‘ … an invitation to a new multi-disciplinary social science crafted with humour, a sense of paradox, ready to be vulnerable as it plays out new ideas and new speculations about the world of ideas … this book is only an aperitif to a richer creation, a sensorium of words, visuals and events that celebrates a still emerging world to which the author plays guide, sceptic, trustee, storyteller and critic.’
- Shiv Visvanathan, Social Scientist based in Ahmedabad
‘Pramod Nayar’s States of Sentiment represents a fascinating merger of cultural studies with philosophy, psychology, and trauma studies through the overarching category of Affect. The book is filled with the ‘emotional style’ that Nayar explores, and readers recognise the influence of culturally-coded images and narratives in the creation of real emotions and conceptions of happiness, suffering, aversion, and hope. Broadly appealing and creative, Nayar’s text connects with readers, thanks to his well-chosen examples (mostly from American and Indian public culture) and easy way of inserting himself into the text. Nayar offers a way to critically consider the effects of a continuous barrage of mediated and emotionally-charged content without dismissing the media as toying with people’s emotions and loyalties in order to manipulating viewers. Rather, he posits that the media can have a positive role to play; by transforming trauma into fictional melodrama, kitsch can make history consumable. While recognising that there is a generalised trend toward affective indifference as we are inundated with images of suffering, Nayar also sees a space being opened for voluntary work and interventions based on sympathy. The book ends on a hopeful note, assigning real consequences in terms of both emotions and actions to the ideas and narratives encountered in public culture.’
- Kristen Rudisill, Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA
‘We live in a world in which expressions such as “globalization”, “the increased pace of life”, “the knowledge revolution”, “media saturation”, and “compassion fatigue” are so familiar as to be banal. Our senses and our emotions are overloaded and still we seem to have more and more access to emotionally intense events and stimuli that are increasingly packaged as commodities. Taking cues from Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall’s views of culture as respectively “structures of feeling” and “feelings, attachments and emotions as well as concepts and ideas” Pramod Nayar in this impressive work of cultural studies unpacks the discursive fields of emotion.… But this is no jeremiad of a bereft culture. Rather States of Sentiment points to an affective turn in public culture that contains within it hope, that is “emotion generated through the imagination of possibilities”. It is a bracing study, but one that offers a way out of the dead-end of despair in our highly commodified world.
- Ian Lewis Gordon, Department of History, National University of Singapore