Exploring Political Affect and its Manifestations Across Modern Asia

The territories across Asia have been marked by not just the history of colonialism and imperialism but also its modern, “democratic” structure of governance. Much of the studies of political history claim the Enlightenment principles of reason, rationality, secularism and democracy as hallmarks of political foundations of colonial regimes, bourgeoise modern capitalist regimes and their “post-”s. As per Ann Stoler (1995), “Students of the colonial consistently have argued that the authority to designate what would count as reason and reasonable was colonialism’s most insidious and effective technology of rule – one that, in turn, would profoundly affect the style and strategies of anticolonial, nationalist politics”. In studying the authority and praxis post-colonial and post-imperial politics in Asia, one cannot ignore the influence of the ideologies of coloniality, modernity and the many forms of neoliberalism on the social-political affective dimensions of everyday living. As William Mazzarella (2019) emphasizes, "any ideological formation has to be affective in order to be effective". Some of the questions to be dealt with in this panel are: What are some ways in which the political-economic ideology is manifested in the form of affective populism in present and in the past? How do epistemes or concepts of Classical/historical/religious Literature across Asia help us to comprehend the neocolonial affectivity in contemporary time? How does affect enable authoritarianism to strengthen through its discursive, visual, aural and sensual entanglements specifically through the social media and mass media discourse? How are these structures of power and ideologies affectively resisted and critiqued? How do specific symbols enable affective embodied actions and expressions of authoritarianism? How do laws and its implementations or potentialities affectively affect specific identities, minorities, and/or cause despair, precarity, discrimination, violence and ethnic cleansing?
This call for papers seeks to look at how affective manifestations of political illegitimacies like ethnic cleansing, casteism, Islamophobia, minority discrimination, carceralization of political opponents and autocracy in the name of democracy are (re)produced, navigated and resisted