Revolution and Disalienation
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2024 Number 112
Revolution and Disalienation
Kai Bosworth pages 131-146
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:112.07.2024
Abstract
What are the affects of revolutionary moments? What role do they play in the distinct temporalities of these situations, and how do they relate to the radical political possibilities imagined by their professed ideologies? Such questions have haunted recent political, theoretical and literary works devoted to critical analysis of political revolt and revolution. This article makes three contributions to this ongoing dialogue. First, I elaborate a method of affective mapping to understand the specific roles that particular emotional complexes play in revolutionary situations. Second, I describe a named affective process of disalienation as particularly crucial to the social experience of revolution. Finally, two recent speculative fictions are examined for the complexity of their portrayal of the emotional valences of such moments of disalienation: Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or The End, and M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072. Affect theory thus proves most useful and provocative to political struggle when it can find a political form which sustains revolt by mediating moments of connection between episodic experience and widespread social transformation. Speculative fiction can provide the opportunity to explore and reflect on how to create, sustain and spread such transformative social situations.
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To cite this article
Kai Bosworth (2024) Revolution and Disalienation, New Formations, 2024(112), 131-146. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:112.07.2024