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This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.
Affect: belonging Drawing on everything from artworks and a cartoon to police documents and a personal anecdote, I consider three temporally discontinuous events in the past to engender an ethical future across racial, ethnic and national lines. At stake in this chapter is the question of how certain subjects are considered as ‘belonging’ and others as not; and the role of art and writing in the reconstitution of notions of ‘home’ (not to mention art histories). I examine the fatal misrecognition of South Asians as ‘terrorists’ shortly after 9/11 in the United
those who threaten. Fear is an effect of this process, rather than its origin.’ 11 Emotions, according to Ahmed, are psychological states but they are also practices that ‘circulate between bodies’. 12 Through the circulation of affects, Ahmed argued, social objects are constituted. No object is inherently worthy of someone’s compassion, and no object is innately conducive to fear. Rather, a social object has to be made that way. According to her, affects are not private properties of individuals but ‘play a crucial role in the “surfacing” of individual and
63 Affective image operations Jens Eder1 Images enter the interactional networks of political conflict in various ways. Often, they motivate political action by evoking emotions and affects. This is evident, for instance, in visual propaganda, images of terror, donation campaigns or activist videos like Kony2012. Aiming to mobilise a movement against a brutal warlord, the documentary made calculated use of cinematic techniques to maximise viewers’ emotional responses. It went viral on social media platforms and was soon watched more than 100 million times. The
Introduction Affect and joy are key themes that run through my data in a number of ways. Firstly, the research methods and the data communicate through affect. The children’s artwork, both individual and collaborative, touches the feelings of its viewers and expresses the feelings of those who have made it. The artworks themselves are materialisations of feeling
1 Beckett's television plays confound the spectator, not least because of their representational ambiguity, their perplexing affective qualities and the singularity of their poetics. Of the five plays Beckett wrote specifically for television, Ghost Trio , his second teleplay, written in 1975, is considered by most critics to be his finest work for the medium. Filmed by the BBC in October 1976, and by Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) the following year, it opens with V, the female voice, describing the set as ‘grey’ in its
4 Lepage’s affective economy In the previous chapter I explored the formal techniques that Lepage uses to construct his stage narratives, arguing that his montages innovate the formal languages of film, communicating to audiences on familiar terms made strange again via remediation. I established spatial montage as one of the key building blocks of his stage storytelling, and argued that while his techniques are based in metaphor, they frequently increase in complexity and come to involve metonymy. In this chapter I look more closely at the effects of these
Introduction In this chapter, I analyse the experiences of gender non-binary individuals using the web of affects and obligations experienced within the family. I seek to show how the ordinariness of family intimacy is transformed when it encounters transgender non-binary lives. Building on research on the everyday lives of gender and/or sexual
; Lahti and Kolehmainen, 2020 ). Thinking of gender as a flexible assemblage illuminates the multiple affective intimacies that emerge when bodies meet in these complex configurations. Intimacy is not only seen as a feature of human relations, but rather affective intimacies are emergent qualities of the web of relations and interactions of many bodies and forces in the gender
reflection, though, it felt like an apposite choice of location. The Linen Hall Library is an important national institution. Former librarian and founding member of the United Irishmen, Thomas Russell, was arrested in the building in 1796 and later executed. 1 It holds a remarkable selection of documents, pamphlets and ephemeral material about the Troubles – the Northern Ireland Political Collection. The library feels historic, in Lauren Berlant's sense, affectively and materially; the steps from the street are worn and