No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics
... I argue that focusing on the potential of affect might help to question the illusion of sovereignty, which needs to disrupt the intactness and coherence of the privileged, Western, white, autonomous subject and body and thereby enables us to forge new views on the complicities of trans* politics. Emotions and affect are, however, not to be interpreted as a lens for getting closer to reality but rather as a crucial element through which power is felt, imagined, and contested (Ahmed 2004;Berlant 2000). Referring to the violent power dynamics in the examples of trans* politics delineated above, I suggest that privileged trans* politics in the Global North and West might instead resort to a sense of discomfort, rather than focus on empathy with the figure of the generalized trans* person or with the figure of the trans* person afflicted with deathly violence. ...
... Instead of thinking trans* politics from a presupposed coherent trans* identity or shared feelings, I propose picturing trans* politics in the Global North and West as based on a desire for social change that entails a feeling of discomfort. Yet, I do not grasp discomfort as a feeling in a strict individual sense, that is, as a so-called "authentic" emotion that functions as a preexisting foundation for politics (Berlant 2000). Instead, I propose seeing discomfort as a mood that constitutes an atmosphere. ...
... My argument also relates to the work of Lauren Berlant, who problematizes the politics of "true feeling" (Berlant 2000), a politics that, in a nonambivalent manner, grants emotions an explanatory value and status for politics. ...
This essay scrutinizes the conundrum of recent trans* politics in the Global North and West. Although this trans* politics has achieved important social changes for some gender-variant people, it at the same time participates in neoliberal notions of equality. In addition, while constructing a seemingly legitimate subject called transgender, this politics perpetuates colonial violence. This article suggests a turn to atmospheres as a crucial term to reassess this quandary. With a focus on discomfort, this article explores ways to decolonize and deprivilege transnational trans* politics in the Global North and West. It argues that such an approach might open up ways to consider trans* politics as an imaginary that would enable fragmented realities, bodies, and selves to become legible and articulable and thereby also make it possible to name the constitutive violence that is at work in politics under the purview of trans*.
... Another feminist and radical take on privacy is developed by Lauren Berlant (1999), who depicts privacy as "the Oz of America", and while analyzing the "place of feeling in the making of political worlds" she mercilessly dismantles the highly idealized concept of "the American citizen", privacy constituting a milestone of it. While it is necessary to remember that the European or Polish constructs of citizenship are definitely different from those practiced in the USA, the recent strengthening of the caring eye of the Leviathan on one hand and the public protest against it on the other again make the American experiences, but also the American dream, quite hegemonic in Eastern Europe. ...
... This contemporary tendency to buy the comfort of building one's comfortable autonomous self depends on our ability to keep countless "Others" in precarity (Lorey, 2015). Foucault's recapitulation of the "Panopticon" project reminds one of the deep impossibility of this dream (Berlant, 1999). The Polish state often employs the caring logic of protecting privacy, neglecting the fact that the society should be allowed to investigate the clear cases of abuse of power in the police actions conducted during the "Hiacynt" operations or under their pretext. ...
w: Internalia. Journal of Queer Theory
In my article I attempt to decipher the logic of a large police and secret services operation conducted by means of surveillance and direct control of the gay men in the late 1980s in Poland. LGBTQ+ activists claim that some 11000 men were involved in it, and yet, this action has never been properly researched, summarized and no justice procedures have been undertaken after 1989. This article combines the "archive activism" of Howard Zinn and his followers in the queer activism and theory, certain elements of theories of the public sphere and counterpublics (Kluge and Negt, Warner etc) and the critical deconstructive and feminist research on the archive and the private (Derrida, Berlant, Gatens) in order to build a discussion of how to queer the scattered state archives of the state police and services without petrification, nostalgia or resignation. It investigates the large spectrum of implications of "being public against our will", depicting forms of resistance and insubordination as well, as "archivizing against their will" in the institutional context avoiding responsibility.
... Rather than rest our criticism of these recent court decisions on a dichotomy between "technical" and substantive modes of legal interpretation, I examine how formal rules of legal authority, and specifically questions of jurisdiction, are crucial sites of political contest (see VALVERDE, 2009). We must first shift our focus from courts' regressive conservatism to a broader problem of how legality and public order, as grounding projects of the postcolonial state, come to organize the limits of what we desire as a good life, as well as the legitimate causes of resistance and conflict (see BERLANT, 2002). John and Jean Comaroff and others have diagnosed this process as the judicialization of politics -or the increasing prominence of "legality" as the organizing language of class struggle in contemporary neoliberal orders (COMAROFF and COMAROFF, 2006, p. 31;CUOSO, HUN-NEUS and SIEDER, 2010). ...
This article traces the emergence of a new politics of jurisdiction in legal abortion debates in Mexico. It analyzes how jurisdictional claims work as a kind of lawfare from “above” and “below” examining: 1) how the Mexican Supreme Court invoked technicalities of jurisdiction to settle the constitutional conflict over the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City, and 2) how a feminist litigator reappropriated the court's formal principles of legality toward their own ends in what they call “legal guerilla.” Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City, the author explores how competing jurisdictions create ambiguous spaces and temporalities of inclusion and exclusion from legality and clinical care. In closing, she argues that feminist activists who work to create access and people who seek abortion enact their own forms of “legal guerilla” as they move through these overlapping and contradictory legalities.
... As we have discussed in relation to memory studies above, part of the appeal of the concept of trauma is the moral authority it confers on those who make claim to it. As Lauren Berlant (1999) has argued in reference to the 'politics of true feeling', 'trauma' and 'memory' seek 'truth' in individual emotional responses and privilege victimhood over historical agency. A similar and influential perspective can also be found in Didier Fassin's critique of what he calls 'humanitarian government' (2012), or the deployment of moral sentiments in order to direct attention towards the suffering of others. ...
Exploring two recent examples of virtual reality (VR) short films designed to produce visceral experiences (on solitary confinement and on seeking asylum), we call into question claims that assign normative value and even transformative power to the VR medium – imagined as so-called ‘empathy machines’. Drawing on a growing body of literature that seeks to contest such claims, we point to and problematise both the manipulative intent of such projects and the liberal-humanitarian logic, which underpins them. Based on such a logic, advocacy through immersive technologies supposes that if only individuals can be made to ‘feel’ something they will be changed by it and so will their behaviour. Whatever progressive motivations of the content producers, the emphasis on empathetic identification threatens to by-pass critical engagement and raises wider questions about the potentially de-politicising effects of seeking technological solutions to effect social change.
... The emotional distress or inspiration that accompany this alignment grounds the claim for students' political transformation and their commitment to keep the traumatic event of 1974 open, which means communicating it in a way that keeps it traumatic for them (Berlant 2001). On the other hand, however, as Berlant (2000Berlant ( , 2001 warns us, there is not only the danger to an impasse in terms of connecting with trauma not experienced, but also it threatens to diminish the implications of trauma -which seems to be acknowledged by policy documents of 'I Don't Forget' as time goes by, especially since 2001. Importantly, then, the historicization of the policy's framings indicates a sentimentalized shift that is linked to the toning down of the affective-discursive positions promoted by Greek-Cypriot education. ...
Education is central to the project of individual and collective identity formation, national development and international relations, and is crucial in moments of crisis. What should be the agenda of study and action for education in such times? Identities and Education engages with this crucial question, seeking to examine and problematise our contemporary moment. Through the heuristic of the concept of identity, it specifically aims at creating a space for understanding our current challenges and considering the potential of education to address them. Contributors in this volume explore identity, crisis and education, not only in interdisciplinary, inter-sectional, relational and eclectic ways, but also through comparative lens. The book includes contributions from leading scholars from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Portugal, the UK, and the USA and covers issues and themes including fear, hope, refugee education and global citizenship education.
... Berlant (1999) andKaplan (2005); see alsoSeltzer (1998) on "wound culture." 257 These two outermost crosses are in the illustration image exhibited in the wrong order from the order requested by the artist (personal correspondence with Tietäväinen 24.8.2020) ...
In this doctoral dissertation, I analyze contemporary Anglophone suicide cinema
from the perspectives of taboo and biopower. The aim is to investigate, first, how
films with suicide participate in the practices of self-willed death’s biopowered
regulation. Biopower refers to Michel Foucault’s theories of the regulation of
individuals’ lives and deaths through normative techniques directed at their
bodies, sexuality and death. Second, I inspect how cinema both reflects and
renews suicide’s tabooed position. In the theories of Mary Douglas, Franz Steiner
and Valerio Valeri, taboo is approached as a normative structure with the
function of protecting society from particular kinds of dangers; this structure is
empowered by ideas of dirt and contagion in such instances where these
classificatory borders and collectively agreed values are threatened or
breached. By employing discourse analysis, semiology and several methods of
visual analysis, I combine visual cultural analysis of contemporary cinematic
representations of suicide with theoretically oriented considerations of taboo and
biopower. I investigate what kinds of cultural meanings of suicide are created
through its cinematic representations and connect these meanings to the
normative and classificatory functions of biopower and taboo. The research
materials are a corpus of 50 Anglophone feature films produced between 1985
and 2014. The research also includes three case studies of the films Unfriended
(2014), Vanilla Sky (2001) and The Moth Diaries (2011) and of the first season of the
Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (2017). The central argument in the dissertation is
that, in the corpus examined, suicide cinema reflects suicide’s tabooed ontology
and status in its othering, marginalizing, stigmatizing, domesticating and
pornifying tendencies. I also argue that taboo and biopower are present in the
fears of contagion that occasionally justify the censorship of suicide’s
representations. Further, I maintain that suicide cinema participates in suicide’s
subjugation to biopower, especially in its gendered and medicalized aspects.
Hundreds of titles featuring suicide are released every year in the popular
medium of Anglophone cinema. Understanding the role of taboo and biopower
in these wide-ranging representations can help reveal the curious dynamic by
which suicide is heavily represented in the media while it is silently struggled
with and mourned in real life as a shameful death.
... Th is article will evaluate the ongoing reconstruction of Dushanbe from the perspective of the aff ective registers it has elicited, from the despair of those who fondly remember its earlier Soviet oblique to those who have benefi tted from the expansion of housing stock and green space across the city center. By counterposing these positions and exploring the role of statist conceptions of modernity, personal and political memories of space and the emotions called forth by urban redevelopment, the article will elaborate on the place of aff ect and sentimental politics (Berlant 1999) in the processes of city beautifi cation and development. While the desperation shown by those mourning the old Soviet city of Dushanbe may not have been able to stem the tide of construction, this article shows it was able to produce through its emotional cascade a change in the economic and social order of construction, one that brought together developers and poorer segments of the populace in a relatively fairer, if stringently marketized, redistribution of housing. ...
Th is article evaluates the ongoing reconstruction of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, from the perspective of the affective registers it has elicited: from the despair of those who fondly remember the city's earlier Soviet facade to those who have benefitted from the expansion of housing stock and green space across the city center. Exploring these positions and the role of statist conceptions of modernity, personal and political memories of space, and the emotions called forth by urban redevelopment, the article elaborates on the place of aff ect and sentimental politics in the processes of city beautification and development. It argues that the despair experienced by city residents in their protests against redevelopment projects has both enabled and constrained citizens in terms of their participation in Dushanbe's urban development, economic redistribution, and the politics of memory.
... Spivak (1988 ) insists that those who are recipients of stories such as trauma narratives have a tremendous responsibility: first, not to presume that suffering can be understood universally, and second, to be vigilant about misuses of such stories. There is never anything transparent or universal about the meaning of wound, which means that knowledge about the wound may become a property of rhetoric ( Berlant, 2000( Berlant, , 2001. It is precisely within this space that traumatic shame may be translated into moralizing stories or sentimental rhetoric, and thus we need to be constantly vigilant. ...
... In her article on Klein's theory of affect, Sedgwick (2007) aptly draws a link between the vicious cycles described by Klein and the notion of ressentiment developed by Nietzsche (1967) that has been more recently elaborated by a number of theorists (e.g. Brown, 1993;Berlant, 2000 Berlant andGreenwald, 2012). Nietzsche's ressentiment, as Sedgwick (2007) describes it, is 'a self-propagating, near-universal psychology compounded of injury, rancor, envy, and self-righteous vindictiveness, fermented by a sense of disempowerment' (p. ...
This article is about the socially divisive consequences of the UK’s 2016 referendum on membership in the European Union. Rather than redressing the country’s long-standing class divisions, the referendum has exacerbated them by fuelling negative stereotypes and mutual accusations between Leave and Remain supporters. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, the article argues that support for Leave and Remain is structured by circulations of affect, fantasies of the good life and psychic investments in different experiences of immigration, nationalism, and social and economic inequality.
... As noted anthropologist George Marcus (2010) explained in his book, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics, prevailing approaches to political analysis, for example, mistakenly assume that emotion limits the capacity to fully consider consequences, reasons for action, and analytic critique. This is also the conventional wisdom that seems to dominate the terrain of literary studies today, especially when it is applied to the critique of personal response and engagement (e.g., Berlant, 1999). According to Marcus, conventional critiques of emotion would have us believe that feelings lead to action without contemplation. ...
We talk of the mind's capacity to analyze. This capacity-to abstract, to absorb elements of knowledge, and to relinquish them in statements, verbal or written-is an important part of what we are: creatures of language, of symbols galore. But we need not use ourselves, so to speak, in only that way. We have memories; we have feelings. We reach out to others. .. That side of ourselves is not set apart from our intellect. In order to respond, one remembers, one notices, then one makes connections-engaging the thinking mind as well as what is called one's emotional side. (Coles, 1989, p. 128) ITERATURE OFFERS THAT KIND OF EXPERIENCE, uniquely activating our metaphorical sensibilities to the might-be-could-be in our lives and worlds. Engaging with literature typically involves dwelling in the primary affordances of the texts themselves and L
* First Reviews and all chapters of the book available Open Access for download on Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/schooling-the-nation/C17A639E1EF9E1448842B6ACEA6216F5
Telling the story of the Egyptian uprising through the lens of education, Hania Sobhy explores the everyday realities of citizens in the years before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring'. With vivid narratives from students and staff from Egyptian schools, Sobhy offers novel insights on the years that led to and followed the unrest of 2011. Drawing a holistic portrait of education in Egypt, she reveals the constellations of violence, neglect and marketization that pervaded schools, and shows how young people negotiated the state and national belonging. By approaching schools as key disciplinary and nation-building institutions, this book outlines the various ways in which citizenship was produced, lived, and imagined during those critical years. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the convivial, communal feeling that typically animates sentimentalism, setting them alongside an opposing archive of interpersonal boundary-making. Ultimately the blog epitomizes the ambivalence that some critics detect at the root of sentimentalism: A Practical Wedding’s real weddings hold up the wedding as a fantastical site of redemption, but this is countered by the unending return of political despair, frustration and rage in the advice columns. The result is a feminist sentimentalism as a specific offshoot of the moods of disappointment that pervade feminism.
Recent years have seen rising trends in terrorism, hate crime and Islamophobia in the UK. Enforced Prevent and counter-terrorism strategies have re-located all Muslims as threatening and having potentiality to radicalisation. This PhD thesis is concerned with how a Muslim schoolgirl feels, lives and experiences everyday life in this era. I follow fifteen Muslim schoolgirls across time and space by mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. This thesis takes up the feminist new materialist and post- humanist call for anticipating potentialities of the virtual, material and affective to find a different capacity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, feelings, and the backgrounds of everyday experiences against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. I argue that the affective atmospheres around Muslims provide the conditions for the emergence of racialising encounters. Multi-sensory methods of walking intra-view, creating photo-diary and face-to- face interview were developed to explore relations between bodies, spaces, times, virtual and actual. Stories, places, objects, thoughts and feelings that emerge as data and in-between relational materialities were mapped and read diffractively through one another. Thinking through relationality, materiality and affect enabled this thesis to actualise the plurality of Muslim schoolgirls' relations-in-the-world and their subjectivity as part of the becoming-assemblages with human and more-than- human bodies. This thesis mapped and challenged some of the racialised, gendered and hegemonic views of Muslim schoolgirls as risky, threatening and with a potential to radicalisation. Mattering with what those Muslim schoolgirls mattered with, their fear of racial harassment in the course of their everyday lives, of what to say, do and wear, their desire to live in safe houses and blossom in safe schools, all showed that safeguarding educational policies need to shift their focus towards threats of racial harassment, of living in overcrowded housing and being silenced rather than seeking to prevent the threat of radicalisation.
En El cultivo de la humanidad Martha Nussbaum propone la noción de imaginación narrativa, evidenciando la relevancia del estudio de la literatura en la educación superior estadounidense con el propósito de fortalecer, así, la formación de a quienes ella designa como “ciudadanos del mundo”. A través de la lectura de un texto literario, explica, los lectores pueden empatizar y entender las experiencias de los otros y sus decisiones. La filósofa asume una perspectiva humanista y universal que cuestiona la mirada de las llamadas “política de las identidades”. Reviso estos argumentos según el análisis crítico de Toni Morrison sobre raza en libros canónicos de la literatura estadounidense de los siglos XIX y XX. La escritora examina cómo la imaginación de los autores, materializada en los textos, contribuyó a la racialización y al racismo en la conformación de las ideas de nación y ciudadanía. A partir del examen de Morrison y de otros teóricos y críticos literarios, establezco un comentario crítico a la idea liberal de Nussbaum de imaginación narrativa y a su razonamiento sobre el discurso de las identidades.
Globally, sex workers have highlighted the harms that accompany anti-prostitution efforts advanced via anti-trafficking policy, and there is a growing body of social science research that has emerged documenting how anti-trafficking efforts contribute to carceral and sexual humanitarian interventions. Yet mounting evidence on the harms of anti-trafficking policies has done little to quell the passage of more laws, including policies aimed at stopping sexual exploitation facilitated by technology. The 2018 passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the corresponding Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), is a case study in how efforts to curb sexual exploitation online actually heighten vulnerabilities for the people they purport to protect. Drawing on 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 58) and key informants (n = 20) in New York and Los Angeles, we analyze FOSTA/SESTA and its harmful effects as a launchpad to more broadly explore how technology, criminalization, shifting governance arrangements, and conservative moralities cohere to exacerbate sex workers’ vulnerability.
Following calls in recent critical debates in English-language Korean studies to reevaluate the cultural concept of han (often translated as “resentment”), this article argues for its reconsideration from the vantage point of minjung theology, a theological perspective that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, which has been dubbed the Korean version of “liberation theology”. Like its Latin American counterpart, minjung theology understood itself in explicitly political terms, seeking to reinvigorate debates around the question of theodicy—the problem of suffering vis-à-vis the existence of a divine being or order. Studying some of the ways in which minjung theologians connected the concept of han to matters of suffering, this article argues, offers an opening towards a redirection from han’s dominant understanding within academic discourse and public culture as a special and unique racial essence of Korean people. Moreover, by putting minjung theology in conversation with contemporary political theory, in particular the works of Wendy Brown and Lauren Berlant, this article hopes to bring minjung theology to the attention of critical theory.
This chapter examines the relationship between positivism and public intellectualism in the American disciplinary context and asks to what extent is positivism the problem in this relationship. It argues that the successive waves of disciplinary discontent revolving around positivism are intimately entwined with the desire for relevance so that more is at play here than epistemological preferences. Relevance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, which suggests that for what or to whom American political scientists and IR scholars wish to be relevant is just as important for understanding their discontent with positivism as its own attributes. Examining this desire for relevance reveals substantive end-goals intimately connected to the American power project. It therefore raises important ethical questions about our relationship to the American national context, our role as public intellectuals in reifying American power, and the impact our reification has on global affairs. This chapter considers these issues and concludes with a discussion of the dangers posed by our desire to be useful to a particular, relatively powerful, national context. It suggests that while the desire for relevance is in keeping with that context, it is also an ethically questionable position.
In the context of debates on ontological risk, ‘border work’, and the transformative potentials of encounter, the paper offers a critical examination of the workings of discomfort to ask what is at stake in both its embrace and refusal. Focusing in particular on the deliberate production of discomfort and its perceived political, ethical, and pedagogical potential, the paper draws on ethnographic research on ‘staged encounter’ programmes, which are designed to push people out of their ‘comfort zone’ in order to address conflictual issues and forms of discrimination. Through such an account, the paper traces the different forms that discomfort takes – bodily, ontological, personal, collective – and examines their implications and differential affects as they variously open up and close down the possibility for social transformation.
This thesis explores the response to loss through attention to a distinctive set of narrative texts written by Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Denise Riley. What connects these different writers, across time and place, is not only that each responds to loss in writing, but that each writer does so in a manner contesting prevalent associations of melancholia and trauma, giving place to an alternate ethics of mourning. Freud’s seminal essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), established the groundwork for contemporary critical examinations of loss, both a source of definitions and a framework to be revised. In particular, melancholia has been reappraised extensively as an ethically privileged response of fidelity following loss. However, as a number of critics elsewhere have noted, the moral economy of the melancholic risks reifying loss in subject-formation and, consequently, risks aggressive and exclusionary attempts at identity reconstruction and consolidation. Associated with an appeal to trauma transfigured as ethically originary, the critical ascendency of melancholia is one from which this thesis departs. As I show, Cixous, Rhys, Woolf and Riley emphasise instead the ways in which loss can be playfully and pleasurably set in motion in the present, as each chapter argues in differing ways. Articulating loss through the framework of fiction, broadly conceived, allows us to avoid the effects of vicarious identification with loss and trauma, while strategies of displacement resist the assumption of an uncritical empathy. The attitude of multidirectional encounter at work across this thesis (with loss; with the ‘other’; across genre, time, and writing) is, what’s more, an attempt to mitigate the paradigm of non-approachability and unsharability when it comes to the loss and trauma of others that, as Denise Riley contends, isolates the bereaved in contemporary life to ‘the inhuman remote realms of the “unimaginable”’.
Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.
Affekte, Emotionen, Gefühle – die Tendenz, die Welt zunehmend affektiv zu vermessen, hat gegenwärtig nicht nur unterschiedliche Disziplinen affiziert, sondern gleichsam die Frage nach dem Politischen von Gefühlen (neu) aufgeworfen. Wie wird über Affekt und Gefühl das Politische artikuliert und reflektiert? Wie wird folglich das Verhältnis zwischen Politik und Gefühl gedacht? Und welche (wissens-)politische Bedeutung wird dieser aktuellen Wende zu den Affekten beigemessen?
Emotionen erfüllen wichtige soziale Funktionen, indem sie Aufmerksamkeit auf relevante soziale Beziehungen und Erfahrungen lenken und dabei helfen, Beziehungen sinnvoll zu gestalten und zu nutzen (vgl. Keltner/Haidt 1999). Bewunderung und Verehrung sind emotionale Reaktionen auf andere, deren Verhalten oder Eigenschaften als herausragend wahrgenommen werden. Vom Erleben und Ausdruck dieser Emotionen können die bewundernde oder verehrende Person, die bewunderte oder verehrte Person sowie deren soziale Gruppe oder Gemeinschaft profitieren.
Published in: Polish Theater Journal 1(4) 2017
Trauma has become a catchword of our time and a central category in contemporary theory and criticism. In this illuminating and accessible volume, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps:
- provide an account of the history of the concept of trauma from the late nineteenth century to the present day
- examine debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
- trace the origins and growth of literary trauma theory
- introduce the reader to key thinkers in the field
- explore important issues and tensions in the study of trauma as a cultural phenomenon
- outline and assess recent critiques and revisions of cultural trauma research
Trauma is an essential guide to a rich and vibrant area of literary and cultural inquiry.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Not Even Past
1. The History of Trauma
2. Words for Wounds
3. Trauma Theories
4. The Future of Trauma
Conclusion: The Limits of Trauma
Glossary
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lucy Bond is a principal lecturer in English literature at the University of Westminster, UK.
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, Belgium.
DISCOUNT
Use the promotional code FLR40 at checkout to receive a 20% discount: http://www.routledge.com/9780415540421.
Este artículo explora la relación entre la ignorancia, la autoridad y el nacionalismo en el pensamiento y la práctica neoliberales para argumentar que, lejos de señalar su fin, el reciente surgimiento global del demagogo neoliberal está firmemente arraigado en el neoliberalismo. La primera parte actualiza el concepto estético de lo sublime para explorar el lugar central que ocupa y su papel mediador entre la ignorancia y la autoridad. La segunda parte argumenta que el neoliberalismo tiene su propia forma de nacionalismo que se sustenta en una lógica social darwinista. Es aquí donde encontramos la base para la intersección entre el neoliberalismo y las formas de nacionalismo vitriólico y xenófobo que han ayudado a impulsar el ascenso global del demagogo neoliberal. En la sección final se argumenta que, en un contexto de creciente desigualdad e inseguridad, el demagogo falsea las relaciones sociales en aras de mantener el statu quo y carga a los pretendidos “enemigos del pueblo” con la culpa de los fallos del sistema.
This paper discusses visual engagements with the refugee issue in Greece and beyond from 2015 to 2017. Drawing mostly, but not only on visual art works, I investigate the extent to which contemporary art can operate as a means of criticising stereotypes and clichés concerning the refugee crisis and its representations, as well as the extent to which it can intervene and act subversively. Since most of the art projects I discuss here use specific objects as a visual means of approaching their subject matter, I also examine the ways in which these objects operate in representing the refugee crisis.
Historically, universities have centred around white-ness and masculinity, meaning that people who do not belong to these groups navigate academic spaces as ‘outsiders’. We position the conference as an important site for understanding the implications of outsider-ness, and the impact of this on early career academics and on the reproduction of exclusionary practices. The conference demands different performances and disciplining of bodies to adhere to academic norms. Conducting interviews with academics within the disciplines of Geography and Politics, this article explores how bodies of white-ness and masculinity are both expected and accepted within an academic setting, whilst for people who are ‘outsiders’, particular along lines of race, gender, and for ECAs, conferences are more difficult to navigate, across ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ spaces. This article concludes by thinking about how conferences can reaffirm or resist the exlcusionary, precarious and uncertain future of the university.
Pillow explores complexities of witnessing in research linking theoretical oppression to inadequate, arrogant witnessing. Weaving narrative and reflection, Pillow considers what is engrained in theoretical oppression and reviews trauma studies engagement with witnessing as a case example. Thinking with feminist, queer and decolonial scholars, Pillow argues for epistemic witnessing based on ethical onto-epistemological responsibility driven by decolonial attitude and reparative reading. The essay is written in five phrasings, which may be read consecutively or randomly, and concludes with ideas for epistemic witnessing as reparative lenticular archives for past–present–futures.
The article develops the notion of affective verticality as a way of interrogating particular dynamics in affective arrangements in right-wing times. The gesture of elevation is key; it gives rise to a powerful claim to territory through affective presence, but also to grandeur and distinction. Concretely, the paper discusses the controversies surrounding two monuments recently installed in East Germany. In one case three buses were set up vertically in front of Dresden's Church of our Lady; in the other, 24 concrete slabs imitating the Berlin Holocaust Memorial were set up in the neighbouring garden of right-wing politician Björn Höcke in Bornhagen, Thuringia. Through the analysis of the local outrage and expressions of disgust in response to these implantations in a region branded ‘Dark Germany’, I propose affective verticality as an optics for reading particular dynamics in affective arrangements where the worry over decline and the longing for grandeur are especially enunciated – in short: a device for inquiring social and political enactments in right-wing times.
This article examines the kairotic beginnings of the #MeToo movement in order to understand what we are to make of this moment. It shows that commentaries about #MeToo unfold as a debate over the desire for law and the law of desire, ceding the contingent kairotic moment in which we might remake our contemporary political landscapes. As such, I argue that movements dedicated to ending sexual violence must reimagine the scene of address in which demands for justice might be spoken and their speech recognized as the truth. This project is complicated, however, by a post-truth era in which telling the truth matters little because truth itself has been devalued. Through this lens, we can see that the cost of telling the truth in the terms of the established debate is the creation of a form of identity politics that reinforces post-truth logics rather than intervening in them.
In this article I discuss the genre of music video re-performance in the context of the formation and constitution of children's cultures and subjectivities. The viral dance-song cover, as I term it, is a digitally recorded and shared imitation of an iconic film or music video clip that formulates transmissible repertoires of movement and so becomes ‘viral’ in the process. Through examples taken from the Disney animation film Frozen and Sia's Chandelier, I think through the ways that contemporary childhood is not only visually construed, but energetically, affectively animated by the diffusive logic of the viral. In doing so I aim to understand how performances of the child-figure are transformed by the digital logic in which it operates, but also how the “traffic” of gesturality so exceedingly visualized by the logic of the viral cover signals a kind of performative compulsion towards transmissibility in which the behaviours of acting like a child become both tested and consolidated.
The critical and methodological overlap between the fields of emotion studies and medical humanities is gaining increasing scholarly attention and interest. This introduction will, after contextualising the impetus for the volume as whole, offer a brief overview of these two fields of study that will address their main epistemological and methodological assumptions. It will then proceed to outline the overall structure of the volume, providing a rationale for its main divisions, before summarising the essays in each.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to revisit Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” and the perennial challenges of researchers to collect information about the Other, focusing on the recent developments in affect theory.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper brings into the conversation the recent work on affect and sentimentality by Lauren Berlant with Spivak’s claims in the essay concerning the representation of the subaltern by scholars and researchers. The paper draws on Berlant’s work to trouble the liberal culture of “true feeling” as well as the liberal subject implied in Spivak’s essay as a subject who is “actively speaking.”
Findings
Recent theoretical developments on the affect theory make an important intervention to the perennial methodological tensions about representation, ontology and epistemology – as raised by Spivak and others over the years – and inspire new ways of thinking with the tools of doing qualitative research.
Originality/value
Bringing into the conversation, the affect theory and Spivak’s iconic essay have important methodological implications for qualitative research.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.