Since the unexpected attack on the Twin Towers (September 2011), Western society has begun to become much more interested in the emotional component in the historical accounts and explanations of conflicts. “The study of emotions is a topic that generates increasing interest, largely due to its importance for understanding politics and the media, but also for analyzing how people relate to each other. “From the study of emotions we can explain many narratives that have been produced about our present, but also about the past” explain Josep San Ruperto and Nuria Soriano, directors of the international seminar Sensibilities, passions and emotions in History and Literature (ss. XVII-XIX) that begins this Monday at the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Valencia.
Specialists from different universities such as Washington College or the University of Sao Paulo will participate in the meeting and will address emotions as a tool to dismantle reductionist narratives about European empires and nations.
The seminar will address the uses and role of sensitivity, passions and emotions built and promoted between the 17th and 19th centuries, inseparable from the cultural and social contexts in which they are expressed. Thus, different young researchers will discuss the formation of discourses and narratives linked to different passions, affects and emotions, fundamental in the formation of national, gender and racial identities and imaginaries in force from the Modern Age to the Contemporary Age.
The passions in the establishment of the empire, the view from the body and gender, and the intersection between race and emotion will be the three tables on which the seminar will pivot with interesting contributions on the construction of masculinities throughout history or racial issue in the processes of Hispanic colonization.
San Ruperto and Soriano explain to La Vanguardia that while it is true that “multiple academic disciplines have already worked on emotions, it has not been addressed as much from a historical perspective, although the history of emotions already has a long history.” . Thus, these two young researchers from the University of Valencia highlight that in Spain the history of emotions can still offer great fruits because, although it already has some outstanding specialists, “it is beginning to make a space little by little in the historical discipline. ”
“The speeches are impregnated with emotions that explain many things that have not always been introduced in academic study,” says San Ruperto. He gives the example of current political debates where the emotionality of the messages is analyzed as much or more than the content of the proposals of the parties and candidates. Electoral campaigns appeal almost more to emotion than to reason.
In this way, Soriano adds, his intention is to reflect on “how we integrate the emotional as a fundamental component of human life in the stories that we historians construct.” “The history of emotions is for us a way to make our questions more complex as historians and also, and why not, to be more creative,” emphasizes the UV historian.
A daring bet in a field like History that these Valencian historians try to emphasize thanks to an Emerging Project financed by the Generalitat. The intention of this group made up of young researchers – and it seems that they will achieve it – is to publish a book next year on the impact of emotions in the study of modern and contemporary history. A different and creative way to approach our past.
