ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a specific episode in Sino-Japanese relations – what shall be labelled the “Zhuhai incident” – to examine how we can approach the relationship of discourse to emotional expression and affective dynamics. This contribution lays out three specific approaches. The first takes discourse as indicative of emotion, as offering evidence of and insight into the emotional state of its author or utterer. The second examines the potential of discourse to be provocative of emotion – that is, constructed to elicit emotional reactions from its audience – by use of particular symbols, themes, and narratives. And the third focuses on discourse as invocative of emotion, or in other words explicitly deploying the social significance of emotions in discourse to personal, social, or political ends. Importantly, each approach denotes analytically distinct ways discourse interacts with feeling structures and feeling rules. The chapter addresses each approach in turn, asking how they respectively help us make sense of the Zhuhai incident and its aftermath.
