Yuchen Chen (CUNY, Baruch College)

Affective economies of investment-for-immigration between China and the U.S.

Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with immigration brokerages and Chinese investor immigrants, this talk centers on affective economies of investment-for-immigration, i.e., the circulation of feelings about investment in the U.S. in exchange. Through analyzing feelings traveling through online discourse, figures, and places among Chinese middle- and upper-middle-class immigrants, I attend to how affect is central to the mobilization, maintenance, and negotiations with the investment of citizenship. I contribute to the understanding of the financialization of quotidian life by showing micro-sites (i.e., family and motherhood) embodying power exercised through circulation and mediation of affects, which depart from familiar frames such as all-subsuming rationalist market logic.