Affective Spaces

Explores how affect and emotion create new ways of understanding contemporary Chinese politics

• Presents informed explanations based on vivid portraits of various emotional spectacles, scenes, encounters, actions, and reactions that are not available in the study of Chinese Politics
• Addresses the importance of affect to the analysis of politics with creative approaches
• Presents broad and informed cultural analysis through close analysis of public cultures
• Draws on case studies of political art, social media, worker's body and films to offer analytical possibilities for innovative political research, and to produce a multifaceted understanding of how affect matters for politics
• Provocatively rereads the history of Maoism by reconsidering how class feeling such as hatred and resentment is mobilized through culture and art

The growing political conflicts unfolded in China provide an opportunity for rethinking the cultural politics of emotion. Although the political formations in the region can be laden with a multitude of emotions, they tend to be poorly understood. This book explains why affect and emotion matter to politics from the Mao Zedong to the Xi Jinping era. It makes a unique contribution by investigating the dynamics of political passions and the contexts from which emotional subjects engage in hegemonic struggles through the creation of various cultural forms, including Maoist art and popular films. Topics discussed include the mobilisation of revolutionary emotions in political movements, the desire of nationalism, the virtual affective space created by antagonistic identity politics, the subaltern body as a surface of emotion work, and the blurring of public-private divides on social media. Liu and Shi find that cultural feelings and emotional experiences are crucial for understanding political struggle, as well as debates about the cultural dilemma of the Chinese Dream.