Emotions and violences: Everyday coloniality

Abstract

Violence is perceived as such an obvious sign of our societies that we rarely really observe the news of violence behind it and with it we reach a state of unnoticed acceptance. Daily life in the 21st century is traversed by different forms of violence: political, religious, gender, and ethnic, just to mention a few of its many manifestations. In the classic social theory, various approaches to the violent features of social practices have been aimed at producing, circulating, and reproducing power. In this context, this article has a double objective: (a) to synthesize some facets considered key to study the connections between violence and emotions today and (b) to present some general guidelines for reading violence and coloniality. To achieve this objective, the following presentation strategy has been developed: (a) in the introduction, a first approximation of the connections between violence and emotions is presented, (b) some lines of study on violence are schematized and three fields of work are synthesized that show the relationship between emotions and violence, and (c) we offer a synthetic approach of violent practices and colonial violence. The article is built around a proposal to understand the various forms of violence as “colonial” and ends by emphasizing the opportunities of appealing to a sociology of hope as a counter light to the current politics of sensibilities anchored in violence.