On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative by Sue J. Kim (review)

I began reading Sue J. Kim’s excellent On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative at the same time that the city of Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in response to the Michael Brown shooting. The anger of the citizens of Ferguson was depicted on several media sites, but very little attempt was made to understand the intricate historical and political layers that gave rise to this anger. Kim’s book, on the other hand, is dedicated to “the justly angry” and unravels both the deep structural roots of anger and the many expressions it takes, each varying according to its social and historical context.

Throughout the book, Kim “examines anger as an elastic system and multiva-lent phenomenon that must be understood through myriad lenses, including cognitive, affective, ideological, and materialist” (4). Kim illuminates her reading of various forms of anger by turning to a range of cultural texts, arguing that films and novels “are important sources to study in order to better understand human emotions and cognitions” (5). Each of the texts she selects—by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—as well as the film and the television series that she analyzes (Crash [2004] and The Wire [2002-2008]) are also deeply imbricated in the politics of race, decolonization, gender, and neoliberalism. While Kim navigates the vastly different political terrains of these texts, she is consistent in her claim that “anger is dialectical” (6). This claim has many implications, one of the most significant being that anger, rather than being “fixed, abstract, singular, or expressive of an interiority … can be understood as an ongoing (and not necessarily teleological) process, a combination of many historical factors that produce a certain experience and expression of a person’s anger at a particular moment in time” (6).

An important element of Kim’s analysis is her attention to some of the “central insights and debates about anger within cognitive psychology” (13). Kim names the work of three cognitive narrative theorists—Lisa Zunshine, Patrick Colm Hogan, and David Herman—as representative of “forays into negotiating cognitive studies and literary and cultural studies to try to gain a fuller, richer understanding of how our minds, bodies, and emotions work in history” (41). She also notes the importance of appraisal theory, one of the dominant models in cognitive psychology, for its “emphasis on contexts and discourses” (41). However, in the end, Kim argues, “cognitive studies of emotion still remain methodologically limited” since a “vast majority of psychological studies have focused on a very small, non-representative sample of humanity (rich, educated, white Westerners), and have yet to engage substantially with both other cultures as well as other disciplines, such as cultural studies” (42).

It is to Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling” and its rootedness in relations and structures that Kim turns to demonstrate that anger is “complexly dialectical in nature” (64). The more recent work of feminist cultural theorists Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde likewise enhances the work of cognitive studies, showing the “contradictions between the concept of anger as a purely individual phenomenon, and the lived reality of anger as a collective, systemic, and ideological product” (53-54). Moreover, in countering tendencies in cognitive theory, Kim asserts that “Anger is gendered, raced, sexed, and classed” (68). In framing her reading of cultural texts, she also reiterates that anger is historical, related to systems, and a “problematic” that “generates as many questions as answers, and that is related to many other considerations beyond the realm of emotions” (69).

Perhaps one of the most significant considerations that she addresses is the logic of global capitalism. As Kim maintains, her analysis “seeks to examine the relations and conditions of anger through the examination of texts in the context of late capitalism” (64). This is not to suggest that there is some unidimensional, homogeneous cause-effect relationship between economic systems and cultural and social actors that plays out in a mechanical way. In...