Anger gets a bad rap. Calling someone “angry” often labels that person as irrational, unstable, and unpredictable. To say “He’s just angry” or “She spoke out of anger” implies something beyond reason, acting as an excuse or an indictment. Regardless of the merits of that person’s reasons for anger, the characterization of “angry” can dismiss not only the content of that person’s thoughts and feelings, but also the entire person, in a sense erasing subjectivity and agency. This sense of anger as pathological is often associated with women and racial-cultural Others. On the other hand, anger is also sometimes equated...

This chapter surveys current work on emotion and cognition, highlighting central insights and debates about anger within cognitive psychology. Despite discussion of a “warrior gene” that predisposes certain individuals toward greater aggression and violence (“Can Genes”), surprisingly little consensus exists among cognitive psychologists about what actually constitutes anger—its triggers, its manifestations, its parameters, its ontological status. To me, this lack of agreement among cognitive psychologists was most surprising, because in cultural studies our understanding of “science” writ large is that of totalization, universality, and objectivity. In contrast, scientists’ and psychologists’ conversations about emotions, particularly anger, often prove to be...

The previous chapter summarized key debates in cognitive psychology about anger; this chapter surveys some approaches to emotion and anger in cultural studies, broadly defined. That is, by “cultural studies” here I refer not only to cultural studies in the Frankfurt or Birmingham School tradition or the more contemporary poststructuralist, post-Marxist approaches to culture; rather, as will become clear, I am referring to these strands of cultural studies as well as various other approaches to studying culture. In other words, “cultural studies” in this chapter should be understood as an umbrella term, just as “cognitive studies” is a general term...

Why was the 2005 filmCrashso popular? Critics have discussed howCrashactually exacerbates the racial problems that it strives to critique. Directed by Paul Haggis, the film spans two days in Los Angeles, focusing on characters of various races whose lives intersect to varying degrees of calamity.Crashwas lauded for its unflinching portrayal of race relations; Roger Ebert called it “a film about progress,” and Oprah encouraged everyone to go see it (Glaister). The film won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for best picture in 2006, and is used in schools and institutional “diversity training” programs...

When I teachthe autobiography of malcolm xand Maxine Hong Kingston’sThe Woman Warriorin my American literature survey, students invariably tend to do two things: they evince surprise thatMalcolm Xis so muchlessangry than they had expected, and they want to readThe Woman Warrioras being about the cultural differences between China and the U.S. These tendencies—the readerly expectations that are disrupted by the actual text ofMalcolm Xand the expectations that fail to be disrupted in their reading ofWoman Warrior—are intimately connected. Both have to do with readers’ desires...

While Tsitsi Dangarembga’s acclaimed first novel,Nervous Conditions, is characterized by what we might think of as “large anger,” the sequel,The Book of Not, consists of what we might dub “small angers.” That is, while the anger experienced and expressed by the women inNervous Conditions—particularly Nyasha, but also Lucia, Maiguru, and Mainini—is grand, explosive, and raging at structures,The Book of Notshows the narrator, Tambudzai, experiencing minor rages, at offenses over apparently trivial things. These apparently quotidian outrages, however, are components of larger systems of injustice. The terms of size—large, small—also refer to...

In his 2000 study of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s works, Simon Gikandi notes an incongruity between Ngugi’s description of the “strong emotions and deep personal feelings” involved in writing the novelDevil on the Cross, and the lack of affect or sentiment in the novel itself. In his memoirDetained, Ngugi describes painstakingly writing the novel on toilet paper in prison, only to have the prison guards confiscate the writings: “With this novel I had struggled with language, with images, with prison, with bitter memories, with moments of despair, with all the mentally and emotionally adverse circumstances in which one is...

The eighth episode of the first season of HBO’s seriesThe Wire, “Lessons,” provides a brief but striking example of the interactions of cognition, emotion, and context. Sarah, a young girl under the care of Wallace, a sixteen-year-old low-level drug dealer in the Barksdale drug organization, comes to ask him for help with her math homework. Wallace quickly and easily reads the problem aloud for her.¹ He shrugs at its simplicity and says, “Just do it in your head.” She thinks and responds, “Seven, right?” Wallace shakes his head, so she guesses again, “Eight?” Exasperated, Wallace reframes the problem for...

I started this book before the Arab Spring, the European antiausterity protests, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since then, however, people around the world have transformed their frustration at capitalism, political repression, and explicit or implicit rule by the wealthy, or the 1 percent, into political and moral outrage. This shift was sparked by the global economic recession, the material result of the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few over the past several decades. Although the problems had existed previously (Muammar Gaddafi had been in power for forty-two years, and U.S. median middle-class wages...