Public Sentiments
Contributors include Nieves Ayress, Jean Carlomusto, Mary Marshall Clark, Anne Cubilié, Ann Cvetkovich, Judith Halberstam, Roger Hallas, Alyssa Harad, Marianne Hirsch, Sharon Holland, Jonathan Kalb, Sarah Jones, Rachel C. Lee, Daphne Lei, Peter Lucas, Meg McLagan, Lorie Novak, Ann Pellegrini, Jorge Ramos, Janelle Reinelt, Steven Reisner, Jane Rosett, Rebecca Schneider, Anna Deavere Smith, Kathleen Stewart, and Jason Tougaw.
September 11th confronted Americans with a new set of emotions in responding to an unexpected and tremendously violent event. These emotions were both deeply personal and also part of our public culture. What are the implications of public sentiments? How did the various emotions evoked by September 11th – grief, anger, sadness, vulnerability – so quickly get turned to the nationalistic feelings of war? What can we learn from the study of public feelings in other times and places? How does art address public feelings? Does it serve as a useful basis for action? And what of activism and social movement? How have movements responded to September 11th?
These are some of the questions addressed in “Public Sentiments”, a special double issue of S&F Online. The essays gathered here call attention to the range of ways in which feelings are central to public life, from the rallying of affect to produce national patriotism to passionate calls for activism.
Part One of this summer issue, “Archives of Trauma,” emerges from the morning plenary session on the topic of “Memory, Trauma, History, Action” at the February 2002 Scholar and the Feminist conference held at Barnard College. The panelists, Marianne Hirsch, Saidiya Hartman, Nieves Ayress, and Ann Cvetkovich (all of whom, with the exception of Hartman, are included here), touched on a wide range of geopolitical sites of loss, violence, and trauma, including the events of September 11, 2001, the Holocaust, slavery and the African diaspora, political torture and repression in Chile, and AIDS. Contributors consider how trauma demands new kinds of archives that not only preserve or make space for memory and testimony but also intervene in more public conversations. In keeping with the multimedia format of the webjournal, our contributors address – and use – a range of genres, some of them ways of preserving and even reviving testimony, such as performance, video, and installation; others, such as photography, serving as sites (and sights) for “capturing” emotion.
Part Two, “Performance Works,” turns more explicitly to the matter of performance, asking how performances, both on-stage and off, might help to generate different kinds of publics. As our guest editors note, theatre can provide a relatively safe, because bounded, space in which to explore and play out cultural responses to trauma. In Part Two, contributors explore the terms by which performers, teachers, and activists solicit feelings on the part of their various audiences in attempts to “move” them. “How do we bring together people who know about organizing and activism with those of us who know how to bring you to your feet?” asks celebrated playwright Anna Deavere Smith (author of Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, Los Angeles) in conversation with Ann Pellegrini. Through performance, photos, essays, and dialogue, our contributors consider how emotions, so vital to the formation of our communities, help define and determine the course of social justice movements. Together, they explore how art, performance, and activism serve as both records of and responses to trauma.
Throughout this issue, contributors consider how and to what ends a given performance of feeling might move a public to action. Note the editors in their joint Introduction, “The essays gathered here are not the last word on any of these issues, but are offered as a spark to what we hope will be a more general project of exploring public sentiments, of bringing affect into discussions of social and cultural phenomena, and, perhaps, just perhaps, of forging alternative possibilities, for emotional as for public life.”