ANGLE: Anger, legitimised
Amplified anger and its rhetorics of legitimation in the 21st century
Anger is often condemned as unconstructive or even anti-democratic, yet people across the world are increasingly turning towards anger as a mode of creating political connections and building cultural exchanges. ANGLE investigates how collective anger is generated, shared and legitimised within or across different communities. The project compares the legitimation, transmission and ethics of amplified anger across multiple local and global political sites to provide a vibrant research platform for studying the cross-regional, interconnected politics of anger.
The world is an increasingly angry place. Fueled by economic turmoil, conflict, climate collapse and culture wars, outbursts of collective anger are visible online, on the streets, and in various political forums. These outpourings of visible, collective ire, what we call ‘amplified anger’, have been historically condemned in mainstream public discourse as anti-democratic, uncivil attacks on human co-existence. But for the people engaged in these acts of rage, anger is often seen as a fully legitimate, necessary response to injustice, oppression or crisis. There is an urgent need to study the sources and rhetorics of legitimation that allow this amplified anger to flourish, be voiced, and spread within and across contemporary communities.
ANGLE (anger, legitimised) studies how communities that feel their anger has been delegitimised seek to perform, communicate and justify this volatile emotion. Composed of four interconnected work packages (Fury, Venom, Rage and Wrath), the project explores gendered, postcolonial, post-conversion and neo-religious iterations of anger in specific cultural sites across the globe. It uses a novel two-fold methodology: fieldwork and participant observation to access and study the localised ‘anger worlds’ of particular communities; and textual analysis to study the print mediums and online spaces where discourses of amplified anger intermingle to create wider, transnational ‘anger arenas’.