Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

This book considers professional culture in relation to place and affect. All law students from across Britain and its empire had to train in London at four legal societies known as the Inns of Court. Unlike other professions that underwent systematic reforms, the Inns of Court remained guild-like associations that offered no systematic training. Instead of inculcating legal knowledge, the societies relied on affective rituals to create a sense of belonging among members—or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession’s ideals. This book examines the societies’ active efforts to maintain an exclusive and masculine culture in the face of sweeping social, political, and demographic changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter examines how, particularly in response to their growing middle-class population, the Inns of Court relied on their architectural spaces and social practices to ensure that all members of the bar embodied the ideal of the gentlemanly professional. In the absence of required classes, the societies stressed fraternization with older generations to inculcate new members with legal knowledge and the values appropriate to British barristers. The societies emphasized affective bonds and tried to cultivate fraternal relationships between their members. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the category of gentlemanliness was itself in flux, subject to divergent ideas of who could be a gentleman and how a gentleman should behave. Competing ideas of who belonged at the societies or what counted as gentlemanly behavior could result in unanticipated affective registers, including anger, indignation, and shame.

This chapter focuses on mystical experience. It considers especially the late medieval mystical accounts of and about women, which are particularly rich in their experiential and affective dimensions. The chapter shows that mystical experience lives within the tension of uniqueness and exemplarity, setting the individual apart from the community while also often arising out of its shared life and perceived to serve and inspire it. Mystical experience is also characterized by the paradox between extensive practices of preparation and recognizable patterns of experience on the one hand and the sense of the givenness of the experience on the other. Mystical experience is frequently abundant and overwhelming, marked by intense affect and emotion, displayed in bodily fashion, full of rich sensory impressions, and combining suffering and ecstasy, sometimes in the same experience. In all these respects, mystical experience displays a phenomenality of excess and saturation.

This chapter identifies a strain of political, affective maladjustment it labels “Hopeless Romanticism,” of which Percy Bysshe Shelley is an exemplary case. It argues that hope plays a fundamental role in the progressivist refusal to abide by the terms of the status quo. Hopeless romantics hold on to visions of a better world in spite of the crushing realities that surround them. This chapter tracks how this affective mechanism manifests in a series of Shelleyan poems where hope leaps past probabilistic boundaries, even as the despair that is hope’s other side repeatedly intrudes. Hope’s structural investment in futurity has made it both a symptom of weakened individual agency and a social portent of political change.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

Although liberals and conservatives tended to disagree about the specific ways in which the franchise might be expanded, both parties accepted by 1860 that reform was inevitable. Yet to whom should the vote be extended and on what basis? These questions animated discussions within and outside the House of Commons. They also informed significant works of nonfiction in this decade, including several of John Stuart Mill’s most important writings, as well poetry and fiction, including many of Anthony Trollope’s parliamentary novels. This chapter constellates Mill’s speculative thought and Trollope’s fiction in order to consider the persistent tensions between thought and feeling that are constitutive features of Victorian liberalism itself.

This essay details the foundational place of affect for medical treatments of body and soul in the late Middle Ages. Because the medieval soul was fully embodied, affects of love, joy, fear, and anger played a practical part in diagnosing or treating a patient’s health. In late medieval medical manuals, along with forms of living and confessional forms, care for bodies and souls draws on a common affective vocabulary. Rather than seeing one form of affective discourse as spiritual and the other as practical, this chapter concludes by briefly turning to the Book of Margery Kempe to take seriously her claim that Christ heals via an affective intensity that transforms her body and soul. The therapeutic domain of affect unites body and soul, spiritual and practical, in late medieval medical writings.

The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.