Liminal Emotions and Visual Politics: Symbolic Repertoires Across Time

Emotions that move between the past and the present shape foreign policies, national identities, social movements, and a wide range of political practices. Rather than being confined to a single temporal moment, emotions are liminal: they carry historical weight while simultaneously influencing contemporary political realities. In this sense, liminal emotions function as symbolic repertoires of politics, particularly within the politics. Their continuity, transition, and transformation remain central to understanding how political actors and societies navigate political life. This article explores the intersection of emotions, historical traumas, and visual politics, emphasizing how emotions become repertoires of symbolic politics. While a substantial body of scholarship has examined the role of emotions in shaping state behaviour and political mobilization, a crucial need persists to incorporate visual analysis into the study of liminal emotions as symbolic repertoires. Visual representations—whether in photography, propaganda, memorials, or digital media—mediate emotional responses to historical traumas and contemporary crises. By bringing together insights from political science, emotion studies, trauma studies, and visual politics, this piece aims to advance theoretical and methodological approaches that bridge the emotional and visual turns. Using the case of the Palestine–Israel conflict, the article demonstrates that images do more than document events; they evoke, sustain, and transform collective emotions across time.