Emotional Community Research Articles

Memory Wars and Emotional Politics: “Feel Good” Holocaust Appropriation in Central Europe

Abstract This article analyzes the patriotic turn in Holocaust memory politics, exploring the processes through which the narrative of a morally upright national majority has been pitted against transnational entities such as the European Union. The EU is considered to foster multiculturalism, leading to interpretations of what some perceive as national guilt. The article investigates invocations of shame and pride in Czechia and Slovakia, two countries that are often overlooked in works on Holocaust memory politics yet are symptomatic of larger changes in the region and history appropriation in general. Building on research into emotional communities, it traces how and why political actors across the ideological spectrum have adopted notions of pride to mobilize domestic audiences against “accusations” of local guilt and complicity in the Nazi genocides of Jews and Roma. By doing so, our article demonstrates how Holocaust memory has become entangled with Europeanization and highlights the role of emotions in shaping national identity and belonging.

Sentimental Porcelain. Meissen Porcelain and Enlightenment Sensibility in Late Eighteenth-Century Saxony

Meissen porcelain objects representing sentimental subjects – such as scenes of familial and romantic love, and the joys of childhood – are documents of fundamental importance for understanding the penetration of Enlightenment ideas into late eighteenth-century Saxony. They speak to the reception of key Enlightenment literary works in social contexts characterised by a new elite made up of wealthy members of the bourgeoisie and liberal aristocrats united in their embrace of progressive ideas about the relationship between reason and sentiment. Embedded as they were in very specific social practices – the sociable rituals of hot beverage consumption, and cultures of viewing and conversation in the domestic interior – these porcelain objects are primary evidence for identifying and reconstructing emotional communities founded on a shared embrace of Enlightenment sensibility amongst the upper echelons of Saxon society in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

“We Love You in America”: Spiro Agnew, the Media, and the Building of an Emotional Community

“We Love You in America”: Spiro Agnew, the Media, and the Building of an Emotional Community

"We Love You in America": Spiro Agnew, the Media, and the Building of an Emotional Community

"We Love You in America": Spiro Agnew, the Media, and the Building of an Emotional Community

Constructing an ‘emotional community’ in times of crisis: the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022

ABSTRACT How does the EU use emotions in its response to international crises arising from norm violations? In order to answer this question, the article focuses on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and theoretically, it draws on the sociology of emotions literature. The article argues that EU institutional actors use emotions to construct an ‘emotional community’ through their discourses during major crises. More specifically, the article shows that emotions matter in the EU’s crisis response in three ways: First, emotions serve to construct and endure a community of values. Second, emotions frame policy options for determining the EU’s reaction to the crisis. Third, emotions construct emotional boundaries between European emotional community (norm followers/the EU) and norm violators at the international level. By applying ‘emotional community’ concept to a new territory, i.e. the EU, the article aims to broaden our understanding of the EU’s international identity construction in times of crisis.

Feeling European? The EU as an emotional community

ABSTRACT This article explores the importance of emotions in the European Union (EU), highlighting their role in shaping the EU’s self-image as a foreign policy actor and promoting social cohesion through emotion norms. Emotion norms are shared feeling rules that underpin collective identities and experiences within a group. Focusing on grief as an example, the article explains how it shapes the EU as an emotional community. By analyzing the EU in this way, the study examines how emotion norms help members navigate norm violations. The findings enhance our understanding of the EU’s emotional dynamics, shedding light on the contested nature of solidarity and public discourse. The article also critically reflects on the relevance of grief in EU foreign policy, emphasizing the significance of emotions in shaping EU policy and offering insights into the role of emotion norms.

Emotion norm violations in small communities: The Carter-Brezhnev hotline correspondence

How do international actors move from milder to more serious measures as they handle emotion norm violations that parallel behavioral norm infringements in small communities that would collapse if community members ejected the violator? Here, we trace this process analytically by examining the interaction between President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev via the Moscow-Washington hotline, which we conceptualize as a small emotional community of Soviet (now Russian) and American leaders of the past, present, and future. Our findings suggest that one community member’s initial mild and tacit demands that the violator emote as expected are followed by other community members in turn committing emotion norm violations, which then erodes these norms. We conclude that such small emotional communities may only survive repeated violations if, at some point, the ejection of the violator becomes possible – for example, following an election loss by the violator – without causing the collapse of the emotional community.

Belief and Prediction Narratives in Rethinking Discourse: The Experience of Soviet Science Fiction and Ad in the 1950s

In the USSR of 1950s, the sociocultural foundations for the functioning of social practices and institutions were the opposite to those in subsequent periods of the USSR history and modern Russia. In addition, they are opposite to the currently dominant trends in world’s development, depicted in “Retrotopia” of Zygmunt Bauman. In the culture of that time, people poorly expressed mass nostalgia as they searched for an emotional community with collective memory. Rationality was the main defining feature of the 1950s. From this point of view, the author examines narratives aimed at correcting the “Soviet” discourse, discredited during the Second World War and political changes in Soviet society in the late 1940s — early 1950s. There are two types of narrative: the belief and prediction, which were broadcast through commercial advertising and science fiction literature. The prediction narrative remained a specific attribute of the1950s culture and did not receive further promotion.

Curating Community behind Barbed Wire: Canadian Prisoner of War Art from the Second World War

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Sijo as Affective Refuge: Chosŏn Court Politicians’ Emotional Community in Poetry

This paper aims to analyze the prevalence of negative emotions in Sijo written by aristocratic politicians of the Joseon court. To analyze these emotions, I will use two analytical frameworks: first, the analysis of emotions from the perspective of Neo-Confucianism and, second, the conception of “emotional communities” as put forth by scholar Barbara H. Rosenwein. By using these two frameworks, I aim to reconcile the tension between the prevalence of such negative emotions in the politicians’ poetry and the Confucian notion that such negative emotions are strictly contrary to the balance of the polity and must be sublimated.

Humor, emotion, and interpretive communities in the controversy over Jerry Springer: The Opera

Abstract Satires that tackle religion have always courted controversy. When Jerry Springer: The Opera was originally aired on the BBC in 2005, the show received 63,000 complaints and Christian Voice attempted to prosecute Mark Thompson (the Director General of the BBC) for blasphemy for airing the show. In this article I draw on the work of Stanley Fish and Gerben van Kleef to argue that interpretive communities of emotional readers provide a valuable framework for interpreting humor scandals. This framework contributes to our appreciation of the interpersonal in the emotional experience of humor and demonstrates that interpretations of humor are often goal-oriented and ideologically motivated. Using the examples of Christian Voice and Mediawatch-UK, I demonstrate how these emotional communities are constructed as well as the rhetorical strategies these organizations adopted. To accuse Jerry Springer: The Opera of blasphemy, for example, Christian Voice presented themselves as defenders of traditional British values. Finally, my analysis of these examples demonstrates that the potential for community outrage increases especially when the community faces a crisis of identity.

WONDER and AWE in the Old English Martyrology: Expression, Feeling Norms and Narrative Motifs

ABSTRACT Following recent research on the conceptualisation and expression of amazement and on cognitive models for wonder and awe, this paper examines these two emotional responses in the Old English Martyrology (OEM). Using different Old English lexical resources, and a bilingual edition of the OEM this paper analyses these two aesthetic emotions with the aim of determining what role they played in the emotional community where this text was composed. Additional aims include establishing whether there is a secular dimension to these emotions and whether it is censored in this text. This research argues that, while the author of the OEM does employ the terms in these two lexical domains in instances of emotional education, the text also contains examples where these emotional experiences are more consistent with how they are described in contemporary aesthetic emotion models, unlike other Old English hagiographical writings, where these emotions are fundamentally religious and spiritual responses.

Wrathful Rites: Performing Shefokh ḥamatkha in the Hileq and Bileq Haggadah

This essay explores a remarkable manuscript, the so-called Hileq and Bileq Haggadah (Paris, BnF Ms. Hébreu 1333), illuminated in southern Germany in the fifteenth century. Our focus, in particular, is on the image that accompanies the Shefokh ḥamatkha prayer, an invocation of God’s vengeance upon nonbelievers. Here, we posit the role of the Shefokh ḥamatkha folio within the context of the Hileq and Bileq Haggadah, suggesting that its prominent position and extravagant visual program involve the reader–viewer in a performative scenario that inflects the meaning of the other images in the book as well as the enactment of the Seder ritual itself. The messianic import of the folio is underscored by its enactive language, both visual and oral, and predicated on the emotional communities that coalesced around the Passover ritual in the later Middle Ages.

David Myatt’s Imagined Emotionology, his Striving for Authentic Aryan Emotional Communities, and the Dishonourable Wulstan Tedder

During the 1980s and 1990s David Myatt, a British neo-Nazi ideologue, was involved in attempts to establish Aryan enclaves; Myatt’s enclave vision imagined a space secluded from the inauthenticity of liberal multicultural modernity where an Aryan folk community could live authentically in accordance with his National-Socialist ideology. This ideology was founded on a cosmology which inextricably interlinked Aryans, the landscape, and the cosmos in a symbiotic relationship. Myatt therefore envisaged rural enclaves established in harmony with Nature, where Aryans could live authentic lives in an authentic community, founded on an imagined emotionology that centred the Aryan virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty. Myatt’s legitimacy as an ideologue was largely formed by his vigorous personal adherence to this concept of authentic Aryanism, but this authenticity and legitimacy was tested by Myatt’s deliberate tactics of obscuration.

ПОВЕСТВОВАНИЯ О СМЕРТИ БОГОХУЛЬНИКОВ В ЕПАРХИАЛЬНЫХ ВЕДОМОСТЯХ КОНЦА XIX — НАЧАЛА XX ВЕКА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИСТОРИИ ЭМОЦИЙ

The article examines the features of stories about the “punishment of God”, or stories about the “miraculous” death of blasphemers, published in Russian diocesan journals of the late 19th — early 20th century. The historiographic gap in this area determines the novelty of the work. In addition to the traditional methods of historical research, the research methodology was based on the model of the “emotional process” by N. Frijda and B. Mesquito, the concept of “public images of feeling” by K. Geertz (“emotional matrices” by A. L. Zorin) and B. Rosenwein’s concept of textual “emotional communities”. Narrative monotony of stories about the “punishment of God”, their rigid genre framework, their belonging to the community of authors and readers from the clergy, made it possible to single out stable emotional structures in them. Firstly, blasphemy is presented in the form of an “emotional” crime, the characteristic features of a “blasphemer” as a subject of emotions are highlighted: it is a source of destructive experiences, unable to control feelings that are destructive for him and harmful to others (anger, malice, hatred), prone to impious fun, bold. Secondly, a blasphemer is considered as an object of emotions of a religious “moralist”, in the role of which the author (narrator) of the story acted and, as it was supposed, the reader of the text should have acted: this is hostility towards the sinner, alienation from him, satisfaction with the disastrous outcome of his “crime”. Thirdly, the forms of expression of the key genre emotion — fear (horror) are investigated, a three-dimensional model of its analysis is proposed: fear of the victim of “God’s judgment”; fear of eyewitnesses of the “miracle”; fear of the author — commentator and publisher.

Круг Михаила Кузмина и формирование неофициальной ленинградской литературы второй половины ХХ века

The literary reputation and creativity of M.A. Kuzmin has been determined to be influential on the unofficial Leningrad culture of the second half of the 20th century, such as works by L.L. Rakov, V.N. Petrov, A.N. Egunov, and others. The analysis of the texts shows that Kuzmin has a shared creative tradition with close friends and young people. Based on the analysis of their texts and the practice of their transmission, the article concludes that these writers formed a kind of emotional community, a bonded memory of Kuzmin, and knowledge of the crucial texts of the elder poet. Many works of Egunov, Petrov, and Rakov of this kind are “coded” by one text or another or by Kuzmin’s method. In turn, Kuzmin’s young friends in the second half of the 20th century themselves take on the role of “masters,” allowing practices, texts, and pre-revolutionary literary culture that support the following representatives, philologists, poets, and writers of the 1950s–1960s. The figure and texts of Kuzmin in these years form a different, unofficial literature, being perceived by authors who are looking for an alternative to Soviet culture. The structure of Kuzmin’s cult was shaped by historical and cultural factors following his demise. For many years, the topics that have been advancing on the periphery of Kuzmin’s work allow us to raise the question of the real influence of Kuzmin’s personality and creativity on the literary culture and literary process of the 20th century.

Emotions and a Genre of Jewish Politics: American Jewish Advocacy for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, 1967–1977

ABSTRACT: It has long been held that American Jewish support for Israel is underwritten by a prevailing sense of emotional attachment to the Jewish state. Focusing on Jewish activist groups formed in the aftermath of the 1967 war, this article shows that emotions also played a central role in American Jewish mobilization for what is now termed the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An entire "genre" of American Jewish political activism has emerged since 1967 to urge Israel to relinquish captured territories while embracing the Jewish state using emotional terminology. Conforming to a broader emotional regime as a way of staying within the bounds of the constructed American Jewish emotional community, generations of American Jewish activist organizations have emphasized love for Israel while simultaneously pushing for Palestinian self-determination. American Jewish advocates for a two-state solution typically argue that their commitment to a peaceful and stable future for the Jewish state drives them to support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Using oral histories and archival documents, this article offers a new perspective on such activism during its first decade (1967-1977).

The interweaving of network nationalism and transnational cultural consumption: the role conflict of K-pop fans

ABSTRACT As the patriotism interweaves with emotional attachment produced by cross-cultural communications, K-pop fans influenced by network nationalism will fall into the predicament of role conflict and adopt multiple coping strategies, hence providing new ideas for revealing the results of overlapped fields of politics and entertainment. Analysis of fans’ behaviors in a series of nationalistic events establishes that these fans attempting to form an emotional community across the border are caught in a dilemma of identity choice with various role expectations. The consequences of the choice are related to some factors such as patriotic cognition, fans’ immersion, fans’ expectations, patriots’ expectations, and risk perception, leading to four attitude tendencies including spontaneous patriotism, compromise patriotism, gentle star-worship, and resistance star-worship. This study argues that precautions should be taken against the tendency that network nationalism transforms into narrow nationalism and that we need to understand the political potential of fandom as a cultural community.

Emotional Splits and Psychologization

Although a number of texts have focused on the role of emotion in the dynamics of political mobilization, their focus has been predominantly on the initial stages of protest in the context of democratic or partly free societies. Using the case of the 2020–21 anti-police violence protests in Belarus, this article analyzes the role of emotional community in nondemocratic, authoritarian environments where vocal criticism is becoming increasingly risky, but the level of societal discontent remains high. Relying on mass media publications, comments on social media platforms, and ethnographic listening in Minsk, the article analyzes the emotional aspect of a protest that was followed by mass repressions. Two processes are identified that affect both protesters’ emotional community and supporters of the regime: emotional split from the opposite side and the psychologization of resistance to violence. These two concepts are useful for understanding the emotional dynamics of protest in authoritarian contexts but also have wider application beyond such settings.

“An Itchin ’Roun the Heart You Can't Get at to Scratch”: Exploring the Emotion of Love in Black Enslaved Communities of the Nineteenth Century

Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized, and have perhaps been taken at face or written value. In some contrast to previous historical scholarship, this article argues that the love, as expressed and experienced within Black enslaved communities, was complex, contentious, and far from monolithic.