Durable Public Feelings.

Exploring the durability of feelings, and the relationship of feelings to publics, the first part of this paper maintains that the multiplicity of contradictory means for engaging the terms 'public' and 'feelings' indexes precisely the conflicts that are constitutive of publics and feelings. The fights over terminology, I argue, are not something to resolve but something to understand, as part of what makes publics and feelings the important, exciting, and sometimes frustrating things they are to practise, experience, and study. In the second part of the paper, I ask questions about the durability of feelings in relation to one of the most durable, public, and disturbing feelings: that joy associated with blackface minstrelsy that is an expression of, and a practice of, white supremacy, which itself is, perhaps, the most enduring form of public feeling, cultural practice, and political aspiration in the history of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]