Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2023 Jg. 49, Heft 1, Revisiting the History of Emotions

In the last decade, the history of emotions has become a burgeoning field of research. While the premise that emotions are historically and culturally contingent phenomena has by now been widely accepted, new questions have arisen and old problems await reevaluation: how are we to adequately trace the relations between social structures, subjectivities, and emotional experiences? Is there a way to mine non-verbal sources, such as images, objects, or sound, for emotions? Moreover, because the field keeps expanding, approaches from, among others, global history, anthropology, and post-human studies have brought different enquiries to the fore: how can we best understand the intersection of emotional and cultural difference? Are there emotions that extend beyond the human and cannot be grasped by Western notions of bounded individuality? This special issue brings together twelve scholars from such disciplines as history, cultural anthropology, sociology, and literary studies, to engage with the field’s directions and challenges in six co-written essays. The publication circles back to the special issue on the History of Emotions in 2009, which programmatically laid out what historical research into emotions could look like. The new issue adopts a more interdisciplinary and more global approach, presenting case studies from, among others, medieval Syria, contemporary Iran, twentieth-century Finland, and South Asia before the Common Era.