The ‘emotion arena’: everyday resistance and power in Havana, Cuba

This paper contributes to the literature on resistance and emotions by introducing the concept of ‘emotion arena’. Drawing on insights from emotional geography, the emotion arena conceptualizes how top-down efforts to regulate feelings – referred to as emotional power – interacts with bottom-up responses that can contest and reshape them. Through the case of Havana, Cuba the paper demonstrates how emotional resistance operates through continual negotiation and contestation, gradually reconfiguring and eroding the spaces of emotional power. These dynamics have broader, even geopolitical, implications, as emotional resistance can undermine the affective foundations on which state power rests, contributing to its gradual delegitimization.