"Taking It to Heart: Emotion, Modernity, Asia"
Guest Editor: Haiyan Lee (University of Colorado at Boulder)
New scholarship on emotion has urged us to see the emotions
(fear, anger, shame, passion, etc.) as perceptions and appraisals
of weal and woe and our emotional experiences as profoundly
shaped by social norms, cultural practices, and moral beliefs.
Not only can emotion be managed and even commercialized, it
can also engender rituals, communities, and movements that become
potent forces in social
and political processes. Emotion is thus a crucial idiom with
which we negotiate difference and identity.
What is the role of emotion in Asian modernity? How did colonialism
invoke the Enlightenment understanding of emotion to legitimize
the "civilizing mission"? How did colonial elites
deploy sentimental discourses to articulate their agency and
advance modernization agendas? How did nationalist and colonial
governmentality regulate emotional conduct as a way of regulating
the body politic? These questions have not been explored in
depth because our scholarship has long been dominated by the
assumption that emotion is a private, irrational matter best
left to the poets and psychologists. The special issue seeks
to fill this lacuna by inviting scholarly engagements in the
following areas of inquiry:
* Emotion in language: If emotion is not just an internal feeling
state, but an articulatory practice fully embedded in the social
process, then it is critical to begin with the language of emotion.
Instead of asking what kinds of (familiar) emotions we may recognize
or identify in Asian texts/praxis, we ask: what kinds of languages
are mobilized to communicate, elicit, censure, flaunt, or celebrate
emotions and for what purposes? How have the semantics of emotion
endured or evolved and how have certain vocabularies crossed
borders and entered into new symbolic economies?
* Emotion in history: How might we write genealogies of emotion
in Asian histories that go beyond the study of Oriental thought
or Eastern aesthetic sensibility? What kinds of sources can
we turn to and how might we fruitfully combine the methods of
philological analysis, aesthetic criticism, folklore studies,
religious studies, historical anthropology, and the history
of ideas? What is the impact of (semi-)colonial modernity on
structures of feeling in Asia? How did some emotions become
delegitimized as feudal, unhealthy, and anti-modern and some
become enshrined as the requisite qualities of a modern
citizenry? What was the role of emotion in mediating the ethics
and semiotics of war and conflict?
* Emotion in literary, visual, and sonic cultures: How have
the lyrical, sentimental, and melodramatic genres in Asian literatures
become reconfigured in 19th- and 20th-century translingual practices?
What impact has the advent of modern visual and sonic technologies
had on the experience and representation of
emotion? How, for instance, might photographic or cinematic
representations of suffering have changed the grammar of "disgust"
or the politics of "compassion"?
* Emotion, body, and identity: What are the culturally differentiating
poetics of such seemingly universal emotions as anger, shame,
envy, grief, pity, and joy? What conceptions of the body and
personhood do they articulate? How do modern notions of love
and desire underscore changing gender relations, sexual identities,
and ideals of masculinity and femininity? How does affect intersect
with the problems of class, race, and ethnicity?
* Emotion, ritual, and religion: What is the status of piety
in modern religious practices? What norms govern the public
expression and ritual deployment of emotion? How have the different
religious traditions of Asia negotiated the modern culture of
sentiment? How have certain emotions (such as "pain"
or "humiliation") become the fulcra of social or religious
movements?
* The biopolitics of emotion: What role does emotion play in
creating, sustaining, undermining, or destroying social relationships?
Which emotions carry formal social consequences and in what
context (e.g., when/where is the plea of emotional distress
legitimate in criminal justice proceedings)? How do the state,
media, intellectuals, and markets shape emotional discourses,
conduct, and communities?
The special issue welcomes contributions from all areas of
the humanities and social sciences, especially those that take
an interdisciplinary, comparative, and/or theoretical approach
to the study of emotion. Papers need not be limited to the topical
or geographical scope outlined above. Please send completed
papers (25-35 pages) by October 1, 2005 to:
positions: east asia cultures critique
c/o the Jackson School of International Studies
Box 353650
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3650
ATTN: Special Issue on Emotion
Please consult http://depts.washington.edu/position/submissions.htm
for
submission guidelines. Inquiries may be directed to:
Haiyan Lee (Guest
Editor)
East Asian Languages & Civilizations
University of Colorado, 279 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0279, USA
303-492-7545; 303-492-7272 (fax)
