MSA Conference in Newcastle

At the 2023 Memory Studies Association conference in Newcastle, I participated in a roundtable on 'Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity', with Michael Rothberg and Arielle Stambler.

The roundtable focused on the varied ways that affect, emotion, and feeling mediate between structural-historical conditioning and individual levels of responsibility. Our starting point was the hypothesis that affective states such as anger, shame, guilt, grief, and disappointment play significant roles in facilitating complicity and implication and thus help anchor diverse forms of domination. At the same time, we suggest, attempts to contest injustice through acts of small- and large-scale resistance and the forging of political solidarities also derive from an affective substratum, one that includes many of the same emotions that accompany implication.

My contribution was to explore how the affect of disappointment can serve as the impetus for resisting complicity in structures of oppression, and specifically the persistence of gender oppression in the wake of liberation from colonial rule.