‘The Past is a Foreign Country’

This article argues that much can be understood about the historicity, context-dependency and mutability of emotions throughout history by comparing how contemporary multilingual peoples, particularly immigrants, use their linguistic repertoires today. Beyond citational performances of fluency, for any meaningful integration to happen in a non-native language, then its emotional vocabulary must be internalised. I discuss how language is acquired through the body in the context of L1 children and L2+ language learners, and show how emotion forms a central part of that mechanism from the earliest stages. Moving between different languages is not simply a case of finding ‘best fit’ translations for universal terms, but is inherently, often painfully emotional. Similarly, historical emotions are not variations on a theme, but rather specific, fully embodied physical feelings unique to that time

Embodied cognition · Feeling · Vocabulary · Emotional Labor in Professions · Emotions and Moral Behavior · History of Emotions Research