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Abstract
This themed issue intends to open up new vistas on the history of emotions. It does so with articles that examine community-based or spatially defined emotional styles that were simultaneously performed within larger socio-cultural contexts. Following this approach one might – for example – discern ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’, ‘British’ and ‘Anglo-Indian’ emotional styles within colonial South Asia around 1900 as well as diverging modes of thinking about, handling, generating and expressing emotions that prevail in work-, leisure- or consumption-spaces within contemporary Berlin. As the contributors to this issue demonstrate, capturing these multiplicities of co-existing styles and analysing their interactions enhances our understanding of the diachronic variability and synchronic diversity of emotional patterns and practices. Put differently, this issue of Rethinking History seeks to expand the scope of previous approaches that were informed by rather monolithic understandings of emotionality.Footnote1 Pursuing this agenda, this editorial first offers a working definition of emotion and outlines the concept of ‘emotional styles’. This notion not only produces new narratives and perspectives in a variety of disciplines, including history and sociology, but also raises fundamental questions about different understandings of the actor, that is, the subject and its potential for choice and agency. These matters are addressed in the second part of this editorial, while the third part raises questions about emotional styles in historiographical practice – how do we come to terms with the historian's emotions?
Acknowledgements
The idea for this themed issue emerged during the workshop ‘Emotional Styles – Communities and Spaces' at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin in July 2010 (see http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3275). I want to thank Karola Rockmann for co-organising this event and all the colleagues partaking in the workshop for their inspiring comments and contributions, from which the articles presented here benefitted a lot. Thanks as well to Christina Becher, Philippe Bongrand, Juliane Brauer, Sabine Donauer, Pascal Eitler, Julia Eksner, Merih Erol, Christel Fraser, Monika Freier, Ute Frevert, Bettina Hitzer, Uffa Jensen, Anja Laukötter, Stephanie Olsen, Margrit Pernau, Jan Plamper, Joseph Prestel, Barbara Rosenwein, Monique Scheer, Maritta Schleyer, Anne Schmidt, Nina Verheyen, Gian Marco Vidor and Claudia Wassmann, who allowed this text to profit immensely from their critical remarks and their encouragement. Finally, it is my pleasure to thank Alun Munslow for his insightful comments and his invaluable support in bringing this entire issue to fruition.
Notes
1. See, for example, Reddy 2001. Stearns (1994) speaks of ‘emotional style’ in the singular.
2. See Matt (2011, 118), Stearns (2010, 15), Biess et al. (2010, 73f.), Anderson (2009, 77), Eitler and Scheer (2009), Hopkins et al. (2009), Zembylas (2007), Reddy (2001) and Barnett and Horn Ratner (1997).
3. Picking up on Raymond Williams' term, Harding and Pribram (2004, 869) also locate ‘structures of feeling’ in between ‘the social formation and individual existences’. Interestingly, they also emphasise ‘the possibility of a multiplicity of co-existing, alternative structures of feeling’ (2004, 871).
4. In these respects, this understanding of ‘emotional styles’ resembles Gilles Deleuze's notion of style as being closely linked to stutter that transgresses personhood towards the non-personal and sets concepts, perceptions and affects in motion, prompting new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling (Bogue 2004, 11 and 24).
5. According to Gould's (2009) thought provoking discussion, an emotional habitus is ‘acquired almost as a direct feed into the body that bypasses more conscious thought processes’ (2009, 33). Furthermore, the notion of styles avoids the anti-constructivist distinction that Gould – following Brian Massumi's understanding of affect – draws between habitus and the non-conscious, extra-discursive, bodily, indeterminate force of affect that, according to her account, precedes and sometimes overpowers the requirements of the emotional habitus, thus creating ‘greater space for counter-hegemonic possibilities and for social transformation' (2009, 39). The notion of ‘emotional styles', in contrast, explains change and variation by means of interactions between diverging styles without resorting to such – in a certain sense deeper – phenomena.
6. For formulations that are similar to the idea of group-specific styles, see Stearns (2010, 19) and Reddy (2008).
7. See the sociological discussions about ‘emotional deviance’ (Thoits 1990).
8. Rosenwein's approach identifies a social group first and then extracts a specific emotional repertoire from their writings, see Plamper (2010, 253).
9. The Journal ‘Emotion, Space and Society’ has been published since 2008. For a general overview, see Smith et al. (2009).
10. Studies about male-to-male intimacy produced inspiring results, comparing city with country-side (Rydström 2003).
11. From a literary criticism point of view, the dynamic interrelationship within which spaces shape emotions which simultaneously inform the perception of spaces has recently been discussed by Lehnert (2011).
12. I am particularly thankful to Barbara Rosenwein for drawing my attention to these interdependencies.
13. For a more recent version of Leys’ argument against the ‘anti-intentionalism’ of contemporary affect theories that blank out ‘consciousness and the mind's control’, see Leys (2011, 443).
14. Phillips (2008, 58) argues that the historicisation of emotions contributes to de-emotionalising historiography.
15. Ute Frevert (2010, 109), looking at Holocaust historiography, also argues against the opposition between emotional and detached modes of studying history, asserting that ‘[t]he critical examination of the past’ depends on ‘the presence of shame, outrage and anger at the perpetrators and bystanders’. In a similar vein, Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy (2008, 25) argue that ‘la participation affective’ can further historical understanding in researchers as well as in readers.
16. See also Phillips (2008, 51) and Pinto (2010, 191).
17. Sarah Pinto (2010, 198) does so referring to David Eng and Judith Butler. One could add Walter Benjamin ([1942] 2007, 132 and 135f.), who, in his ‘On the Concept of History’, claimed that the image of the enslaved ancestors nourishes revolutionary hatred and spirit of sacrifice (thesis XII), while simultaneously critiquing historicist notions of empathy (thesis VII).
18. Mark Salber Phillips (2008, 59) puts forward such a balanced argument, stressing that the line between empathy and voyeurism is dangerously thin. Similarly, Dominic LaCapra (1999, 697) emphasises the complexity of mourning losses while at the same time trying to include former victims as well as former perpetrators into the account. Boquet and Nagy (2008, 24) also stress the potentials as well as the perils of ‘la lecture intuitive, le recours à l'empathie’.
19. In anthropology such research strategies are well established (Lutz 1988, 12; Davies and Spencer 2010). Within geography, Bondi (2005, 12f.) argued that ‘much academic work could be enriched and strengthened if emotions were taken more seriously and placed less peripherally in relation to academic enterprise’.
20. For an insightful analysis of these issues in German-speaking historiography around 1900, see Saxer (2008, 87–90). Bondi (2005, 237) speaks about the emotion work necessary for navigating an academic career. On emotions’ impact on historiographical practice, see also E. Robinson (2010, 510) and Munslow (2010, 115).
