Vortrag Prof. Pernau

Alle Interessierten sind herzlich eingeladen zu dem Vortrag von Prof. Margrit Pernau (Berlin) über "Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India".

Zeit: Do, 01.02.2018, 18 h c.t.
Ort: HGB, A016

Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India

Modernity for long has been viewed as a process which went along with an increasing control over emotions – whether this control was regarded as linked to capitalism, to the modern bureaucratic state or interpreted as a process through which external control mechanisms moved inside the subject. However, as I would like to argue in this talk, emotions neither disappeared nor was their disciplining pervasive. New emotions came to the forefront, and even more important, they gained in intensity. These strong emotions were not an indication of an incomplete modernity and a remnant from the past, but a new phenomenon – the actors not only reflected more on their emotions and the emotions they encountered (or missed in their encounters), they increasingly valued strong, visceral and even indomitable passions. They strove for an experience of these emotions and attempted to inculcate them in others as well, and they devised new languages and practices to bring about these feelings. Being modern meant feeling the right emotions, and feeling them with the required degree of control and passion. The talk will take the riots following the destruction of a part of a bazaar mosque in Kanpur in 1913 as a case study and link them to the way emotions were conceptualized in the new psychological writings in Urdu, which were published at the same time.