Politics of Emotion / Emotions of Politics

AI, Intuition and the Making of Computational Cultures 

Bio note

Carolyn Pedwell is Professor in Digital Media in the Sociology Department at Lancaster and the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). She is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023).

Professor Pedwell’s research interests include digital media and culture; emotion and affect; habits and social change; media, cultural and social theory; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial theories.

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/people/carolyn-pedwell

Public Feelings in a Time of Broken Infrastructures

Bio note

Ann Cvetkovich is currently Professor in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  She has been Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings:  Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression:  A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).  She co-edited (with Ann Pellegrini) “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010).   She has been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ:  A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She currently has two books in progress:  Feeling My Way Through the Archives:  A Journey in Queer Method and How To Live in A Body:  A Survival Guide for Troubled Times.  

http://www.anncvetkovich.com/

Taste, Fashion and the Politics of Emotions: (Re-)Appropriating Burberry

Taste is a crucial site where both the emotions of politics and the politics of emotions are negotiated, distributed and enforced. “While it might seem an overstatement to suggest that groups might go to war over taste disputes” as Ben Highmore notes, “it is hard to imagine that what we term culture is not in the end (and endlessly) driven by the peculiar admix of affect, sensual perception, and bio-power that is instanced by taste. From one angle at least, social struggle is struggle through, in, and about taste.“ (2010). When it comes to fashion, emotions thus serve as a powerful lens through which the symbolic significance of material objects and cultural practices can be observed. Burberry, with its quintessentially British heritage, is a striking case in point, as it used to embody a particular vision of upper-class English identity associated with tradition and refinement. Yet, twenty years ago, when in the early 2000s Burberry’s famous nova check became associated with ‘chav-ism’ and hooligan culture (Martin 2009; Jones 2011), the infamous pattern turned into a visual marker of ‘bad taste’ and was hence banned in various clubs and restaurants. However, the paper argues that the appropriation of Burberry by chav culture is not merely a superficial act of consumerism, but rather a deeply emotional and affective response to social exclusion and marginalization. It reflects a desire for visibility, belonging, and the assertion of agency within a society that often renders certain identities invisible or demonized. (Re- )Appropriations of Burberry thus challenge dominant narratives of Englishness: in asserting alternative forms of belonging and cultural expression, they proof to be powerful technologies of emotions that simultaneously create and divide communities. Situating itself at the intersection of affect, identity politics, and cultural symbolism, this paper explores how the adoption of Burberry’s infamous nova check represents a form of resistance against hegemonic notions of ‘good taste’ and ‘bad taste’. This becomes manifest in cultural forms, artefacts and representations that re-evaluate – and sometimes simply co-opt –taste distinctions. To show this, the paper contextualizes the appropriation of Burberry within the broader framework of pop culture by reading FKA Twigs’ “Papi Bones” as well as the controversial media coverage of Jade Goody.

Bio
Dr. Susanne Bayerlipp teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies at Goethe Uni Frankfurt and is currently visiting professor at the University of Erlangen. Her research focuses on Affect Theory, Contemporary Literature and Material Culture. Her second book project is tentatively entitled Cluttered Epistemology: Hoarding in Contemporary Literature and Culture.

The Spirit of Service: The Neoliberal Promotion of Community Volunteering in Austerity Britain

The chosen theme for the liturgy during the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on 6 May, 2023 was ‘Called to Serve’. And so, in his official address at the service, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak underscored ‘service to others’ as a crucial trait of the British monarchy and a defining aspect of “Britishness”. He then endorsed The Big Help Out, a nationwide volunteering event scheduled for the Sunday following the Coronation, stating that ‘in a fitting tribute to the spirit of service that will define the Carolean Age, people across our country will help their communities with thousands of acts of kindness’. The Big Help Out campaign positions itself as a registered “super-charity” endorsed by the Royal Family and the Church of England. This convergence of religious and political spheres underscores communal affect as a precursor to democracy, linking the new identity marker of ‘serving the community’ with the coronation of the new head of the Church.

This paper argues that the performance of communal affect through acts of service aims at reinforcing the communal underpinnings of British democracy by fostering a sense of shared responsibility and belonging. Amid economic turmoil marked by numerous city councils declaring bankruptcy, the push for increased social solidarity based on voluntary work, which entails privatising and moralising public services, resonates with neoliberal ideals. It cultivates a sense of personal and collective identity, ultimately reframing perceptions of diminished social services and infrastructures while providing a disguised rationale for austerity policies. Sunak’s coronation address invoked the revival of community volunteering as a neoliberal paradigm, emphasising community spirit as the emotional foundation of British Toryism. Affectively potent yet politically vague, this spiritually charged goal may serve as justification and consolation for the harsh and seemingly isolating realities of British life after Brexit, in a country facing recession.

Bio
Julia Boll holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and a habilitation from the University of Konstanz. She is currently Adjunct Professor (Privatdozentin) of British Studies at the University of Konstanz. Before, she was Interim Professor for British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She has spoken and written on representations of war, violence, grief and pornography; ethics in literature on science; neoliberalism; theatre, transnationalism and utopia; the performativity of knowledge; the relationship between Early English cultures and nostalgic nationalism; the performativity of the commons; and the diachronic representation of bare life on stage. Her monograph The New War Plays was published in 2013, and her second book, Scapegoats, Devils, Outlaws, Witches: Bare Life’s Lives on the Medieval, Early Modern, and Contemporary Stage, is under review.

Narrating Black Anger and Agency Forty Years On: The BBC Documentary Uprising (2021)

The title of the tri-partite television documentary refers to what the British public knows as the Brixton Riots. Replacing the pejorative term with one that insinuates resistance against those in power the narrative presents the Brixton Uprising in April 1981 as a reaction to the New Cross house fire in January of the same year. The three one-hour films suggest that the protest was a reaction to the hostilities of the National Front and to aggressive racist policing. The accounts demonstrate the black community’s conviction that white racists perpetrated an arson attack despite the fact that the two police investigations into the fire returned no verdicts. BBC One commissioned the documentary from the renowned Black British filmmaker, producer and video artist, Steve McQueen (along with James Rogan) and broadcast them at prime time in July 2021 shortly after the massive transatlantic BLM campaigns in June. The paper argues that the filmic commemoration of the New Cross fire, the subsequent Black People’s Day of Action in March and the uprising in April serves a political purpose. Methodologically close to oral history, the films seek to integrate not only Black anger, but above all, Black agency into the British national narrative. Given the centrality of emotions in British political discourse based on affective division, the paper will examine the modes of generating sensibility to the Black British experience of accumulated pain and anger. How do the films create empathy across the racial and social divide? Firstly, on the level of structure and storytelling, they employ the generic conventions of a police procedural replacing the inconclusive investigations by a clear verdict based on circumstantial verbal and visual evidence. Secondly, on level of cinematography, they rely on the established means of documentaries, i.e. a combination of eyewitness accounts and original footage. Extreme close-ups of the speakers, repeated insertion of the fire victims’ names and photographs as well as recurrent emotionalized statements by representatives of the community help the audience to follow the logic of translating pain and anger into rebellious action. Finally, on the sound level, the driving rhythm of Reggae transforms the uprising into an emotionally compelling and fast-paced performance.

Bio
Jana Gohrisch is Professor of British and Postcolonial Studies at Hannover University, Germany. She teaches British literatures and cultures with a special interest in Asian and Black British, Caribbean, West and South African as well as Canadian and Irish writing. She has published two monographs, one on Jamaican-British novelist Joan Riley (1994) and one on middle-class emotion cultures in nineteenth-century Britain (2005). She co-edited several essay collections, the most recent one being Affective Polarisation – Social, Cultural, and Economic Divisions in the UK after Brexit and COVID-19 (2023, with Gesa Stedman). Her current project deals with C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian-British political activist and writer, concentrating on his pioneering study of the Black Jacobins and the Haitian Revolution published in 1938.

Disturbing the Comfortable in Popular Culture: Towards an Aesthetics of Confrontation

In a conversation about art and politics, British film director Ken Loach and French writer Édouard Louis discuss the function of literature and film in and for today’s society. Due to an omnipresent media technology, art can hardly serve any longer as a means of awareness-raising
and of popularising the unknown. Understanding art as an invitation to critical inquiry and a call to action, Loach and Louis address questions of empathy, solidarity and what they consider an aesthetics of confrontation: how can literature and film make ‘the people’ aware of deplorable social circumstances that they know about but tend to and prefer to ignore? As an educational approach, this corresponds to Megan Boler’s ‘pedagogy of discomfort’. What one chooses to see or not to see is shaped by emotions such as fear, anger, guilt, curiosity, joy, hope, optimism. This emotional selectivity results in what Boler identifies as ‘inscribed habits of (in)attention’. Educators and students are encouraged to learn to see things differently by going beyond their comfort zone.

This paper will elaborate on these and similar ideas concerning the political and educational potential of cultural artefacts. While I will briefly sketch how films like Sorry We Missed You and I Daniel Blake can be read along these lines, I intend to go further by applying the aesthetics of confrontation not only to the arthouse niche market of social realist cinema but to a more obviously entertaining, commercial, widely received genre: to crime narratives. It is my contention that crime narratives prove popular in current times of political instability, economic inequality and social polarization precisely because they both fulfil the audience’s desire for comfort and closure, and engage them in public debate about pressing sociopolitical issues.

Bio
Ellen Grünkemeier is Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She works on Anglophone literatures and cultures, focusing regionally on Great Britain, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and historically on the 19th and 20th/ 21st centuries. Her research interests include popular culture, working-class writing, economic criticism, postcolonial studies and medical humanities.

The Emotional Politics of Representing Social Class on the Contemporary British Stage

In this paper, I will explore the complex emotional politics involved in representing social class in contemporary British drama. After a noticeable absence of class as a category of enquiry in politics, sociology and cultural studies, there has been a conspicuous re-engagement with matters relating to social class across the disciplines in the 21^st century. As part of this ‘turn’ to class, the crucial role of emotions in shaping classifications, class identities as well as class relations has recently begun to be recognised, foregrounding the relational, embodied, affective and psychological dimensions of individual and collective class experience (see Aston; Beswick; Skeggs). In this context, the theatre has offered a vital laboratory for exploring class relations and for probing the nexus between emotions and class – not only within the plays themselves but also in the relationship between stage and audience. 

In my talk, I will draw on Kieran Hurley’s 2018 play Mouthpiece to examine how the theatre can contribute to interrogating class identities and relations. Mouthpiece is a metatheatrical duologue between a middle-class playwright who seeks to revive her career and an unemployed young man with a working-class background who serves as inspiration for her new play. While raising important questions about the ethics of theatrical representation – who speaks for and to whom, in what context and for what purpose? –, the play particularly zooms in on the affective dimension of class. Emotions – above all anger, shame and love – not only shape the relations between the characters but also serve as a means of rendering class on stage. As a self-reflexive play, Mouthpiece brings into view the role of the theatre as a cultural institution in cementing class hierarchies and interrogates the potential of the theatre to critically intervene in class politics. As I will show, this is achieved through the play’s use of emotions as a key strategy for representing class relations as well as for shaping the audience’s emotional engagement with the action on stage.

Bio
Anja Hartl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is currently working on a postdoctoral project in which she explores shame in the Victorian novel. She has published on contemporary British theatre, the Victorian novel, Shakespeare, adaptation, and border studies, and co-edits the Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Agitations series.

Dorian Gray’s Cultural Condemnation: The Affective and Socio-Political Functions of Oscar Wilde’s Literary Persecution

This paper explores the affective, and ultimately, socio-political functions of the literary scandal surrounding the publication of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It employs close reading analysis of the novel itself, and critical discourse analysis of contemporaneous newspaper articles spanning 1890 to 1900, particularly drawing from the resources of the British Library’s Newspaper Archive. I explore the affective responses and their socio-political functions directed at Oscar Wilde’s writing and public persona from the moment of the publication of Dorian Gray until the author’s death. I specifically focus on the rhetorical techniques employed to ‘cancel’ Wilde as an artist and maintain the status quo, ultimately resulting in the writer’s incarceration. I contrast these to Wilde’s novel as well as analyse his defence strategies in the public. I contend that the relentless personal attacks launched by publications like the St. James’s Gazette and the Scott’s Observer against Wilde, and his subsequent counterattacks, mark the genesis of a struggle for dominance over polarizing values and beliefs in the Victorian era. This struggle for dominance, which culminates in the vilification of Wilde, signifies an early iteration of culture wars, where divergent moral codes and aesthetic preferences famously and continuously collided. Through the analysis of Wilde’s own writing, media coverage surrounding the publication of Dorian Gray, and the subsequent portrayal of his life and demise, I illustrate how this scandal enforced a discourse that not only punished but ultimately silenced the artist, relegating him until his death to a state of social and cultural oblivion. The paper concludes by highlighting Oscar Wilde’s cultural legacy, as the affective responses in public discourse were not just aimed toward stabilizing the status quo, but ultimately resulted in cultural, social, and political change through the negotiation of norms and values.

Bio
Deborah de Muijnck is a postdoctoral researcher at the GCSC, JLU Giessen, holding a PhD in ‘English Literature’. Her first monograph explores how British military personnel reconstruct their identities after war experience through autobiographical writing. Other publications such as Pandemic Storytelling (Brill, forthcoming) address the reciprocal impact of pandemics and narrativity, the influence of non-normative life experiences on narration (Poetics of Disturbances, Brill, forthcoming), and the relationship between narrative, culture, and identity (Routledge Companion, forthcoming). Her second monograph discusses literary scandals as forms of cultural transgression from the 18th – 21st century. In 2023, she was an affiliate at the Institute for World Literature, Harvard University.

A Woman’s (Affective) Work is Never Done”: See Red Women’s Workshop’s Archive of Contrasting Feelings

Focussing on See Red Women’s Workshop, a feminist printmaker cooperative established in 1974 as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United Kingdom, this paper explores feminist archives as repositories of contrasting affects. The mobilising potential of “‘bad,’ unsettling affects (anger, rage, despair, shame)” (Zarzycka & Olivieri 528) for political activism has widely been acknowledged. Drawing on the foundational work of Ahmed, Cvetkovich, Pedwell and Whitehead in feminist and queer affect studies, the paper investigates SRRW’s artistic translations of ‘seeing red’, i.e. an angry outburst, into the visual realm through striking imagery and powerful slogans as “acts of translation that are moving” (Ahmed 174). At the same time, it complements dominant readings of the cooperative’s activism as a radical ventriloquising of shared anger by foregrounding its “affective practices” (Wetherell et al. 5) whose mobilising potential is connected to intersectional solidarity (for example, for the “Armagh women” in Northern Ireland), community-building, and skill-sharing, which are traceable through archival material such as meeting minutes and correspondence. These seemingly less radical and visible, yet fundamental and sustainable practices, I propose, are indicative of “networked feminism” in a more literal sense than its current use in the context of digital media (Clark-Parsons). Investigating the contrasting affects contained in feminist archives and considering individual collectives within their web of interconnections is, I argue, a crucial component in painting a more accurate picture of the cultural and affective history of 1970s feminism in the United Kingdom.
 

Bio
Tamara Radak is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of Anglophone cultures and literatures at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. Her publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, James Joyce Quarterly, Open Research Europe.She has co-edited the Special Issue Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance (TRI 48.1, with Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Heidi Lucja Liedke) and the collection Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with Paul Fagan and John Greaney, Bloomsbury 2021). Her current research project bears the working title Feminist Media Practices in Ireland and the United Kingdom, 1970–2020: Activism, Affects, Archives.

The Role of Cultural Studies in Times of Affective Polarisation: A Conversation

In our self-reflexive contribution, we want to think about the role of British cultural scholars within thecurrent conjuncture which is marked by affective polarization. Traditionally, British cultural scholars have been public, left-leaning intellectuals. As such, they/we currently belong to what is now labelled/derided as the ‘woke’ camp. This has consequences for the position from which we do and formulate our research. In our contribution, we wish to reflect on a number of questions that this situation raises, such as: Is there a danger that by being part of a discursive formation around which there is a strong affective force field, we as practitioners are drawn into an emotional maelstrom which impacts our capacity of doing research that is on the one hand grounded in political values (such as justice, equality etc.) while at the same time adhering to rigorous scholarly values (impartiality, rationality)? How do we insulate our research and ourselves from the energy that the affective polarization generates and that has the potential to cloud our judgment? Should we try to step out of the emotional current that enwraps us and how could this look like in practice? Does the affective polarization make it difficult for people from one camp to acknowledge that people from the ‘other’ camp might have valid points? If so, does this also affect British cultural studies and might a change of strategy be in place? (How) Can we help towards building a compromise with those who deride us as ‘woke’, rather than thinking of ever-new arguments disproving their points? What/where are spaces where the ‘moderates’ from both camps can meet and learn from each other? What can British cultural studies contribute to such politics of mediation? What would it have to let go off in the process?

As the preceding paragraph makes clear, at that stage, we have a number of questions that preoccupy us – both intellectually and affectively – in our roles as academics, intellectuals, educators, citizens and civil servants of a democratic state, and, obviously, British cultural scholars. We do not have ready- made answers, but we believe that it is productive to raise and discuss such issues of self-positionality within the forum that the BritCult annual conference provides. As a consequence, rather than preparing a standard academic paper, we propose to present a selection from a written conversation inspired by the afore-mentioned questions that we will engage in over the course of the next months. We would hope that our questions and ideas provide a fertile inspiration for further exchanges with our fellow colleagues about the role of British cultural studies (in Germany, Austria, and potentially beyond) in times of affective polarization.

Bio
Joanna Rostek is junior professor of Anglophone Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies at the University of Giessen and Interim Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig. Gerold Sedlmayr is Chair of English Literature and Culture at the University of Dortmund.

Shame and the Female Body in Irish Nation-Building

Ireland only became (partly) independent after the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921), which resulted in the creation of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State (1922), the latter called “embryonic State” (151) by Wall, which not only emphasises the state’s fledgling independence, but also reflects the urge for redefinition, self-determination and emancipation from the former oppressor. Decolonisation, after all, not only entails the retention of the visible, material realm, i.e. geographic territory, but also the reclaiming of an affectively charged territory, central to which is the creation of a national canon of values. Paramount for this longing for self-definition in Ireland’s case was the unshackling from the stereotypes imposed on them by their former coloniser. This ‘shedding of old skin’ went hand in hand with a strong desire for differentiation from Britain. Compared to the commonly held view of the former coloniser as being pagan and materialistic, Ireland presented itself as its opposite, namely as virtuous, folkloristic and Catholic – in short: as morally superior (Valiulis 100; Inglis 23).

Central to this image was the cultivation of a certain female ideal, a paragon with stereotypical Victorian middle-class characteristics such as purity and chastity (Fischer 822). Most crucially operative in this construction of Irish femininity, I will argue, was the affect of shame: Due to the strong societal idealisation of women(’s bodies), the fear of female ‘impurity’ rose correspondingly. The concomitant “physical removal of transgressing women” was reflected in their confinement to various institutions in Ireland, the most (in-)famous ones being Mother and Baby Homes as well as the Magdalene Laundries (42).

In my talk I would like to show how a) Britain utilised the workings of shame in their oppression of Ireland and b) how Ireland tried to free itself from this externally caused shame by actively turning this affect into a central parameter regarding their construction of femininity and, by extension, nationhood.

Bio
Carolin Steinke works as a research assistant at the Chair of English Literature at the University of Augsburg. Her PhD projectPrecarious Borders: Aesthetics of Shame in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction explores how women’s bodies were and are portrayed in Irish literature and moreover, how their long-held iconic status was undermined in favour of a more complex and genuine understanding of women’s embodied reality. The project is funded by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

The Shifting Use of Emotional Rhetoric by Britain’s Two Major Parties in the 2024 General Election Campaign

From about 2022 onwards, British political rhetoric has been showing significant shifts in the strategic evocation of emotions compared with the discourses relating to Brexit and also the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on an understanding of ‘sentimentality’ as “a relational code of communication”,1 our paper analyses the new ways in which sentimental scripts of the nation are currently being instrumentalised. From the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum and during the pandemic, especially Conservative rhetoric was dominated by a master narrative of nostalgia contrasting the contemporary state of the nation with images of Britain’s ‘glorious’ past as well as conjuring up fear of an alien ‘Other’ (more or less explicitly) located in Europe. At the same time, hope for the future was evoked by the construct of ‘taking back control’ and the promise of agency it conveyed.

However, as the cost of living crisis hit Britain in 2022, this master narrative began to lose its effectiveness and appeal with voters. At the moment, one can thus detect a shift away from nostalgia and discontent in current Conservative rhetoric, but it still draws heavily on emotions like anger and (national) pride, so that the effects of the more open, cooperative concept of Britain propagated now are often undercut at the same time. Labour, on the other hand, begins to appropriate some of the political opponent’s characteristic nostalgic strategies and integrates them in their own ‘sentimental’ bid to form the next government, based on negotiations between discontent, insecurity, and hope. In this context, future-oriented constructions of diverse, empowered (‘imagined’) communities become a key method of communicating a reassuring sense of agency and belonging. In studying and comparing the two parties’ current use of emotions in these respects, our paper will also keep track of potential developments as the 2024 General Election starts taking shape.

Bio
Dennis Henneböhl is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He received his PhD from Paderborn University for his dissertation published by Brill | Fink under the title ‘Taking Back Control’ of the Nation and Its History? Contemporary Fiction’s Engagement with Nostalgia in Brexit Britain. In his postdoc project, he investigates representations of the scientist as a social figure in Victorian literature and culture. Among his other key research areas are the BrexLit genre, historical fiction, political rhetoric, Britain’s and Ireland’s relationship with Europe, as well as contemporary (Northern) Irish literature and culture.

Merle Tönnies is professor of English literature and British Cultural Studies at Paderborn University, holding degrees from Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses especially on British theatre and drama from the 19th to the 21st century, interrelations between genre expectations and gender constructions as well as British political rhetoric and its cultural contexts. Key publications include Twenty-First Century Anxieties (ed. with E. Voigts, 2022), Performing the Future (ed. with A. Pankratz, 2021) and (En)Gendering a Popular Theatrical Genre (2014), and she is also the Reviews Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English.

“For the Trampled Multitude”: Collective Affects in P.B. Shelley’s Political Poetry

Long before the current ‘age of emotion’, affects have been part of the effort for political change, including in their literary invocations in the political poetry of the Romantic period. In his Defence of Poetry, P.B. Shelley defines poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the World” (1977b: 508), arguing for the power of poetry to influence political developments and effect social change. In particular, Shelley was preoccupied with the power of poetry to speak of, and to, a collective affective community, promoting “an identification of ourselves with […] thought, action, or person, not our own” (1977b: 487). The poet then strives for identification with (and perhaps empathy for) the other that allows him to represent in verse common human emotions – and, in the face of political oppression, to lament the unjust condition of his fellow citizens and solicit solidarity with ‘persons not our own’. This tendency can be found in one of Shelley’s most openly political poems, The Mask of Anarchy. Here, in response to the 1819 Peterloo massacre, the poet calls for united action to contrast the ruling class: the “trampled multitude” (1977a: l. 222) that share in the “terror” of Anarchy’s law (1977a: l. 54–55) also constitute the “unvanquishable number” (1977a: ll. 152, 369) of resistance. The poem explores the emotions of the gathered crowd at Peterloo to elicit in the public the recognition of their common condition of subjugation and to rouse them to action against it. The “sense awakening and yet tender” (1977a: l. 136) that reveals to the crowd their own oppression is nothing but their collective affectivity, “resembl[ing] the bod[ies] from which [it has] emanated” (Goldstein 2011: 83) in a mist that entails the people whose spilled blood it is composed. Here, drawing on materialist traditions, the poem envisions the people of England as if melting together in the particles of the bloodshed, allowing for a gruesome depiction that arouses an affective reaction in the reader. I thus argue that the poem seeks to inspire political action through the invocation of collective affects, as, for its author, it would be a daring mistake “amid the varied multitude / To live alone, an isolated thing” (Shelley 1989: ll. 1–2).

Bio
Irene Valenti earned an M.A. in English and American Studies from the University of Augsburg with a thesis on sublime affects in the poetry of Shelley and Keats. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Augsburg, where she also works as tutor and assistant editor for the
academic journal Anglia. Her dissertation project entitled Daemonic Matter: The Material Sublime in Romantic Poetry seeks to expand theories of the sublime from a new materialist perspective and to apply her findings to poems of the Daemonic from the Romantic period.

The British ‘Love’ of Liberty, 1660-1800

It is a cliché of the British self-image – and was already in the early modern era – that they are a liberty-loving people. An immense engine of cultural production, the commitment to the hard-won freedoms gained in the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s generated books, pamphlets, plays, art, and music across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the ‘liberty’ that the British purported to champion, far less has been said on the ‘love’ they held for this idea, that is, on the emotional and affective bonds that undergirded this political culture. These bonds were self-evidently powerful: for example, the unrelenting focus on the contrast with unfree countries, above all France, produced a blindness to Britain’s own violation of others’ freedoms best encapsulated in the line from Rule, Britannia! (1740), “Britons never will be slaves!” But the ubiquity of liberty and freedom in early modern British culture, often expressed in platitudinous and hackneyed language, produced such noise that it is difficult to detect the genuine emotional bonds that existed between Britons and this cornerstone of their self-perception.

This paper seeks to cut through this interference by concentrating on texts that were only indirectly intended for public consumption yet which emphasise emotional ties to freedom and liberty. These are the loyal addresses sent by British towns to the Crown on the outbreak of wars in the period under investigation. Linda Colley has used these sources profitably to chart the geography of loyalty in the era when British identity was being forged. I will use these texts in a diachronic approach that maps changes in the expressions of ‘love’ and ‘affection’ for liberty and the British constitution. Reading these texts alongside recent work on emotional history (especially regarding emotional communities) and Martha Nussbaum’s work on political emotions, I will show how emotional ties to liberty fluctuated in accordance with the severity of the threats faced by the British Crown and state.

Bio
Andrew Wells is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit in the Historisches Seminar of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel. His research focuses on the intersection of cultural and intellectual history in the early modern era and he is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the histories of animals, freedom, and race. His first book, Generating Difference: Race and the Reproductive Body in the British Empire, 1660-1840 is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press and he is currently writing a Habilitation thesis on urban cultures of freedom in the British Atlantic world. His work on more recent cultural history includes the collection, co-edited with Katrin Berndt (MLU Halle), entitled The “Second World” in Contemporary British Writing (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024).

Of #sadgirls, #softgirls, and #unhingedwomen: Selling gendered negative affect on the international literary marketplace

My paper delves into the financial viability of contemporary literature featuring female protagonists marked by intense negative emotional states like boredom, disgust, shame, existential dread, and numbness. This trend parallels a broader phenomenon across diverse media platforms, notably social media, where depictions of melancholic, anxious, and disaffected femininity dominate, often under popular hashtags such as #sadgirl, #softgirl, #hyperfeminine, and #unhingedwoman. These hashtags also serve as conduits for promoting literary works within communities like BookTok and Bookstagram. Drawing upon Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), I explore the interrelation between affects and contemporary capitalism, particularly the trend of commodifying negative emotions for profit. Ngai’s framework reveals how capitalist structures shape ambivalent affective experiences, reflecting capitalism’s inherent contradictions. This ambivalence is evident in the pursuit of success alongside pervasive feelings of anxiety, as evidenced in recent literature. Berlant’s framework further elucidates attachment to unattainable fantasies. Synthesizing Ngai and Berlant’s perspectives offers insight into emotional dynamics in capitalist society, its literature, and the commercialization of negative affect. My central argument suggests that publishing houses strategically exploit the deliberate portrayal of negative emotions in a gendered manner targeted at predominantly female readers. This marketing encompasses not only the thematic content of narratives but also visual elements, such as cover designs featuring crying or bored women, and promotional blurbs. Additionally, it includes linking publications to relevant hashtags on BookTok/Bookstagram. I demonstrate the global prevalence of this phenomenon, providing mostly visual examples from book covers since 2015, and examining Irish fiction more closely as an example. Further, I will explore the feminist implications of the #sadgirl phenomenon, arguing that it offers an avenue for passive dissent and resistance against prevailing ‘feeling norms’ imposed on women. These norms dictate that women must consistently display care, strength, and resilience to embody feminist ideals. My objective is to illuminate the commercial exploitation of female emotional states and contribute to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of literature, marketing, emotion, and gender.

Bio
Dilâra Yilmaz is a PhD researcher and assistant lecturer of Irish and British Literature and Culture at Kiel University. She holds a M.Ed. in German, English and History, and a M.A. in English and American Literatures, Cultures, and Media. Her research interests include Irish studies, creative economies, literary sociology, gender studies, and negative affect. She is working on her PhD titled “Conditions of Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction Writing” for which she conducts field research in Cork, Dublin and Belfast, interviewing writers, publishers, and other agents of the Irish literary industry. She has presented results from her interview corpus CrEIC (Creative Economy Ireland Corpus) at international conferences in Belgium and Switzerland.

Transmedial Storytelling: Ch.N. Adichie and Bernardine Evaristo

This dissertation project examines the construction of authorship in the digital realm, exploring Chimamanda N. Adichie and Bernardine Evaristo. In particular, my investigations focus on the ways in which Adichie and Evaristo develop and disseminate sociopolitical discourses across different media, thereby establishing their authorial projects. In the context of these authors, I understand authorship as a construct extending across literary works, projects and different forms of presence on (digital) media. This involves reflections on (inter/trans)-mediality and narrative voice, situated between fiction, autobiography and sociopolitical engagement. The question of what techniques these authors employ in constructing and developing these discourses as well as their implications for their respective versions of authorship are addressed. Eventually, the body – different versions of body, physical, community and authorial – is of particular relevance for this project, as the body as a medium plays an important role both in constructing and developing these transmedial discourses and their authorship in general.

This paper will concentrate on a particular aspect in the development of transmedial discourses, namely the blurring of the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and activism. To illustrate this, I will analyse how Bernardine Evaristo challenges the limitations of fiction, by constructing a specific discourse – women of colour in cultural establishments in the west – by almost seamlessly combining her personal narratives, her novel Girl, Woman, Other, as well as sociopolitical discussions in a larger, transnational context in the podcast Gurls Talk and in “Bernardine Evaristo on womanhood: ‘I refuse to be invisible’.”, an article in Net-A-Porter Online.

Bio
Sarah Back is a doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and works as the PhD coordinator of a doctoral college called “Borders, Border Shifts and Border Crossings in Language, Literature, Media” at LFU. Sarah’s research focuses on the intersections of authorship and feminist activism of colour in the digital realm. She is particularly interested in the physical manifestations of authorial discourses created and/or developed across different media and their impact on questions of contemporary authorship.

The New Soldier Poets: The Role of Cultural Studies in a Literary Studies Project

Roughly speaking, my dissertation is concerned with poetry written by British soldiers, currently serving or recently retired, about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. A book about contemporary soldier poetry (in fact, any book about war poetry) raises certain preliminary critical questions. In searching for a satisfactory critical approach, one might be tempted to examine these poems, first of all, in relation to the actual historical experiences which they in varying degrees evaluatively re-create. And yet, the danger of this approach is that of reducing the poems simply to documents memorialising history, just as the danger of a more purely literary ‘the-text-itself’ or literary historical approach is of neglecting the poems’ relationship to the context(s) from which they arise. At the Postgraduate Forum, I want to discuss how the methods of cultural studies can/have enhance/d or balance/d the approach of my project. Specifically, my presentation will focus on the role that ‘the past’ has to play in the soldiers’ texts, in keeping with the topic of the BritCult Weiterbildungsseminar held in Bielefeld earlier this year. For instance, what place do things like patriotism, nationalism, or heroism still hold in the poets’ imagination?How do certain cultural,philosophical, or ideological values which may perhaps no longer be ours exactly interact and/or collide with the shifting dynamics of the present?

Bio
Felix Behler is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the University of Paderborn, Germany. His research concentrates on different aspects of British literatures and cultures: for his dissertation project he investigates the representation of war in modern and contemporary British literature and culture, focussing primarily on The New Soldier Poets. Having majored in English and History, he is further interested in all areas of Anglophone culture through the ages, as well as early modern European-, transatlantic-, and art history. He has given presentations, amongst other things, on the question of representability in trauma literature, cosmopolitan identities, and the state of military heroism in the ‘post heroic age’

Screening the Working-Class: Neoliberal Ideology in British Popular Cinema,
1990s-2020s

My research project will investigate the impact of neoliberal ideology on the representation of working-class identity in British popular cinema from the late 1990s to the present day. It will analyse three British canonical films, namely Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996), The Full Monty (Cattaneo, 1997), and Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000), and their recent reworkings in different media (film, musical theatre, and TV series) to trace key developments in the production and reception of popular working-class narratives from the 1990s to 2020s. A major objective of my project is to question Mark Fisher’s claim that the adaption of popular narratives implies a ‘cancellation of the future’ (2014). Instead, my project argues for a more productive reading of the adaption, sequelisation and serialisation of working-class cinema by exploring the subversive potential of revisiting and revising popular narratives for changing cultural contexts and audiences. For this, it will situate itself at the intersection between the study of neoliberalism and adaption theory and conduct a comparative analysis of the case studies, investigate their period of production, and examine their reception. My research aims to illuminate how visual media chronicle contemporary culture through varying intertextual practices. As such, this project will be the first detailed study focussing on altering forms of narrating class in British visual culture in light of a growing neoliberalisation of society. It will thus advance knowledge on the reinvention of working-class identity on screen and stage.

Bio
Naemi Victoria Dehde holds a bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies from the University of Hamburg. In 2023, she graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a master’s degree in film theory, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service. Naemi’s research interests are British working-class cinema, gender representation in visual media, and the study of neoliberalism in popular cinema. This winter semester, Naemi will join the University of Konstanz to pursue her PhD. Her research project will investigate the impact of neoliberal ideology on the representation of working-class identity in British popular cinema from the late 1990s to the present day.

Compromised Communities: Spatial Practice in Conservative Britain in the 1980s and 2010s

In my PhD thesis, I examine what I broadly categorise as British anti-establishment texts from the 1980s and 2010s, representing decades of uninterrupted Conservative government. I analyse how these texts construct representations and imaginaries of countercultural, community, and non-Cartesian space. The project includes work by Black British, working class, radical Left, and queer authors and aims to highlight how subjectivities and communities opposed to Conservative politics have been
developing autonomous and convergent strategies of resistance through space in the past 40 years. I work with the hypothesis that the social upheaval caused by Thatcherism from 1979 onwards put stress on marginalised spaces and communities, necessitating new ways of organising the spatial and temporal relations that make
communities cohere.

I take as a point of departure the 2019 collection Surge by the queer Black British writer Jay Bernard, which creates a temporal suspension between 1981 and 2017, constructing a textual space in which institutional racism is neither addressed nor resolved, belying all narratives of progress. This is a testament to the legacy of neoliberal Thatcherism and an attempt to still make spaces where agency and political action is possible.

I draw on Derrida’s concept of hauntology and Mark Fisher’s development of the term in the context of his capitalist realism. Additionally, I draw on work produced as part of the spatial turn and the terminological apparatus of new formalism. My interest in how affordances are shaped and in turn shape the bodies moving through a space also gives a prominent position to Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology.

Bio
Konstantin Helm (pronouns: they/them) is a research associate and PhD student at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. They studied English and information science at HU Berlin, the University of Manchester and Università Ca’Foscari in Venice and hold an MA in English Literatures from HU.
Konstantin is part of the research project “Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts” (QueerIT). As part of this project, they are researching feminist receptions of queer theory in Germany as well as digital queer spaces. They have taught courses on the history of literary theory, the interactions of literature and the body, the cultural history of addiction, and cultural anxieties in Victorian literature. Konstantin has organised workshops and colloquiums on queer theory and new perspectives on confession, and presented their work at various conferences and workshops.

Ágnes-Heller-Haus

Innrain 52a
6020 Innsbruck

How to get to Ágnes-Heller-Haus

• Starting Point: Innsbruck Train Station
  • Time: approx. 10-12 minutes
  • Bus 404 from train station (gate D) to “Innsbruck Chirurgie” (stop is next to conference venu)
  • Bus R or F (direction “Rehgasse” or “Flughafen”) to “Klinik/Universität” (4-minute walk to Agnes-Heller-Haus. Head west on Anichstraße toward Innrain, turn left onto Innrain, the venue will be on your right).
• Starting Point: Innsbruck Airport
  • Time: approx. 15 minutes
  • Bus F (direction “Rum Bahnhof”) to “Klinik/Universität” (4-minute walk to Agnes-Heller-Haus. Head west on Anichstraße toward Innrain, turn left onto Innrain, the venue will be on your right).
• Starting Point: Innsbruck Old Town (City Centre)
  • Time: approx. 5-7 minutes
  • Bus C & M (direction Sieglanger & Mentlberg) from “Innsbruck Maria-Theresien-Straße”; stop: “Innsbruck Chirurgie” (stop is next to conference venue).
• Busses depart approx. every 10 minutes. For more information, check IVB’s route-planner.

La Trattoria

Sparkassenplatz 5
6020 Innsbruck
Website

How to get to La Trattoria

• From bus/tram stop “Anichstraße/Rathausgallerien”: Approx. 2-minute walk; head on Anichstraße toward Maria-Theresienstraße; turn left onto Maria-Theresienstraße; turn right onto Sparkassenplatz.
• From bus/tram stop “Innsbruck Museumstraße”: Approx. 3-minute walk; head on Museumstraße toward Erlerstraße; turn right onto Erlerstraße; turn right onto Sparkassenplatz.
• Busses depart approx. every 10 minutes. For more information, check IVB’s route-planner.

Bergisel Panorama & Bergisel Christmas-Market

North of Innsbruck stands Bergisel, a mountain which is home to numerous stories, past and present. We will start the afternoon with a guided tour of the Bergisl Panorama, which showcases and recontextualizes, one of the world’s largest ‘Rundgemälde’, depicting a highly affective landscape. Then we will visit the adjacent Bergisel ski-jump. This elegant and iconic building was designed by British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid and is one of Tyrol’s architectural landmarks. At an elevation of 250 meters above Innsbruck, the ski-jump offers a splendid view of the alpine scenery surrounding it. We will conclude our outing at the Kaiserweihnacht Bergisel, a cosy Christmas-Market overlooking the lit-up city of Innsbruck below.

The ticket for both, Bergisel Panorama and the Ski-jump, is 15 €. The different sights are all in close proximity to the city and in walking distance to each other.