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this volume, at once geared to the scholar and to the professional.
Our professional motivation leads us to ask questions with proactive intervention and practical suggestions in mind. What kind of affect connects people instead of creating boundaries? How can we make sure our romantic desire and curiosity for the exotic do not make our relationship with the cultural other into voyeurism? How can we harness and redirect emotions in order to humanize the encounter? What kinds of mobilization and management of affect reduce relations of power and domination and instead reinforce egalitarian relations?
In what follows, we will first present a broader theoretical framework and an overview of our approach to affect. We will then go on to situate this volume’s contributions in four fields whose interests touch upon the issue of affect and border crossing: affect in the national belonging and the global, affect in the encounter with the cultural Other in relations of power, affect in learning, and affect in helping others. After introducing the chapters in this volume, the chapter ends with a postscript that explains how this project began.
Affect: Theoretical Frameworks
There is no single theory of affect (Seigworth and Gregg 2010). For Brian Massumi, one of the influential scholars of affect writing today (cf. Massumi 1995, 2010), the distinction between emotion and affect is central, as they follow “different logics and pertain to different orders” (1995: 88). Massumi uses the word “emotion” to mean the quality of experience from that point on defined as personal; it is a “qualified intensity” to be inserted into the system of meaning. Affect, in contrast, is irreducibly bodily and autonomic: passion. Eric Shouse further clarifies Massumi’s distinctions, writing that “[f]eelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal”; affect here is “a non-conscious experience of intensity” (Shouse 2005: 5). Julia Kristeva, as discussed by Karen Rodriguez in this volume, distinguishes the emotions, shared with other vertebrates, from the passions, which are human and involve reflexive consciousness (Kristeva 2011: 80, quoted in chapter 3).
Some (e.g., Besnier 1990) are wary of such distinctions, however, because they impose West-centered taxonomies of psychological process. They also warn about the assumption that affect can exist independent of and prior to ideology and to shared meanings (see Leys 2011 for discussions). For our part, though we do see Massumi’s, Shouse’s and Kristeva’s distinctions as key for some purposes, in this work we do not focus on the distinction between feeling, emotion, passion, and affect. Thus, we avoid imposing researchers’ interpretation of these processes. Instead, we use these terms synonymously, using the term affect interchangeably with feelings, or emotion, or sentiments, and focusing on the relationship of affect to broader social, economic, and political processes. In so doing, we follow the approach of Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009: 57) who use affect as a way to conceptualize “the relationship between structures and sentiments.”
This also contrasts with earlier anthropological approaches to emotion as culturally mediated (Geertz 1973; Rosaldo 1984) that relied on a static and bounded notion of culture. Instead, we pay attention to wider political, economic, and social forces that shape “culture” as well as affect—passion, desire, romantic feelings, discomfort, fear, anxiety, etc. This approach allows us to link subjectivity and action, to explore in meaningful ways the connection between lived experience (including its visceral manifestations) and broader processes, “the shifting relationships between the state, market and society” (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 57).
In particular, our volume examines the mobilization and management of affect, which then shapes actions and fosters particular subjectivities. For individuals choosing to study or volunteer abroad, the main affect connected to these activities is positive, at least initially: the emotions that drew them to participate. Therefore, our main focus is on romance and the other alluring feelings that draw people to study or volunteer abroad. However, other types of affect are also discussed.
What does it mean to talk about how affect is mobilized? A flight attendant may mobilize her empathy for passengers and her good humor to live up to her employers’ promises of providing “sincere smiles” to customers (Hochschild 2003); a care-giver from the Philippines or Sri Lanka, separated from her own loved ones, may divert her affections and transform them into love for those she has been hired to nurture (Hochschild 2004). Letter writers in the Nukulaelae Atoll in the Pacific mobilize love or alofa to control the flow of gifts with their relatives living abroad (Besnier 1990); leaders of Mexican NGOs “build bridges of love” between local people and foreign volunteers, fostering solidarity that will lead to ongoing donations and structural assistance, all the while trying to avoid “emotional blackmail” (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 67). Not only love and affection but fear can be analyzed in this way; for example, in the post-9/11 United States fear was mobilized to bind subjects together (Ahmed 2004; Massumi 2010).
In this volume, we ask: How is affect mobilized, through what discourses, by whom and to what ends? How is the affective experience of students and volunteers aroused by marketing materials, by orientation sessions, by on-site interventions (Rink, Taïeb et al.)? How is our romantic search to be helpful to others and make a difference shaped through media images and news reports in ways that move us across the globe (Jakubiak) and how does it intersect with other types of discourses such as modernism and anticolonialism (Li)? Are there paradoxes involved in study and volunteering abroad—practices that must emphasize difference to evoke romantic passion in potential “customers,” but must overcome difference to some extent to be successful? How do these processes fit in with the larger economic and social context—what kind of desire, fear, guilt, and aspirations do current neoliberalist, globalist, and other world transformations inspire, and how do these direct our movements and actions?
Another way we look at affect is in terms of how it is managed. This management of affect can be part of a “technology” for governing individuals (Good 2004), as modes of governmentality shift from welfare states that sought to govern “through society” to advanced liberalism that seeks “to govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents . . . and . . . through intensifying and acting upon their allegiance to particular ‘communities’” (Rose 1996: 61). The shift toward neoliberalism has been shown to involve the production of subjectivities through the management of affect. For example, affect-laden spiritual development sessions known as ESQ, Emotional and Spiritual Quotient, were instituted in Indonesian corporations, mixing management techniques with Koranic verses, with employees and high-level managers, leaders, and participants sharing in tears that showed “an open heart” and that led to a renewal that would improve business practices (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Those who established these practices shared in the affect and were moved themselves to new kinds of subjectivities. A second example can be seen in the work of Ana Ramos-Zayas, who shows how emotions like belonging or pride in one’s desirability or commercial viability can be managed to enhance an individual’s “Blackness” and overall worth in terms of race, sexuality, and gender in the current wider race politics (2009). In the example mentioned above concerning Mexican NGOs, the affect elicited for volunteers by hard work with local people and shared food is purposefully molded by local leaders into warmth that will lead to ongoing partnerships. The NGO local leaders conceive of this as a kind of therapy, working against the alienated emotions and “coldness” that they see as characteristic of human relations for their foreign volunteers, and fostering warmth, creating solidary subjectivities (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 67).
It should be clear from these examples that the management of affect can occur in very different sites and with very different goals. In the field of study and volunteering abroad, we can ask: How is affect managed, by whom (students and volunteers themselves, local partners on-site, education abroad professionals, researchers)? To what ends? What discourses and political, economic, and social environments move students and volunteers to overcome certain affect, such as fear of the unknown, anxiety about novel experiences, and a sense of guilt about privilege in the face of social injustice? What neoliberalist and globalist restructuring of higher education and employment pushes us to think about what affect and what affect-management skills a successful employee should have? What kind of interpretative strategies are used to “read” students’ affect in order to manage it?
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