‘History is What Hurts’: Crisis, Stasis, and the Mnemonic Landscape

This IHUM salon will investigate the production and transmission of affect, across different historical and geographic contexts––from nineteenth-century Britain, to postwar South Korea, to the suburbs of New Jersey during the Bush administration. We will draw on our respective curatorial and literary-critical practices to forge conceptual linkages–and identify antinomies–between our dissertation projects and the intellectual investments underlying them. Some questions which have grounded our thinking and that we seek to address in this salon include: what does it mean when we describe historical periods (Cold War, post-Cold War), generations (Greatest Generation, Lost Generation), and other temporal units in sensorial terms, however idiomatic or quotidian? How does affect “get into” history–and vice versa? Can affect be historicized? What is the relationship between affect and political subjectivity? How does affective experience both resist and attune itself to different representational practices?