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Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
Abstract
This introduction situates the discussion of emotion and selfhood in medieval literature in a critical and cultural context, addressing its relevance for postmedieval readers and scholars. It addresses concepts such as performativity, selfhood and emotionality and their importance for the understanding of medieval literature. It furthermore elaborates on the rationale of the special issue and its scope, which extends across Scandinavia, Germany, Britain, Northern France, Flanders and the Netherlands. Finally, it proposes that the literary representation of selfhood is intimately interlinked with emotionality and the staging of literary emotions and introduces a broad range of essays to test this hypothesis across multiple cultural realms, generic forms and literary traditions.
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Abstract
This afterword sums up and responds to the articles in the special issue. It notes the variety in representations of the textual self and its constitution through emotion across medieval Northern Europe; representations which nevertheless depend on an imagined body. It also calls attention to the development of ideas of subjectivity and interiority and the ways in which literary experimentation drives social change, ending with a plea to reconsider the association of the medieval period with violence.
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In the Old Norse-Icelandic literary context, animals are understood to be capable of emotional experience, but they are generally unable to communicate their feelings through a language which people might understand. To resolve this issue and express animal emotionality, Old Norse authors used several strategies: emotion words, inference through behaviour, and emotive gestures, both naturalistic affective responses of animal bodies and affective anthropomorphisation – recognisably human emotive displays. Medieval romance offers a vehicle for cross-cultural comparison: a study of the lion’s tears in the various translations and reinventions of Chrétien’s Yvain further establishes the literary popularity of animal emotionality in the medieval North. Emotive performativity was reformulated through translation and acculturation, acting as a tool for medieval authors to imbue animals with textual subjectivity and literary selfhood. However, there are limitations to the human ability to comprehend animal cognition and emotional experience, and in the Old Norse context, animals textually experience a finite range of emotions, indicating a limited medieval understanding of animal selfhood, with implications for how we understand humanity’s historical subjugation of the nonhuman.