Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia

Abstract

The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is thatemotions matterin shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be,dhotis andsaris.

Revisiting space and emotion: New ways to study buildings and feelings

“…While promoting the theoretical and methodological heterogeneity and possibilities within the field (Boddice, 2022, pp. 176–7; Bremner, 2022, p. 173), the forum also aligns itself with the current academic trend that focuses on emotional regimes and the influence of social expectation and pressure on activities within certain spaces (Reddy, 2001, pp. 124–5).…”

“…It provides insight into how emotions affect the built environment and how the built environment in turn enforces or changes emotions. Since 2014, modern urban history increasingly responds to her call (e.g., Barclay & Riddle, 2021;Chatterjee et al, 2017;Kenny, 2014a,b;Prestel, 2017). Some, like Rose and Fitzgerald (2022, p. 17), go further, presenting the city as an 'ecological' place where people and the environment shape each other.…”

IN THE SHADOW OF ‘THE CITY’ YET TO COME: Auroville, Developmentalism and the Social Effects of Cityness

“…In the specific context of Auroville, I have shown how the ideological function of this geographical imagination of cityness cannot easily be disentangled from the colonial teleology that, as Chatterjee et al . (2017: 547) write, poses ‘the city as the iconic location of modernity’. What I have in mind here are the ways that ‘the city’ and ‘cityness‐to‐come’ work as mental frameworks, languages, concepts, imageries of thought and systems of representation deployed to stabilize and produce Auroville's developmental social formation (on ideology, see Hall, 1996: 27; and Althusser, [1978] 2008: 1–60).…”

“…To this extent, the experience and imagination of cityness is still closely connected with the experience of the future ( ibid . : 326), not least in the context of imperialism where the liberal concept of progress, of improvement, and of civilization, was spatially and imaginatively so imbricated with the colonial city (Perera, 1998; Legg, 2007; Chatterjee et al ., 2017). Thus if, as Namakkal (2012: 82) suggests, Aurovillian efforts at decolonization failed to provide the rupture necessary to end established colonial hierarchies of race, class and caste, then this article has shown how the spatial binary of city and village—a binary which in its own postcolonial historical context is also a hierarchy—has been centrally implicated in that failure.…”

“…These progressivist idioms provide what Chatterjee et al . (2017: 546) refer to as ‘a sense of past, present, and future laden with normative dichotomies—between the modern and its opposite, the premodern, backward, or primitive’. As Chatterjee et al .…”