Description
What is at stake when we feel worn down or exhausted by outrage? How might exhaustion potentially lead us to consider other starting points, characters, and scenes in the study of global politics? This paper addresses the politics of heightening nationalism through everyday examples––from ‘digital structures of feeling’ (Kuntsman, 2012) in response to terrorist attacks to the ‘politics of pity’ in response to refugee crises (Squire, 2014)¬¬. Focusing on questions of affect and knowledge, from the politics of fear to anxiety, the paper asks: how do we identify different modes, registers, and tones for thinking and acting politically? Drawing on a case study from the field of performance––specifically, the work of Jo Fong and Sonia Hughes (‘Neither Here Nor There, 2019)––I discuss alternative imaginaries of being together, which re-work the ‘I’ and ‘We’ through a focus on movement, gestures and the politics of listening. I examine how this leads us to another understanding of political change, in a way that refuses both narratives of redemption and the framework of ‘emergency politics’ (Honig, 2011). Overall, the paper outlines fresh ways of addressing the question of nationalism’s persistence, through a discussion of affect, performance and the politics of listening.
