Emotion's Empire

Drawing on affect theory, the history of emotions, as well as decolonial and feminist scholarship, this open access study offers three interlocking core concepts—colonial attachment, grievability, and self-preservation—to illuminate how literary texts sustained and occasionally disrupted the emotional logics of empire across different transatlantic contexts. By intertwining “empire” and “emotion,” Emotion’s Empire opens up practices of reading beyond traditional conceptual boundaries.Reframing the “grateful slave” trope as a colonial attachment narrative, Caroline Koegler reveals how imperial patriarchy legitimized emotional bonds. Her concept of affective coverture illuminates the unequal distribution of grievability: whose feelings and attachments are deemed grievable, whose are only intermittently acknowledged, and whose remain entirely unrecognizable? Her exploration of literary representations of self-preservation similarly asks: who is permitted to preserve the self, under what conditions, and whose selfhood is recognized as a function of agency?While Emotion’s Empire traces normative ways in which these types of affective allocation unfold, it remains attentive to those moments in a narrative that diverge from or question imperial affective conventions, or carry them into new contexts. This book teases out how intricately and at times how unevenly or paradoxically literary texts negotiate imperial affect, reflecting empire’s adaptability to different contexts and agendas during this crucial time in literary history.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by Freie Universität Berlin.