Breu (he/they) is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities. He is also co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Hatmaker) of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020). Alexander Dunst is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century cultural history, the digital humanities, and contemporary visual narrative. He is the author of Madness in Cold War America (2016) and is currently writing a book on the rise of the graphic novel. Sean Grattan is lecturer of American literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (2017) and coeditor (with Christian Haines) of the special issue on “What Comes After the Subject?,” Cultural Critique 96 (Spring 2017). Elizabeth A. Hatmaker was a poet, theorist, and teacher. She was instructional assistant professor at Illinois State University. She was the author of two books of poetry, Infrastructures (2015) and Girl in Two Pieces (2009). She passed away in 2015 due to complications from ALS. Peter Hitchcock is professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1992); Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999); Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (2003); The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (2009); The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (2016; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo); Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (2017); and, most recently, The Debt Age (2018; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Sophia McClennen). Justus Nieland is professor of English at Michigan State University, where he teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008), David Lynch (2012), Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (2020), and Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2009), cowritten with Jennifer Fay. He is also coeditor of the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press. Andrew Pepper is senior lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class (2000) and the coeditor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Palgrave 2016). He is also a coeditor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. He is also the author of a series of crime novels set in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, including The Last Days of Newgate (2006) and Bloody Winter (2011). Brian Rejack is associate professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University. He is the coeditor, with Michael Theune, of Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (2019). He is also the author of “Toward a Virtual Reenactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past,” published in Rethinking History (2007). Ignacio Sánchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction and The Neoliberal World Market and the Question of World Literature (2018) and editor of Mexican Literature in Theory and Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (2018). His work focuses on the relationship between cultural institutions and aesthetics in Mexico and he has published over ninety articles and book chapters on questions of Mexican literature and cinema, world literature and cultural theory. Pamela Thoma is associate professor of English and the director of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington State University. She specializes in Asian American literary and cultural studies and feminist media studies. She is the author of Asian American Women’s Popular Literature: Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging (2014) and editor of a forthcoming volume on the fiction of Karen Tei Yamashita. Her essays have been published in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2014), Feminist Media Studies (2009), and Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (2014), edited by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker. Kirin Wachter-Grene is assistant professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work focuses on African American literature and gender and sexuality studies and has been published in African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Feminist Formations, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and more. She is guest editor of At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, a special issue of The Black Scholar, and is currently working on a book on Samuel R. Delany and transgressive African American literature.

Preface | vii

Introduction: Dark Passages

Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker | 1

1. Toward Alphaville: Noir, Midcentury Communication, and the Management of Affect

Justus Nieland | 29

2. Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive

Christopher Breu | 59

3. Cold Kink: Race and Sex in the African American Underworld

Kirin Wachter-Grene | 78

4. Noir Pedagogy: The Problem of Student Masochism in the Classroom Economy

Elizabeth A. Hatmaker | 99

5. The Shadows of the Twilight World: Beebo Brinker and the Circulation of Affect

Sean Grattan | 122

6. Peripheral Noir, Mediation, and Capitalism: Noir Form, Noir Mediascape, Sociological Noir

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado | 137

7. Cyborg Affect and the Power of the Posthuman in the Ghost in the Shell Franchise

Peter Hitchcock | 156

8. Playing with Negativity: Max Payne, Neoliberal Collapse, and the Noir Video Game

Brian Rejack | 178

9. Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl

Pamela Thoma | 197

10. Surplus Feelings: Neoliberal Noir and the Affective Economy of Debt

Alexander Dunst | 222

11. Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto

Andrew Pepper | 241

Afterword: Melodrama, Noir’s Kid Sister, or Crying in Trump’s America

Paula Rabinowitz | 261

List of Contributors | 275

Index | 279