AustLit

The focus of this essay is the racialised political emotions of ‘good white people’. I examine what Berlant names ‘public feelings’, focusing on the way emotional states are part of communal experiences. My interest is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ repeated calls for mainstream Australia to genuinely engage with political and cultural difference, and listen. Such claims often make ‘good white people’ anxious. They protest, insist they are trying but don’t know what to do. Good white people’s anxiety is much more telling than the stories that are told about bad racists. Thus, it is a productive site to analyse the cultural dynamics of settler–Indigenous relations, and to understand how race structures Australian culture and the endurance of racism. (Source: publisher's abstract)

In many Australian communities, outdoor municipal pools are much loved yet constantly threatened with closure. Threats of closure inspire impassioned responses and it is clear that these seasonal pools offer much more than physical infrastructure. At first glance, the concept of ‘emotional geography’ seems to capture this ‘more’, and this essay, based on research at one such pool, demonstrates how pools afford sociality, embodied experiences and practices of emplacement that emotionally connect people to each other, to nature and to an imagined historical community. However, participants’ narratives also revealed affective intensities, and multisensory evocations of place and self synchronically encountered, that the concept of ‘emotional geography’ cannot capture. To understand the cultural meaning and personal significance of seasonal pools in Australia, we have to feel our way through the placial folding of affective intensities and emotional lives. (Source: publisher's abstract)