The Cultural Politics of Emotion

The Cultural Politics of Emotion complicated the political economy, emphasizing the emotions of hate and love as a key component that allows for the systematic positioning of peoples in this international hierarchy. The use of the word economy when talking about emotions alludes to the process that enable materials to become commodities that segregate, isolate, and privilege certain countries, regions, and identities at the expense of others. While materials become commodities that might strengthen national ties, the acceptance and division of the ideas of entitlement and access to these commodities need an acceptance of emotion to facilitate the value of these commodities. Hate is a process, a process that is created as an opposition of love but often times ignored because love is a device used by to justify one’s own identity. Yet unfortunately, in order to construct one identity and or one emotion, there needs to be what it is not or an opposite.

            While Ahmed explored how “hate is the production of the ordinary”, Fernandez’s comparative analysis of Indian films demonstrate how difference is constructed against the norm. This construction “against” or attempt of the acknowledgment of difference in media often times reinforces certain norms-in one case the rising middle class- is often times influenced by Western ideology and interpretation that inadvertly perpetuates and often times ignores the history of certain places, peoples, and involvement of the international community that have created the reality people live in.

            This cultural authority over the production of knowledge further stigmatizes and ascribes a certain intellectual progress for developing countries; Ullysse shows how this assumed and often strewed knowledge of said countries-in this case Haiti-influences how the world responds to disasters and tragedies. In Haiti’s case, blackness and the religion of Vodou has caste the country as deserving of the tragic earthquake while simultaneously having the world feel entitled to exploit or save the country in the name of humanitarian work. The perceptions and reality of what happened to Haiti during the earthquake show how emotions are a commodity, influencing how these singular, constructed narratives of Haiti that have historically been used to uphold American and European exceptionalism(and all the hegemonic ideals this exceptionalism upholds).  These narratives that have been constructed of Haiti showcase how exclusionary processes of privilege and the access to power are that often contradict or silence the reality of those persons on the ground, power that leads to authority, whether that be economic or political authority, or entitlement to use someone or someplace’s tragedy to make one’s self feel like they are doing their duty of operating love. Which is ironic because it does the opposite in reinforcing hate.