Emotional styles – concepts and challenges

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.1 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?