...; and thirdly, what racialised affective communities it produces. Whereas emotion works through historicisation to pin down a precise subject identity, affect deploys abstraction to construct a timeless truth about bodily intensity. I take Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale as my axiomatic example, where Canacee’s lappe...

... the long-term memory of a particular version of the past. Thus, when he invokes Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser defines Chaucer’s work as a ‘monument’, albeit one defaced by time. The idea of the monument, then, is bound up with the idea of the ruin. Thus, Spenser...