Three approaches to emotion and affect in the aftermath of the Zhuhai incident

There are multiple ways discourse can be taken as “emotional”. This paper 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 for 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, as capable of deploying emotions as socially—and even politically—consequential referents. Although actual discourse rarely falls neatly into only one of these categories, each denotes analytically distinct ways discourse can be “emotional”. Below I address each in turn, employing the Zhuhai incident and its aftermath for heuristic illustration