Prof. Liu and Prof. Wei Shi’s new book, Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China, is forthcoming in February 2024. The authors presented their work at the East Asia Program at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023.
The talk at JHU, titled ‘Affective Spaces as Method’, focuses on why and how emotions create new ways of understanding the dynamics and tensions in East Asia and beyond. Hosted by Prof. Joel Andrea, the event was attended by faculty members and researchers from various disciplines at JHU.
The event at UPenn, titled ‘Love Happens for a Reason in This World. So Does Hatred: Affective Spaces as an Analytical Framework for the Study of Contemporary China’, contextualized the concept of affective space, explaining how art, the bodies of workers, film, and social media help us grasp its materiality and performativity. Topics discussed include the desire of nationalism, the subaltern body as a surface of emotion work, and the blurring of public-private divides on social media. The talk was hosted by Guobin Yang, the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology.
This project received financial support from the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau.