Langhamer, Claire (2020) 'Astray in a dark forest?' The emotional politics of reconstruction Britain. In: Noakes, Lucy, Langhamer, Claire and Siebrecht, Claudia (eds.) Total war: an emotional history. Proceedings of the British Academy, OUP, Kettering. ISBN 9780197266663
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Abstract
Based on material generated by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, between 1944-1946, this chapter maps some of the political work that emotion did in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It adapts cultural theorist Sara Ahmed’s question - ‘What do emotions do?’ - to a precise historical moment. It approaches emotion through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history by asking an additional question - ‘What did people do with emotion?’ It examines how the interlinked categories of feeling and experience were invoked by individual Mass Observers as ways of knowing a rapidly changing world and as grounds for participating in a dynamic public sphere. The chapter argues that a distinctive form of ‘emotional citizenship’ emerged out of the war; one which deployed feeling as a form of epistemology and experience as an evidential base.
Item Type: | Book Section |
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Keywords: | Britain, Mass-Observation, Feeling, Reconstruction, Emotion |
Schools and Departments: | School of History, Art History and Philosophy > History |
Depositing User: | Claire Langhamer |
Date Deposited: | 24 Jun 2019 16:38 |
Last Modified: | 29 Oct 2020 11:26 |
URI: | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/84551 |
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