Introduction

Abstract

Framing this special issue within a broader understanding of the concept of aesthetics as affective, sensory, and emotional entanglements, I start this introduction by grounding the present endeavour in the scholarship on revolution, senses, and affects. I then consider the ways in which this intertwining framework of multisensory and affective modalities proves to be particularly productive in exploring the idea of nationhood and politics after revolutions. Such a focus illuminates how specific dimensions of national narratives become only perceptible once one considers the aesthetical relationship between people’s bodies and the body politic. As revolutions move back and forth from the nation to people’s bodily sensorium, this collection uncovers the multiple facets of (post)revolutionary collective identities. This sustained attention to the perceptual, as a zone not only of ‘cultural intimacy’ but of national determinacy, I propose, also provides an occasion to reckon with politics beyond revolution itself.