Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban

摘要

The foundation of history's recent 'emotional turn' is that emotions matterin shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational "economic subjects in trousers and skirts"— or, as it may be, dhotis, and saris. The emotional histories of this last group are only just beginning to be written. From its roots in the study of Europe, the history of emotions spread to the United States in the 1980s, with its ascendancy overlapping with the rise of 'history from below'. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it had birthed a rich and fully-fledged research agenda, complete with dedicated institutes, journals and graduate courses. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, it has made limited inroads into global studies of South Asia, at least explicitly; a number of South Asianists have made valuable contributions to the subdiscipline avant la lettre, while a collective of contemporary scholars is forging a nascent agenda for the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the history of emotions remains "overwhelmingly a European and North American history", as a recent introduction noted.