Description:

Please join us for a practice job talk with PhD candidate Shah Zeb Chaudhary, who will be presenting chapter four of his dissertation.

After the emotional excess of the Bush presidency and the War on Terror, President Obama campaigned on a promise of sobering realism, tough choices, and a strategy based on facts on the ground. Obama’s ‘fundamental seriousness’ was the anti-thesis to ideological and emotional arm-chair weekends warriors who led the U.S. to a disastrous war in Iraq and away from the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet even as seriousness presents itself as the solution to the problems of ideology and emotion, its successful performance increases the proclivity to violence. Chaudhary explores seriousness as a way of making sense of the nation-state and its place in the world order. The serious state traffics in what can be described as subdued affect, a pathos of rationality and gravitas, and morally necessary sovereignty. He analyzes seriousness’ political work as affect by analyzing it as a genre of political discourse by looking at how it casts the self and others, its moral economy, style, narrative, and narrative trajectory. The chapter explores how seriousness operates in Obama’s foreign policy speeches, especially as a way of making sense of and legitimizing U.S. imperial sovereignty.

Shah Zeb Chaudhary is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Dissertation Fellow at the Roberta Buffet Institute for Global Affairs. He did his M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown Univeristy as a Fulbright Scholar. His research explores the intersection of international relations and emotions.

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