Affective Counterpublics in the Chinese-American Diaspora in the 19th and 20th Century

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Linjie Dai, whose interest is in affective counterpublics. His focus is especially on the experience of Chinese immigrants in the Chinese exclusion area of American politics.

The concept of affective publics emerges from a dissatisfaction with the Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which overemphasises rationality and sees affect and emotion as problematic. Even affect theory tends to ignore the role of race and racism in power relations and affect, however.

The experience of Chinese diasporic networks in the United States in the 19th and 20th century, well before the digital age, is valuable here: they enabled the circulation of affect in such communities, and thus served as affective counterpublics in opposition to dominant European-American society and its orientalising view of Asian-Americans. Chinese-language newspapers in the US variously expressed outrage, worries, homesickness, sympathy and other forms of affect; this should not be blindly romanticised either, however. Such observations may then also be translated to other minority communities, based in race, ethnicity, or other identity attributes. However, affective counterpublics are valuable as a critical concept.