Contribution short abstract

This paper asks questions about the transmission of situational affect in contexts of caregiving amongst Kurdish refugees in London. I will talk about reported speech, quotation as an object of exchange and yardstick for the study of (in)communicabilities.

Contribution long abstract

In a recent book called ‘Endurance’ (Brill, 2024) I studied the affordances of Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) embedded in the representation of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. This study included a chapter on affective paradigms. Here I mobilized the work of Catherine Lutz, Don Brenneis, Judith Irvine, Benedicte Grima and Seyda Türk Smith. As a shorthand to refer to this body of work I used the term ‘situational affect’. When situations that elicit affect appear more salient than inner subjective experience and emotion words this term is apposite. For this conference paper I take this argument a step further and ask questions about the transmission of situational affect.

Such questions are linked to the construction of voice amongst Kurdish refugees in London, questions about who speaks, who gets heard, and who becomes silenced. Communicative and affective contestations in the Kurdish community in London concern diverse caregivers. This concerns the institutional contexts in which chronic pain becomes articulated. Equally important are caregivers within the extended family. Children and grandchildren may have been raised in Turkish or English and are attuned to a divergent affective paradigm. In this paper I focus on the reported speech clause, as an opaque form in language, a distinct shape, and object-like sound. I build upon the French linguist Josette Rey-Debove’s work on meta-language. The quotation is hereby interrogated as the affect itself, a speech object to be exchanged, transacted for the transmission of situational affect. This raises further questions about (in)communicabilities.