Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly questioned the meaning and purpose of critique. Contributing to those conversations, some geographers have advocated for affirmative or reparative practices such as reading for difference or experimentation that seek to provoke more joyful, hopeful, or enchanting affects, as alternatives to what they perceive as a prevailing forms of ‘negative’ critique. In response, others have re-emphasized the centrality of negativity and revalued negative affects in the context of regimes of racialization, heteronormativity, and coloniality. Rather than taking sides in a debate thus framed, this article develops an ambivalent position that foregrounds multiple senses of difference that exist within affirmative and reparative projects. Drawing on feminist and queer geographic work, the explicitly political and difference-oriented writing of Sedgwick and Deleuze, and queer and postcolonial affect scholars, we argue for critique characterized by an ambivalent and pluralistic attitude toward feeling. Joining those arguing for a pluralization of the moods and modes of critical work, our readings suggest the necessity of a pluralism that refuses any escape from the ‘negativity’ of the social field in favor of an affectively ambivalent engagement with the inherent politics of critique in a plural and uneven world.

Abstract:Encounters across difference-in city spaces marked by diverse migration trajectories, cultural differences, and racialized hierarchies-have captured the attention of urban scholars concerned with both the challenge of ''living with difference'' and the promise of multicultural conviviality that inhere in the super-diversity of many cities. Expanding on approaches that focus on analyzing the conditions of a good or ''meaningful'' encounter that can reduce prejudice or promote intercultural understanding, this paper brings interviews with queer Asian men in Sydney, Australia into dialogue with Sara Ahmed's revaluation of the ''bad encounter.'' It shows how research on encounters can more productively engage with how negative encounters can become meaningful political occasions in their own right. Focusing on the problem of sexual racism as it emerges in accounts shared by participants, the paper highlights dating and sex as important moments through which the aesthetic orderings of race, gender, and sexuality shape the unevenly shared spaces of citizenship and urban life.

The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we make the case for the value of a less explored angle on space in Deleuze's work, which we call the topologies of space‐as‐difference. We highlight the Möbius strip as a central figure in his ontological system, and we show the significance of this topological structure both for understanding key Deleuzian concepts, such as the virtual and actual, and for understanding space and difference in productive ways. We demonstrate this by showing how Deleuzian topologies of difference enable us to further theorise the encounter – a key theme in recent geographical scholarship – as spatial and embodied, connecting up with material feminism and work on the skin, touch, and breath. We suggest that Deleuze's concept of space‐as‐difference thus contributes to the intensification of relational and topological approaches to space that are currently shaping the discipline.

The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which difference is understood. We argue that geographers could helpfully extend their theorizations of difference through Deleuze's philosophy of 'difference-in-itself'. We examine the value of a 'difference-in-itself' that views difference as generative, originary, and primary, in productive tension with conceptions of difference that tend to, purposefully or otherwise, subordinate difference to presupposed identity-based, representational categories, or dialectical forms of contradiction and opposition.

This paper uses Jacques Rancière's conception of the partition of the sensible to interrogate the aesthetic regimes and spatial coordinates that animated public debate about Park 51-the Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. Understanding conflicts over mosques as potential struggles over the conditions of membership in a community, I suggest that many of the arguments in favor of Park 51 reinforced a partition of the sensible in which Islamophobia could resonate. At stake in these debates-which turned on different understandings of the distance that separated the proposed center from the WTC site-is the relationship between American Muslims and the narratives of trauma constructed around the September 11th attacks. I conclude by exploring the projects proposed by Park 51 organizers as potential sites of everyday micropolitics that could subtly "jolt" existing orders in the interest of reconfiguring the "common sense" of a community.