Violent Feelings at Scale: Body, Affect, Public

Abstract

In the second half of this special double issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, we continue to explore the forms and effects of violent feeling in contemporary literature, film, and culture. Taken together, the essays in this issue help us to connect violence and feeling through the vectors of racial identity, spatial politics, trauma, neoliberalism, and embodiment. Working at a number of different scales–from the broad sweep of Hurricane Katrina and its aftereffects to the inhalation and exhalation of a single breath–these essays show how violent feelings operate at multiple scales to connect the minor to the epochal, the social to the embodied. These essays address violent feelings across the twentiethand twenty-first century, beginning with the large-scale use of violent aerial technologies in World War I and concluding with considerations of police violence as it has been critiqued by the Black Lives Matter movement. In order to apprehend large-scale formations of violent feeling like these, however, wemust also look to local, particular, even private manifestations of violence and feeling. The looming threat of large-scale violence, after all, manifests in the individual body, its anxieties and its pain. As Sean Austin Grattan notes, there are “intersections between violence, belonging, and publics in the United States” that are in need of study (63). He notes the “overwhelming fear of difference” that saturated the American public sphere in the 1990s, that manifested in the Los Angeles riots and the rise of Giuliani in New York City, but that is also evident in an array of texts by Anna Deveare Smith, ToniMorrison, andChuck Palahniuk. Seen in this way, the 1990s seem stuck between the affective intensities of violence and the emptiness of boredom, suggestive of a broader disorder in “the competing models of citizenship” which emerged in the decade (73). As a flashpoint where new forms of citizenship emerge, and, with them, new formations of affect and sociality, the 1990s are also a meeting point of, for example, the tensions of the Cold War and the slow violences of late capitalism. We know, as Grattan does, that violence creates new assemblages in its very act of destroying others. For a moment, its punch connects aggressor and victim, and just as instantly, it clarifies the incommensurable relationship