This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?

The seminar invites papers that examine how emotion circulates through narrative and visual form. Modernist fiction may sustain a flattened tone, heritage television often builds ceremonial rhythm, and streaming platforms organize mood through algorithmic pacing. Some works generate intensity through repetition and withholding, while others explore displacement through silence, saturation, or fragmentation. In these instances, affect emerges as a force that both grounds and destabilizes cultural identity.

Possible areas of focus include:
• Emotional containment and repression in colonial and post-imperial literatures
• Ritual, repetition, and rhythm within heritage cinema and television
• Diasporic memory and displaced attachment in transnational texts
• Platform logic and algorithmic pacing of affect
• Affective strategies of overflow, stillness, or fragmentation

The sessions aim to foster sustained dialogue on the emotional structures that bind and fracture collective identities. The seminar welcomes contributions grounded in affect theory, comparative literature, media studies, and memory studies. Graduate researchers and faculty are encouraged to join.