Contributions to the History of Concepts

The modern concept communism emerged in the French public sphere in 1840 and rapidly gained currency in other European countries as well. Though primarily used as a term of derision, its radicalization of already-established senses of accelerating change and worldly futurity secured its incorporation in complex unities of utopian hopes and dystopian fears all over the political spectrum of the time. The Danish public sphere of the 1840s reveals three basic modes of using communism, each linked in its peculiar way to new uses of the concept democracy: conservative equations of democratic political equality (particularly, universal male suffrage) and communist attacks on private property in favor of a community of goods; left ist democratic denials of such equations and the emergence of anticommunist democratic positions; and, between the two extremes, liberal distinctions between their own moderate conception of democracy and the false, “communist” democracy of the left.

At first glance, a conceptual history of emotions appears counterintuitive. Unlike the concepts of democracy or liberalism, emotion concepts seem to refer to stable objects, rooted in the genetic heritage of the human race. However, answers to the question, “What is an emotion?” vary widely across time and space. It cannot even be taken for granted that our analytic concept of emotion is matched by corresponding concepts in the sources: the very question might be untranslatable. In the first section, the introduction will discuss the challenge a conceptual history of emotions faces from psychology’s perception of affective phenomena as objects that exist independent of their representation. The aim of this section is to clear the theoretical and methodological ground for an investigation of emotion concepts in South Asian traditions, which will be the central focus of the second section of this introduction.

This article looks at the changes in the concepts used to write about emotions in Urdu between 1870 and 1920. It argues that while emotions at the beginning of the period were still thought of as premised upon notions of equilibrium and balance, which accorded a crucial role to the will and to rationality, fifty years later concepts celebrated the elementary power of emotions and their capacity to overwhelm the individual. This can be read as an indicator and factor of a profound emotionalization of private as well as public life. The first section looks at ethical and pedagogical texts, the second at articles published in journals linked to the reformist Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, and the final section at the reconfiguration of emotion knowledge through the translation and adaptation of psychological treatises.

This article illustrates the impact of generic differences and changes in the social and political context on the use of emotion concepts such as love and passion in selected Urdu novels from 1869 until 1945. While Nazir Ahmad (1830/31–1912) and Rashid-ul Khairi (1868–1936) in their domestic novels tend to stress the control of passions, particularly in familial relationships, Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) in his Islamic novels/historical romances allows for romantic attraction and propagates religious fervor, bringing him closer to the emotion vocabulary used in contemporary Urdu journalism. This format was later expanded by Nasim Hijazi (1914–1996), who sought to strengthen the enthusiasm of fellow Muslims in their fight for Pakistan. In this highly popular genre strong feelings and passions serve to arouse intense feeling for the Muslim community.

This article argues that conceptual change can be brought about and shaped by communication practice by approaching emotional experience in a particular strand of Islamic sermons from contemporary Bangladesh. It utilizes an extended rhetorical analysis, pertaining to the intertwining of concepts to be communicated, concepts of communication, and performance patterns of the sermons. It argues that by the juncture of narrative techniques of immediacy and momentarization with a bodily grounding of the voice, the listeners and preacher jointly reach the self-affection of the bodily and salvific emotions of (com)passion. From this perspective, the role of rhetorical practice is not limited to an ex post facto translation of conceptual change into practice; instead, the rhetorical goal of self-affection turns out to be an active factor in shaping concepts decisive for contemporary Islamic religiosity.