What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us about Affect, Mediation, and Global Nationalism?

In this article, I show how Berlant offers important resources for thinking about the relationship between affect, mediation and global nationalism, and for considering how to build alternative forms of belonging. These resources include: how they address people’s sense of belonging to an affective space, and how they map the affective states that form part of living in the present under late capitalism. In these ways, Berlant offers material for helping us understand why nationalist ways of understanding belonging should appear so persistent, and continue to provide convincing narratives of attachment. The article goes on to outline methodological approaches pursued by Berlant, which I suggest others interested in engaging the mediation of national affects can adopt. This includes paying attention to moments that do not appear to form significant “national events”. Taken together, I demonstrate how these different elements can teach us a substantial amount about the rise of global nationalism

Feeling “Brexit”: Nationalism and the Affective Politics of Movement

This article discusses what ‘Brexit’ felt like in the year following the UK vote–held on 23 June 2016–to leave the European Union through a performance called ‘The Populars’ created and performed in 2017 by Volcano Theatre, in Swansea (Abertawe). The article addresses the specific contributions that engaging affect does in the context of ‘Brexit’: as an invitation to address heightened political feelings and also, as an alternative approach to the politics of knowledge to that enabled by a focus on voter interests or identities. Overall, the article develops ways of thinking and acting politically that defy the closures of nationalist populism

The affective atmospheres of nationalism

What would it mean to understand nationalism as an atmosphere? This article makes a theoretical contribution to cultural geographical works on ‘affective atmospheres’ as well as to critical approaches to the study of nationalism by addressing this question. It examines how nationalism operates affectively and atmospherically through a discussion of the event of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the ‘happy atmospheres’ of being together that circulated in the course of those Games. The key claim of the article is that addressing the nation’s affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical for understanding how nationalism endures and, furthermore, how it appears especially difficult to critique. As such, the article points to different ways in which thinking about nationalism as an ‘affective atmosphere’ builds upon the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ but also takes it further by inviting an attentiveness to the different tonalities and intensities of nationality and shifting the focus from a subject identity or bounded community to the question of how affective forces congeal around particular objects and bodies and echo as part of an assemblage. Finally, this article makes a contribution to debates around the relationship between affect, atmosphere and politics by asking how national affective atmospheres might be resisted

The spaces and politics of affective nationalism

Over the last decade affect has emerged as one of the most prominent concepts within human geography. More recently, scholars engaging with the nation have also have also drawn on insights from studies of affect to interrogate the ways in which relations between people and materially heterogeneous assemblages underpin national forms of identification, organisation and expression. This symposium aims to interrogate affective nationalism both as an analytical lens and a topic of investigation. More specifically it looks into the spaces and the politics of affective nationalism as a way to explore how the nation continues to operate as a salient register in people’s everyday lives.</p

Traed ar y Ddaear

Ar 9 Hydref 2022, bu farw Bruno Latour, un o feddylwyr mwyaf gwreiddiol yr argyfwng newid hinsawdd. Roedd Latour yn adnabyddus am ei allu i bontio’r gwyddorau ffisegol a chymdeithasol. Gallai ysgrifennu â hiwmor hefyd, fel y gwelir yn ei gyfrol fer, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018; Où atterrir: comment s’orienter en politique, 2017), a luniwyd ar gyfer cynulleidfa eang yn hytrach nag un arbenigol. Yn y gyfrol hon, ysgogir ni i ystyried y cysylltiadau rhwng y tri argyfwng mawr sy’n pwyso arnom heddiw: y cynnydd mewn gwleidyddiaeth genedlaetholgar eithafol, newid hinsawdd, ac anghyfartaledd byd-eang