The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Chapter 1’s focus text is excerpted from a Christian Aid fundraising letter about landmines. In her analysis of this letter, Ahmed explores the power relationships involved when pain is used in public discourse. Ahmed argues that the language used when pain is invoked to motivate audiences depends on a system of signs that highlight the suffering of bodies while obscuring the active agents of this suffering. Further, this language encourages the audience to appropriate the pain of others and transform it into a personal sadness that is sympathetic without being empathetic. Ahmed points out how the letter promises a kind of empowerment to its readers, who will experience release from their pain through the action of supporting Christian Aid and through identification with the charity’s ability to effect change. The Christian Aid letter, argues Ahmed, is one example of a larger tradition of Western elision of histories of reciprocity: It casts the Western audience in the role of the generous benefactor who can choose to alleviate suffering without acknowledging the ways in which the West’s riches accrue from that very suffering.

Because pain is