Affective Economy Research Articles

African Socialism, the Economy of Affection, and a Concern for Foreign Affairs

Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, is known as the ‘Mwalimu’ (the Great Teacher) for his roles and expansive thinking about the liberation of Africa. While he belongs to an older generation of politicians, it is opportune to reflect on his philosophical contributions at a time of extreme poverty and inequality in developing countries, and as Africa largely takes a backseat on the Russia-Ukraine war. Nyerere’s contributions tend to be forgotten, due to little contemporary academic work on his thoughts, criticism of his Ujamaa socialist policies, and ‘Nyererephilia’ (love/sentimentalism for Nyerere). This Nyererephilia remarkably persists even 61 yearsinto Tanzanian independence. This paper uses excerpts from the vast archive of Nyerere’s speeches to reflect on how he subversively defined the Global South to implement African socialism, an economy based on interconnectedness and compassion, and a belief that Africa has to be concerned with foreign affairs. In his time, he was seized with grand questions like self-reliance, educational reform,international debt and global inequality, nuclear weapons, non-alignment, African independence, and African unity. A contemporary vision for confronting contemporary questions could lean on his conception of the Global South. In Nyerere’s view, the Global South was not the underdeveloped world but was the ‘Third World’, which meant the third vision/way/subjectivity. This ‘way’ can only bepracticed through unity, otherwise the small states of the Global South are weak states that cannot participate as equals in the global system.

Making bodies and worlds

Inspired by the intense affective experience of watching the film 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute/Battements par minute) (Robin Campillo, 2017) about the HIV/AIDS activist group ACT UP Paris, I turn to affect theory to better understand how the film did what it did, tracing the circulating emotions of joy, anger, love, sadness, frustration, and exhilaration among the protagonists on screen, between the screen and the audience, and among the audience. I argue that the film’s affective economy has a religious quality in the way it creates bodies, worlds, and communities, and more specifically, that these religious sensibilities resonate with Christian affectivities in all their complexity. Thus, my argument about the religious affects of 120 BPM also contributes to the reflection on the affective dimensions of Christianity, and religion more broadly, and on the religious dimensions of affective-embodied aesthetic experiences.

Is Violence Critique?

The offence and violence surrounding episodes like the Salman Rushdie Affair and the Danish cartoon controversies have furnished Western critique of Islam. While important work has challenged this criticism of Islam by interrogating the secular foundations of critique, the relationship between violence and critique remains troubling. Through reflecting on an excerpt from an attempted murder trial following an attack in purported retaliation for offending Islam in an English prison, this article considers an expanded notion of violence that recognizes the structural conditions behind violence and the political stakes that prioritize the psychological and ideological drivers that service criticism of Islam. This article builds on scholarship that explored the State and the violent actions of non-State actors and the critical studies of hate crimes, Islamist extremism, and radicalization to reflect on the role of critique in the aftermath of violence and to ask: “Is violence critique?” It argues for an approach to violence-as-critique by recognizing how emotion and violence are not merely resident inside the fanatical body that protrudes outwards but are instead part of the wider, circulating, and unstable affective economies of structural violence where violences can be mutually reinforcing.

Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps

ABSTRACTThe feral horses of the Australian Alps—“brumbies”, as they are usually called—have occupied considerable space in settler-Australian culture since the 1890 publication of “The Man from Snowy River”. From the 1980s onwards, brumbies have been culled periodically to preserve “native” alpine ecosystems, which have not evolved to support hoofed animals. Such culls, however, are often highly controversial. This article uses Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies to explain why the culling of brumbies generates such heated debate and intense public outpourings of emotion. I relate the hyperaffective public performances of brumby supporters to a crisis in settler identity in Australia: as Indigenous activism has undermined the legitimacy of settler claims to belonging, some settlers have begun to use brumbies to assert their own kind of indigeneity.

‘When showing Hanfu to foreigners, I feel very proud’: The imagined community and affective economies of Hanfu (Chinese traditional couture) among Chinese migrant youth in the United Kingdom

This article sheds light on the intricate relationship between the revival of Hanfu, traditional couture from the Han Dynasty, and rising Chinese nationalism among Chinese youth living in the United Kingdom. Mobilizing the theoretical tool ‘affective economies’, we explore how particular feelings and values are assigned and attached to Hanfu, and thereby circulate among young Chinese migrants. We begin by examining the Hanfu movement to interrogate how Hanfu is reinvented based on a selective historicity of the past, serving as a specific cultural product for China’s rejuvenation. We then move on to analyze a series of in-depth interviews conducted between December 2019 and July 2020. We probe the lived experiences of young Hanfu supporters, who are members of the UK Han Culture Association, and the cultural events organized by the Association, in order to scrutinize the ways Hanfu conjures up an imagined community suffused with nationalism. Drawing upon on the affective economies of Hanfu, we discern the following three key findings: First, we argue that there are both positive and negative affective attachments to Hanfu, such as homesickness, loneliness, alienation, happiness, pride and beauty, which impinge on migrant bodies, assigning values to Hanfu and the Hanfu-related cultural events. Second, we show through the analysis of the fieldwork materials the paradoxical desire for chuguo (going abroad) and huiguo (returning to the nation) in the hearts of the young migrants. Finally, we argue that Hanfu circulates as a ‘mnemonic thing’ that signifies a specific imaginary of Ancient China, where young migrant’s aiguo (love of the nation) sentiments are then ‘stuck’ to this reinvented fashion.

Reproductive governance and the affective economy

The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Reproductive Governance and the Affective Economy, we apply repronormativity and affect to our reading of 20 articles published in Feminism & Psychology. Collectively, these articles provide a glimpse of the wide-ranging scope of reproductive regulation (including that which is re-produced by/within feminism itself), and the various work that repronormativity and affect do in this governance. The challenging of reproductive governance notwithstanding, we conclude by arguing that the centring and circulation of certain reproductive subjects and their experiences within feminist knowledge production is itself a part of and upholds repronormativity and forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for all.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Squeezed out by the market, seeking strength in the network: Makeshift temples and the spatio‐affective logics of survival in Singapore

AbstractThis paper offers an understanding of the spatio‐affective workings of religious organisations – and the marketplaces they operate in and through – that go beyond capitalist logics. We do so by examining how makeshift temples representing various forms of ‘Chinese religion’ survive in Singapore. Capitalist logics fail to explain how such marginal and precarious religious organisations, which might be ‘squeezed out’ by the market, nonetheless manage to survive amid competition. Moreover, scarce attention has been paid to how religion as a social‐affective system might mediate the functioning of a religious market. This paper fills the lacuna by bringing an understanding of the affective resonances of Chinese religious practices into conversation with religious market theory. Rather than treating the market as a universal mechanism that moderates patterns of competition, growth, and decline, we focus instead on the spatio‐affective conditions through which a plurality of ‘actually existing’ religious marketplaces is made possible. We argue that makeshift temples in Singapore create an alternative order of the religious market that is organised by the affective economies and interpersonal relationships within which different ritual service providers compete, cohabit, and cooperate. These temples dismiss the spatio‐religious boundaries and regulation that define the neoliberal religious marketplace of Singapore by carving out sacred niches instead.

Dance as a register of war: following unruly bodies, affects, and sounds in conflict

ABSTRACT What do people do in the face of violence, war, and tragedy? How do those touched by violence survive, live on, keep on going and feeling? What if ‘dance first, think later’ IS the natural order? In this paper, I propose dancing as an everyday, embodied, and multisensorial register of war. Combining new trajectories in war and military studies with ongoing feminist scholarship on war, embodiment, and emotions and interdisciplinary research on dance and electronic music, this paper explores entanglements between sites of political violence, militarism, and electronic dance music and culture. Drawing upon my research in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, I argue that attending to these unseen entanglements activates distinctive ways of knowing the politics of war: they reveal alternative narratives of armed conflict mediated through and in between DJ performances, dancing bodies, and electronic sounds. These experiences offer important insights that unsettle taken for granted locations and affective economies of war while also reproducing conflict logics and divisions. I propose dance as a heuristic device that can recalibrate our understanding of the sensuous, affective, and embodied politics of/in war, enabling us to explore fragile possibilities for resistance and escape from its grip.

Emotions, inequalities and crises: Ecuadorian migrants in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article examines narratives of transnational belonging and transnational practices of care between a group of Ecuadorian migrants in Spain and Italy and their families and friends in Ecuador during the first semester of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Drawing on the concepts of transnational affective economies (Wilding et al., International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020, 23, 639), the circulation of care (Baldassar & Merla, Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding mobility and absence in family life. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, London, New York, 2014) and transnational forms of belonging (Boccagni & Baldassar, Emotions, Space and Society, 2015, 16, 73), we look at how despite their still precarious social and labour conditions in destination-which were exacerbated during the pandemic-Ecuadorian migrants activated different forms of belonging and transnational care. Findings reveal that emotions had a crucial role in enabling the transnational circulation of care between family members and friends and a revival of migrants' sense of national belonging. We argue that the crisis generated by COVID-19 was the occasion for migrants to revisit their sense of belonging as well as their awareness of south-north inequalities since they experienced the crisis simultaneously in Ecuador, Spain and Italy. At the same time, emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and concern for their families and communities triggered subjective understandings of local and global inequalities that reaffirmed their migration project.

Affective economies of racism on social media

New media technologies and social networks have not only opened up spaces for civic engagementand democratic participation, but have also offered alternative sites for the proliferation andcirculation of racist, homophobic and xenophobic sentiment. This article draws on Ahmed’s ideaof “affective economies” and Ekman’s (2019) notion of “affective publics” to investigate how whitesupremacist groups in South Africa have used social media to express racist views, attitudes andsentiments. The internet in general and social networks in particular are based on a libertarianlogic that emphasises freedom of speech at the expense of the rights of minorities whose viewsmay not meet the required algorithmic thresholds of specific social media sites. While governmentsaround the world have put in place laws to deal with overt racism and hate speech, online platformsremain new battlegrounds for the articulation of racist views and sentiments. The findings of thestudy show that white supremacist groups in South Africa use social media as a platform to recontextualiseand re-mediate topical issues in South African society and ramp up group solidarityby circulating racist views that undermine and de-legitimise the ruling party (the African NationalCongress) and its policies.

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Stretching Our Stories (SOS): Digital Worldmaking in Troubled Times

In this article, we reflect on the pivot to online research creation in COVID’s wake, and offer a gallery of ten films that emerged through on-line multimedia story-making under lockdown conditions. We describe what new, online research creation has meant for us as critical disability and intersectionality scholars who work with creative visual methods—both with and in justice-seeking communities. We introduce COVID-era adaptions to the research creation practices we co-developed that helped to sustain racialized/allied, disability, fat, neurodivergent, mad, aging cultures and communities during the pandemic. We focus on the bifurcated affective economies that circulated around COVID, and how these affects surface in the stories of makers who participated in on-line multimedia workshops that we have run since March 2020. While the pandemic has deepened inequalities and disrupted research and arts activism, we argue that it provided opportunity to expand possibilities for disability and non-normative cultural production and to imagine and fight for a radically different world.

The affective afterlife of naked body protests

In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women’s naked protests. We read black women’s naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interviews, archival video, podcasts and written content emanating from South Africa, we explore what occurs after naked protests. The experiences endured by the women protestors range from negative affects such as shaming to humiliation by protestors’ communities and psychological distress. The findings suggest that refusal is not counter to women’s experiences of psychological distress and shame – they co-exist. We demonstrate how affects travel in affective economies and stick to bodies in ways that disperse bad feelings and create productive openings for freedom. Finally, we contend that the affective afterlife of naked protests might be understood as an ongoing theorisation of the body long after the event of the actual protest.

Blame, Shame, and Atonement: Greenlandic Responses to Racialized Discourses about Greenlanders and Danes

Outside Greenland, many believe that the Greenlandic name for Greenland means “Land of the People.” However, the Greenlandic word for human being or person is inuk (plural: inuit), and Greenland is called Kalaallit Nunaat not Inuit Nunaat. Kalaallit is the West Greenlandic term for modern-day Greenlanders who trace their ancestry along two lines: to the Inuit in the West and the Scandinavians in the East. During the first half of the twentieth century, this mixed ancestry was an important argument for the Greenlandic claim for recognition and equality. This article examines a literary source, Pavia Petersen’s 1944 novel, Niuvertorutsip pania (The outpost manager’s daughter). The novel’s female protagonist, who is of mixed ancestry, is staged as a national symbol for modern Greenland, a country that appropriates European culture while remaining Greenlandic. After the end of the colonial period, the Inuit legacy and Greenlanders’ status as an Indigenous people became important drivers of the Greenlandic claim for independence. In present-day Greenlandic film and literature, Danes are often left out of the story entirely, delegitimizing much of society’s genetic and cultural legacy. Naturally, this poses a problem for the Greenlanders who not only number Europeans among their remote ancestors but also live with a dual identity, with one Danish and one Greenlandic parent. This article illustrates that the notion of “mixed-breed” or “half” Greenlanders is currently regarded with such ambivalent feelings because it accentuates unresolved tensions among the ethnic groups, including the continued dominance of the outdated (colonial) affective economies in Danish-Greenlandic relations.

The (un)expected consequences of the teacher's (emotional) labor. Inspirations from politically and critically oriented affect theories

The aim of the article is to describe the teacher’s (emotional) labor and its relationships with the formation of the teacher’s subjectivity. This relationship is especially visible when the relations between the teacher’s emotions and professional work are shown from the perspective of theoretical analyses and research in the field of the affective turn, especially the so-called "affective economies". Based on selected critical and political theories of emotions (i.a. Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, and Teresa Brennan), the teacher’s (emotional) labor is presented here as a tool of auto-(trans)formations and (auto-)reflection and, at the same time, as a place of the affective marginalization of the teacher’s subjectivity and impoverishment of his or her agency. The presented way of conceptualizing emotional labor is a new look at the teacher’s emotions. It provides educational theorists and pedeutologists with analytical tools for empirical research and is also a voice in the discussion, an argument for considering affect in teacher education.

Introduction: language, work and affective capitalism

Abstract This special issue contributes to scholarship on language and affective economy by exploring the role played by affect in shaping work and workers under current configurations of capitalism. We take as a starting point the observation of increased valorisation and instrumentalisation of affect in the contemporary phase of capitalism. In this editorial introduction to the special issue, we set the scene by first outlining our questions, aims and objectives. Subsequently, we situate the contribution made by this issue in a larger social theorisation of affect and capitalism, particularly the notion of affective capitalism, and reflect on how this theorisation can contribute to sociolinguistic scholarship on work. The introduction concludes with an outline of the articles in this special issue, highlighting the way, empirically and conceptually, each article contributes to our understanding of the intersections between language, work and affective capitalism.

Women’s Work, Precarity, and Cultural Labor, or the Affective Economy of the Assistant

Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities.

Ghosted: Jewishness and the Haunted Hegemony of Racial Modernity

In this article, I introduce affect as a theoretical paradigm for describing and understanding the logic of racialization by focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses of religion, Orientalism, and civic equality, and the specific case of Jewish racialization. Describing racialization primarily in affective terms, I focus on the case of Jewish “racial affect”—the unseen circulation of feelings about Jews, about what Jewishness makes Europeans feel—as a spectral and haunted discourse of European racial modernity. I suggest that Jewish racial affect can help illuminate how racialization and racial formation, more generally, form “affective economies” that help the idealized citizen-subject of national identities orient themselves, feeling their way past those negative carriers of racial impurity and disgust and securing borders and banners in the name of their own likeness. Thus, the spectral figure of the Jew provides a figure of a living death (to conjure Leon Pinsker’s description), an undead past that continues to haunt an increasingly secular modernity in which race organizes presence in order to mark religion as a necessary exclusion. Focusing on the negative affects attributed to Jews in the Enlightenment discourse of “civic improvement,” the imagined role of the “Semite” in Orientalist literature, and the anxiety triggered by Jewish persistence in historical exile, I outline the spectral role of the Jew in the shifting discourse of religion and secular historical thought in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.

The affective economy and fast fashion: Materiality, embodied learning and developing a sensibility for sustainable clothing

Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people have with clothing can be shaped by workshops that immerse them in making, mending, and modifying garments. Such experiential learning can encourage adoption of more sustainable clothing choices, such as reducing consumption of new garments and prolonging the life of already owned items of clothing. We present findings on a strand of work from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explored the affective economy around clothing, and considered how emotive affects around garments operate as a conduit to self-sustain particular practices. Our significant contribution brings political analysis firmly into the debate about sustainable clothing by merging literatures on behaviour change and affect, through exploration of a novel longitudinal (9-months) qualitative data set. At the start of the project, participants generally thought of clothes as being low-cost (and therefore disposable) items. The workshops, in contrast, presented garments and the materials from which they are made as precious, complex and fluid – in a process of continual possibility. For pro-environmental behavioural change, we find that immersion in the materiality of clothing mobilised affective processes, enabling potentially transformative affective encounters. Further, we found that group learning environments need to do more than simply teach approved normative values and behaviours. Pro-environmental behaviour change initiatives need to provide people with the space to create and situate their own knowledges, enabling affect to be mobilised, activated and supported by appropriate cultural milieu.