What does it mean to experience national belonging through emotion? This session brings together papers that consider the layered connections among feeling, identity, and cultural memory as they unfold across literature and media. In periods marked by rupture or transformation, emotion often anchors or unsettles the stories through which nations come to know themselves. Heritage dramas steeped in nostalgia, literary depictions of estrangement, and audiovisual forms of cultural longing all point to this dynamic. National identity, in these works, emerges not as a fixed concept but as a lived and felt experience.

The panel invites proposals that explore how literature and media—whether film, television, digital content, or hybrid forms—shape and circulate emotional responses linked to the nation. What emotional frameworks arise through genre, visual rhythm, or narrative repetition? How do artistic forms register tensions between stability and disruption? In what ways do memory and emotion intersect in stories of empire, displacement, or cultural inheritance?

Submissions may draw on affect theory, memory studies, media theory, or cultural analysis. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that link textual and visual readings, and encourage work that examines emotional themes such as nostalgia, shame, pride, and melancholia. These affective forces often shape both individual and collective understandings of identity.

In a moment defined by political division, post-imperial reckoning, and the rise of digitally mediated emotion, this session asks how national feeling is formed, expressed, and circulated—and why literature and media remain vital sites for navigating that emotional terrain. We especially encourage submissions from scholars in modern and contemporary literature, critical theory, media studies, diaspora studies, and comparative literature.