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Andrew Burke, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism and Affect, Screen, Volume 54, Issue 1, Spring 2013, Pages 104–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs069
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Whatever your feelings about affect theory, it is scarcely deniable that in the short span of its existence it has transformed several fields. While it might seem to herald a turn inwards, towards a private realm of experience focused exclusively on the personal, the opposite is in fact true. Whether cast in terms of emotion (Sara Ahmed), feeling (Sianne Ngai) or sentiment (Lauren Berlant),1 the affective turn binds the private to the public, understanding the relation between the subject and society to be mediated by sensation.
Such an approach offers much to thinking through the power and force of television, not simply in terms of the emotional impact it so often delivers but by the way in which audiences are imaginatively bound together by the affective experience of watching. In Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism and Affect, Marusya Bociurkiw examines the role television plays in the production and circulation of nationalist sentiment. Far from casting television as a mere vehicle for the transmission of ideology or focusing on the spectator's heroic resistance to such ideological seductions, Bociurkiw instead examines those moments when sensation precedes and overpowers sense, when gut reaction threatens to contradict and compromise conscious and deeply held political convictions.
