Feeling Down(town Julie Brown): The Sense of Up and Expiring Relationality

<jats:p>During the late 1980s and 1990s, the presence of women of color dancing on film and television greatly increased: Rosie Perez in Do the Right Thing, the Fly Girls from In Living Color, and Downtown Julie Brown hosting Club MTV. These figures were highly energetic and up, marking a positivity that can be distinguished from the depressed affects that have been centralized for the 21st century. This article historicizes the sense of up to rethink the terms available for not only the affective turn but also relationality. The latter draws from the former to contend with how different communities relate to one another through shared sensations, precarity, or commons. The author examines the temporal dynamics embedded in sense and affect to analyze the theoretical bases (from Kleinian object relations to Deleuzian intensities) that produce the relational. In doing so, the author engages Rashaad Newsome’s Shade Compositions (2009), which reperforms these earlier up practices. Ultimately, this article rethinks relationality by placing an expiration on the way it is presumed to sustain itself. Relational connections cannot be stabilized nor assume that one can fully know the other. The author thus proposes an ethics for relationality that can be traced through the sense of up’s entwinement with racialized forms of rage, ‘killing it’, and exhaustion. Sense and anger produce pathways to engage one another again and again.</jats:p>