Volume 17, Issue 2 - Editors’ Forum: The Decade of Disenchantment? A Global Emotional History of the 1970s; Guest Editors: Rukmini Barua, Caroline Moine, Alexandra Oberländer, and Julia Wambach

The 1970s have been identified through a range of emotional markers. This special issue critically analyzes the emotional history of this decade through a global perspective. In doing so, the contributions in this issue consider the different registers and scales at which emotions were experienced, perceived, and discussed. Drawing on discussions of gay liberation struggles in Latin America, decolonial movements in Palestine, the New International Economic Order, the North American Left, and forms of post-imperialist belonging in New Zealand and Australia, we detail how new emotional communities were produced and how distinct emotionalities were shaped in conjunction with shifting global politics.

In the article I study the emotions involved in the emergence of the homosexual liberation movement in Latin America. Marked by the radical ideas that came out of the sixties many queer organizations bowed to create a sexual revolution inside the social revolution. Because it was the first-time homosexuality came out to the public in the Latin America, at the same time in different countries, a sort of emotional community was formed. This happened thanks to the radical queer intellectual network that was formed after the Stonewall riots connecting the Americas with Europe. By sharing experiences and ideas I will argue that the Latin American homosexual liberation organizations also shared the process of what I have called coming out collectively, where things leaving shame and sadness, overcoming fear with courage, and building pride or anger were fundamental in the early years of the movement.

The aim of this article is to explore an emotional divide within the critical discourse on capitalism in the United States in the period from the late 1950s to the 1970s. By using the examples of John Kenneth Galbraith and Robert Lekachman, the article shows how an older generation of liberal economists used irony and sarcasm to create an air of emotional distance and disengagement between the critic and the subject at hand. This mode corresponded with the emotional regime of “American cool.” In the late 1960s, however, a younger generation of radical economists started to intervene. The rhetoric of this group was distinctively more emotional. Although the younger generation of radicals, like the older liberals, mostly belonged to the white middle class, the new global identity made it possible to overcome the emotional restraints of “American cool” and enabled the use of emotions and affectedness as a discursive tool in the fight for social and economic justice at home. Yet, the fact that the radical emotionality was linked to the hope for revolutionary change made it difficult to make compromises and agree to less radical reforms.

In the 1960s, it became apparent that the seemingly strong ties between Britain and the former settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand were in danger of disintegrating. Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in the early 1970s was a symbolic end point to their affiliation. Since belonging is closely linked to emotions, this prompted a re-ordering of emotional practices in Australian and New Zealand society. As Britain’s turn to Europe was interpreted by the majority in these countries as an abandonment, Britishness could no longer be the main self-descriptor of identity, and the “British World” no longer the world to live in. Multicultural policies meant a re-evaluation and re-shaping of social coexistence in Australia and New Zealand. Food cultures as cultural heritage were emotionally reinterpreted and appropriated, as they offered new possibilities for identification in the search for a new national identity. The relationship with neighbors in the South Pacific was also placed on a new emotional footing, while the British were excluded via mechanisms of “emotional othering.” These processes of emotional detachment from Britain had direct influences on how Australia and New Zealand positioned themselves in and in relation to the world.

The 1973/74 oil crisis, comprising an Arab oil embargo targeting Western industrialized states and the quadrupling of global oil prices by OPEC, was followed by a major international debate on the establishment of a New International Economic Order in the years to come. This debate not only made it to the top of the international agenda given certain emotional reactions to and perceptions of the first oil crisis in different groups of countries: The successful oil revolution, as it was called by Arab elites, nurtured a sense of empowerment among OPEC representatives while it triggered fears among Western governments, making them more willing to listen to OPEC demands. At the same time, both oil and non-oil developing countries professed a strong feeling of solidarity allowing them to formulate a shared program of economic decolonization. It was exactly these emotional reactions to the oil crisis that enabled the conflict over the New International Economic Order to become such a prominent feature of the decade. Thus, the oil revolution was a game changer without which the North-South debate would have remained on the sidelines.

In the thirty years of British occupation before 1948, elite Palestinian spokesmen understood emotion as a fundamentally ineffective mode of political engagement vis-à-vis a perceived audience of European colonial diplomats. After the nakba, though, as writers like Qustantin Zurayk and ‘Arif al-‘Arif tried to make sense of its traumatic upheavals to new iterations of regional audiences, expressions of emotion began to make new appearances alongside such writings’ abstract appeal to rights. In the 1960s, and particularly after the war of 1967, emotional expression began to take on a rather different valence as writers like Ghassan Kanafani came to understand emotion, and especially the expression of an abstract form of decolonial anger, as a key way to connect with other global audiences and thereby buttress external support for Palestinian political demands. This article, then, seeks to explore changes in the emotional content of Palestinian nationalist literature, and especially the increased rhetorical presence of expressions of anger, as reflections of changes in what we might think of (in a gloss on Barbara Rosenwein’s crucial notion of emotional communities) as “emotional audiences.”