States of upheaval

Many of the 21st century’s most influential critics of affect and emotion have emphasised the persuasive socio-cultural and political power of insecurity and unrest, from Peter Stearns’ American Fear (2006) and Brian Massumi’s Ontopower (2015), to Ute Frevert’s The Politics of Humiliation (2020). Of course, as Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (2005) has pointed out, for many people this particular affective landscape long pre-dates 2001; for others it has existed at least since colonisation, and for others still, it is embraced as a mode of existence. How useful, then, is the concept of ‘upheaval’ in contemporary studies of emotion and affect?

This special issue has its origins in a symposium on the topic of upheaval in November 2020 hosted by the Affect, Emotion & Society research cluster in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at La Trobe University. Over the course of two days, presenters offered perspectives from cultural studies and the creative arts on states of upheaval. The diversity of presentations is reflected in this special issue, which offers a trans-disciplinary perspective on a range of manifestations of and responses to ‘upheaval’ – including social, cultural, political, technological, personal and emotional upheavals and their intersections – in recent history. Given the vibrancy of presentations and the liveliness of conversation at the symposium, we believe the term ‘upheaval’ might still be used to speak to our times in meaningful and significant ways. The essays in this thematic issue reflect on late 20th- and 21st-century figurations of ‘upheaval’ to measure the affective and emotional dimensions of some of the most complex challenges of our times. In exploring the discursive potency of the term ‘upheaval’ itself they attend collectively to an ‘optics’ of upheaval – that is, to the ways in which upheaval’s forms are rendered visible or invisible in a variety of contexts.

Martha Nussbaum’s best-selling Upheavals of Thought (2001: 1) opens with the declaration that ‘Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives.’ As shaping forces in this landscape, emotions ‘mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal’ (Nussbaum, 2001: 1). Although Nussbaum makes little reference to pre-modern history, for historians of the emotions Nussbaum’s formulation may bring to mind the etymology of the word ‘emotion’ in pre-modern Europe: in late medieval France, experiences of individual emotion were closely linked to social and/or political unrest, often serving as a catalyst for physical violence, including violence associated with conflict and war (Downes et al., 2015: 1; Maddern, 2013: 121).

While ‘upheaval’ lends itself easily to political unrest, it also suggests non-human or more-than-human forces, forces that are beyond our control and, importantly, invoke a sudden disruption to a previous state of perceived normality. The word ‘upheaval’ has origins in geology where, according to the OED, it denotes ‘the action of raising, or fact of being raised, above the original level’, often by volcanic activity. Upheaval suggests a sudden eruption of forces that have been building for a long time but have remained mostly invisible, an accumulation of tension or discontent bursting on the scene with considerable force, even violence, that causes a shift in the established dynamics. While states of upheaval may be perceived as chaotic, disordered and overwhelming, and may invoke strong feelings of fear, suffering, or anger, the loss of an old order may also harbour a liberating or creative potential; such loss may invoke new beginnings and bring opportunities for redress and change.

As the social and cultural history of emotions makes clear, the long-held association of emotion with upheaval, crisis and unrest tends to understand emotions and affects alike as deviations from a norm. This characterisation of emotion as inherently unstable or insecure, and upheaval as inherently emotional, warrants investigation in relation to the recent past. In this thematic issue we consider the uses of ‘upheaval’ in framing conceptions of affect and emotion in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. We break from existing studies of emotional or affective upheaval by juxtaposing approaches from within both cultural studies and the arts, drawing further attention to the role of artistic practice and ‘aesthetic experience’ in the study of affect and emotions in general (Sullivan, 2018; see also O’Sullivan, 2006).

The essays collected here analyse a series of both historical and artistic ‘events’ to explore how affects and/or emotions are practised, performed, experienced and created. Crucially, they address theories of practice and performance alongside theories of affect and emotion. If emotions are a form of practice, as Monique Scheer (2012) suggests, is upheaval itself also a form of doing rather than a way of being or an ‘experience’? The interdisciplinary contributors to this thematic special issue focus on a range of intersections between, for example, affective and creative practices, or emotional and political ones. All of them consider upheaval as a deeply social phenomenon.

The first group of articles explores upheaval as a communal experience in the fluid space between the private and public. David Marshall discusses the curation of our emotional selves in social media and government tracking in response to COVID-19 and notes the formation of a new ‘covidiquette’ – patternings of emotional self-presentation deemed appropriate to the epidemic.

Sara James and Anne-Maree Sawyer discuss the emotional trajectories of celebrities’ (self-)presentation in the redemptive narratives of overcoming personal challenges in The Australian Women’s Weekly. Focusing on Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, they examine the ways in which celebrities might ‘re-story’ their own experiences of personal difficulty.

Stephanie Downes and Juliane Römhild explore the affective and emotional implications underpinning pandemic reading practices in 2020, and the therapeutic – even life-saving – dimensions of storytelling. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of anxiety and Winnicott’s notion of play as a space of creative freedom, they discuss Boccaccio’s 14th-century work, The Decameron, in conjunction with the New York Times Magazine’s 2020 short story collection, The Decameron Project, as creative responses to states of uncertainty and dread during a global health crisis.

The second group of articles engages with the affective structures of upheaval, and with both personal and collective responses to trauma. Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly’s article explores the emotional dimensions of colonial commemorative practices in Australia from Indigenous points of view by taking a closer look at the controversy surrounding the James Cook monument in Sydney’s Hyde Park, engaging with pressing questions around public monuments and their traumatic memorialisation of the colonisation of Australia.

Peta Tait describes representations of affect and emotion on the stage, exploring her own affective and emotional responses to the political plays of the Free Belarus Theatre. Theatre, Tait argues, allows us to see complex and nuanced relationships between politics, emotions, physiological emotional feelings, bodily affects and moods in and around live performance events.

In an interview, director Bagryana Popov discusses how the performing arts can give expression to subjugation and harassment in totalitarian regimes. Popov discusses the intergenerational affective and emotional inscriptions of the Bulgarian communist regime on the body in two performance works she directed in her hometown, Sofia. Both were inspired by Popov’s own family history.

By taking a long view of how affects and emotions shape, and are shaped by, ‘upheaval’, the contributors to this thematic issue reveal how attending to both critical and creative practices – simultaneously or in juxtaposition – can illuminate theories of affect and the emotions in turn. This special issue does not highlight one common manifestation or definition of ‘upheaval’, but many. It aims to show that upheaval may be best understood as taking multiple forms, even in relation to specific times and places. The articles collected here show how art and other forms of social practice may be forces of resistance or repair in times of crisis, and how they might serve to respond to upheavals’ forms, as well as how they might generate new forms of upheaval.