American Negritude

This chapter contextualizes Malcolm X’s interventions about black feelings in the contemporary psychological literatures that framed and circulated about blackness to understand how new black psychology informed Malcolm’s emotional and rhetorical repertoire. Then, in excavating Malcolm’s performances of black rage as an easily identifiable feeling and an intended goal of his rhetorical corpus, Corrigan argues that Malcolm’s psychological strategy articulated what she calls “American Negritude.” Marrying black psychology to the work of African and Caribbean intellectuals theorizing postcolonial black subjectivity, Malcolm’s rhetorical skills hinged on his ability to resituate black political and social consciousness around black pride and disidentification from whites. Malcolm’s American Negritude, particularly as it embraced rage, was at odds with the affective orientation and the racial liberalism of the integrationists and created both tension and opportunity for a global blackness. Still, while Malcolm reconceptualized feeling and being black, his enactment of black rage was often confused with hatred, which fueled white opposition to Malcolm and the NOI and fed white fragility in the early 1960s. Malcolm’s critique of black loyalty to white civil religion hinged on his relentless exposure of faulty black identifications, which he saw as a form of modern slavery.

Disco, Derby, and Drag The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler

This chapter traces the queer politics of Marvel Comics’ Dazzler (aka Alison Blaire) from her comics debut (1980), to her solo series and other appearances over the following decade, and up through her recent one-shot appearance in Dazzler: X-Song #1 (2018). Drawing on scholarship by queer theorists Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, and Nishant Shahani, the chapter examines how queer reading practices expand on what Ramzi Fawaz refers to as an “affective orientation toward otherness and difference” in superhero comics by reading Dazzler alongside other concepts in queer studies—particularly those tied to disco, derby, and drag. By highlighting how Alison Blaire’s relationship to these concepts destabilizes normative gender categories, the chapter demonstrates how Dazzler’s status as both a mutant and a performer allows her to embody queerness even in periods devoid of explicitly LGBTQ+ content in Marvel Comics.

Traumatic Horror Beyond the Edge: It Follows and Get Out

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat.

Exploring Cherishing: A Qualitative Approach

The word cherishing is frequently used in our daily jargons. It is also very often mentioned in empirical literature on cherished possessions. However, despite the relevance of the term in the empirical literature on cherished possessions, very little is known about the way it operates in people’s lives. The only link with cherishing happens to be the studies conducted in individualistic cultures on cherished possessions. Besides, there is hardly any consensus on how cherishing operates in collectivistic culture such as India owing to the scarce literature available on the topic. Hence, the present study addresses the gap in the literature with the objective to explore the concept of cherishing. The present study examines cherishing through qualitative investigation by using semi-structured interviews in India. Forty-eight participants were interviewed for the study. Analysis of the data based on grounded theory techniques revealed three major themes: (i) the attributes of cherishing, (ii) functions of cherishing and (iii) the objects of cherishing. The attributes of cherishing convey a sense of protectiveness, a tendency to care, affective orientation and reminiscence. The functions reveal the benefits experienced from cherishing. The objects of cherishing convey the targets towards which one experiences cherishing. Recommendations for further study, along with theoretical and practical implications of the study findings, are also discussed.

The impact of affective orientation on bank preference as moderated by cognitive load and brand story style

Purpose The competition among banks in Taiwan is fierce. The financial services offered by banks are highly similar and banks attempt to devise a variety of marketing campaigns to gain brand preferences of bank clients. However, little research regarding bank marketing has applied the segmentation strategy to precisely target bank clients. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating roles of cognitive load and brand story style in the impact of bank clients’ affective orientation on brand preference of bank clients. Design/methodology/approach A total of 216 participants who have bank accounts in Taiwan were randomly assigned to a 2 (brand story style: underdog vs top dog) × 2 (cognitive load: low vs high) factorial design. An ANOVA was conducted to examine the interaction effects of affective orientation, cognitive load and brand story style on the brand preference of bank clients. Affective orientation of participants was measured by Affective Orientation Scale. Findings Results demonstrate that for bank clients with low and high affective orientation, advertisements characterized by cognitive load (low vs high) and brand story style (underdog vs top dog) will elicit differential brand preferences of bank clients. Originality/value This is the first research to examine the moderating effects of bank clients’ affective orientation, cognitive load and brand story style on brand preferences of bank clients. Specifically, this research takes up the call to apply bank clients’ personality traits to examine the impact of bank marketing on brand preferences of banks.

A Phenomenology of the Devout Life

A Phenomenology of the Devout Life offers a phenomenological approach to the kind of Christian spirituality set out in François de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life but with parallels in other movements in both Protestant and Catholic spirituality. Situating the subject in relation to contemporary philosophical discussions of selfhood, the book arrives at a view of the devout self as essentially motivated by an affective orientation towards God that, via the experience of temptation and the practice of humility, subordinates reason to love and ends with self-annihilation. In this annihilated condition it becomes capable of a pure love of God, devoid of self-interest, willing only what God wills. These themes of pure love and nothingness are explored with particular reference to the writings of Archbishop Fénelon. Although this may suggest that the devout life is a kind of mysticism, it is argued that as a programme for practical life in the world it is distinct from experientially oriented kinds of mysticism, though sharing the ideal of union with God. As the first of a three-part Philosophy of Christian Life, the book ends by questioning what it could mean to insist that the source of the affective lure of devotion is God.

Transmigrant media: Mediating place, mobility, and subjectivity

This article contributes to the exploration of interrelationships between human and media mobilities through analysis of qualitative interviews with 18 Southeast Asian transmigrants in Australia. This group demonstrated three main orientations toward the media they habitually engaged. In the memorial-affective orientation, respondents re-engaged media familiar from remembered pre-migration childhood and family contexts. An ambivalent-localizing orientation was taken toward Australian legacy media, some of which respondents found helped them relate to Australian culture while other forms were experienced as xenophobic and alienating. In the cosmopolitan-global orientation, respondents engaged global corporate, largely Anglophone media in ways that reinforced their sense of themselves as mobile and cosmopolitan. Most importantly, in our respondents’ experience, these three orientations were often not separable but interwoven into complex admixtures. We explore the implications of this hybrid experience of location through media both for the conceptualization of place in globalization, and for the study of migrant media.

Emotion in sales performance: affective orientation and need for cognition and the mediating role of motivation to work

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and under what condition does affective orientation (AO) drive salesperson performance (SP) and whether there is a tradeoff between affective orientation and the need for cognition (NFC). Using career stage theory, this research proposes that emotion is important and that the relationship between AO and SP is conditional and mediated. Design/methodology/approach The hypothesized model is tested using survey data that were collected from 611 attendees at a Midwest regional sales meeting of a national direct selling organization. The model was estimated using 5,000 bootstrapped samples drawn to assess the conditional and indirect effects. Findings The findings reveal that AO increases SP when mediated through motivation to work (MW), but only during the salesperson’s initial stage of their career – their first year. In subsequent career stages, AO’s impact on SP diminishes, while NFC’s impact on SP remains significant regardless of career stage. Research limitations/implications The data were collected from a single selling organization. Practical implications This study increases the understanding of the relationship between salesperson emotion (AO) and SP. This informs sales managers that new salespeople interpret information both emotionally and cognitively, which impacts the management of early career salespeople. Originality/value Sales research rarely investigates the role of emotion. This research finds that emotion can be an asset to new salespeople. However, the need for emotion (AO) decreases with experience and no longer has a significant impact on performance after the initial stage.

Troubled Men: Ageing, Dementia and Masculinity in Contemporary British Crime Drama

Focusing on three recent British film and television crime dramas, Mr Holmes (2015), The Fear (C4, 2012) and the English language version of Wallander (BBC, 2008–16), this article argues that older men in these texts are a site through which contemporary social and cultural anxieties about ageing and dementia are played out in highly gendered ways that link to social and philosophical reflections on power, autonomy and selfhood. The dramas, while very different in affective orientation and tone, nonetheless all produce reflections on the meanings of memory loss within figurations of masculinity in the crime genre which have a broader significance for thinking through the representational dilemmas of dementia.