Abstract
Affective nationalisms
Affective nationalisms are made through affective economies of fear and love (Ahmed, 2004) and emotions in-between. My definition would be to posit affective circulations in relation to ‘nation’ and membership of such, as the political-economic driver of social relations. The affective charges that circulate define the very essence of ‘mobility’, ‘freedoms’ and ‘self-determination’. Contrary to Merriman (in this symposium), a philosophical account at molecular level is profoundly interesting, but remains a possibility for only some over others. The structural inequalities of society and their embedded violences cannot be addressed politically at the molecular scale. The scale of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ are figured through the economies of multicultural intimacies and racial politics (Fortier, 2008) at street level. Banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) cannot be understood at the molecular scale, and more importantly, cannot be resisted at that scale. As Matless (1998: 17) has argued, ‘national identity is regarded as a relative concept always constituted through definitions of Self and Other and always subject to internal differentiations’. In this commentary, there is a contestation of the bounded concept of a singular affective nationalism, through the investigation of the striations of the economies of race (and resulting senses of belonging). These internal striations are materially figured through dominant planes of connection, affirmation and national sensibility. Here, the proposed inclusion of race as a striation of affective nationalism considers seriously the contingent and plural affective charges that materialise circulations of nationalistic sentiment that is assumed as singular and embodied homogeneously in banal cultural processes (see Closs Stephens, 2016; Merriman and Jones, 2017). As Antonsich (2018: 450) argues, the very account of nationalism is ‘understood as a state-centric construct operating uniformly across space and society’. By pluralising our accounts of both nation and nationalism, we can acknowledge the very different sets of rights and responsibilities various citizens can inhabit, inspire and celebrate. For Brubaker et al. (2006: 206), nation is conceived as a contingent and contextual discursive resource, not a continuous phenomenon. However, without being reductive about the agency of individual bodies or indeed collectives of communities, the ‘discursive’ positioning is not one available to all, at all times. There is a visual economy of recognition and misrecognition (Antonsich, 2018) that encounter ‘others’ as outside of the sensibilities or indeed moral geographies of nation and nationalism when evoked. Black bodies are violently erased every day (Erfani-Ghettani, 2015) through structures of policing (Dearden, 2017) the judiciary, mental health agencies 5 and racial violence. Racialised figures are dehumanised and targeted as erasable. 6 There is a persistence within the logics of signification that is reproduced, in formats of cultural expression in the public sphere.
The persistence of ‘race’
Hall (2017) posits The Fateful Triangle as the nexus of race, ethnicity and nation where ultimately the hegemonic regimes of truth that define race and cultures of racism are produced and reproduced. The resilience of ‘race’ as scientific fact, despite having been debunked since its inception, is located at the core problem of seeing aesthetic differences in skin, bone and features, and their having meaning with respect to their place in the Great Chain of Being marked by intellectual potential, spiritual capacities and affective palates. Du Bois (quoted in Hall, 2017: 40) articulates ‘the grosser physical differences of colour, hair and bone transcend scientific definition’, the discursive, sociological or indeed philosophical interventions to describe, debunk or de-inscribe race with meaning simply buries the biological conception and does not transcend it The matters of race are ‘clearly defined to the eye’ and as such retain a rootedness in cultural values as evidence of difference. This work of seeing difference is visceral and thus associates with ideas within a chain of equivalences (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) which are felt and lived. The embodied experience of seeing difference is thus part of the affective circulation of fear, hope and repulsion that feature in nationalisms both banal and violent. The retention of the logics of our fields of vision undermines the evidence of there being no biological differences that constitute races.
Race as a signifier indicates implicitly human worth; the regimes of truth are played out in economies of employment, housing, policing and governance (Hall, 1999; Hall et al., 2013; McKitterick, 2011; McPherson, 1999). The oppressive structures that are institutionally racist compound the effects of the prejudice against religious and ethnic groups. Within state calls for a singular, loyal citizenry, what is evoked are calls for a recognition of ‘the enemy within’; the threats of ‘radicalised’ Britons and indeed those with legal rights to remain, but who are easily discounted, betrayed and excluded from British territory and rights to state care (Whitfield, 2006). These rhetorical calls for a return to a golden age (Williams, 1973) depend upon a moral geography of nation and national identity (Darby, 2000; Matless, 1998). The evocation of a singular national sensibility is what has been critiqued and undermined (Gilroy, 2013, 1993; Matless, 1998; Kinsman, 1995; Pollard, 1989). These enemies within return periodically (Gilroy, 2013), including more recently, the figure of the radicalised Muslim (see Heath-Kelly, 2013).
Striations of nationalism
This account of ‘others’ permeates sociological and cultural studies’ own repertoire (Mahmood, 1996). ‘Symptomatic analyses that explain the success of ethnic and politico-religious movements as signs of socio-cultural disorder, cultural backwardness and/or lack of appropriate modernization, fail to take these movements seriously’ (Mahmood, 1996: 1). Two problems are identified by Mahmood (1996: 2), firstly that ‘nationalist movements’ are defined in-relation to the West and often relegated to the realm of ‘backward cultural others’. The second issue is of the blanket characterisation of ‘others’, without investigating the historical, political and economic particularity of each case. Instead, there is a misrecognition of these movements as fundamentalist and dependent on notions of cultural and ethnic absolutism. As such, these movements are positioned as other to the disposition of ‘patriotism’, which is an indication of a developed European citizens’ sensibility. The misrecognition positions ‘nationalism’ based on ethnicity or religion as reactionary, in comparison with movements in developing nations in the era of decolonisation, which are sanctioned as rightful counter-discourses to colonialism and colonisation (Hall, 1993). The argument effectively discerns between ‘other’ nationalisms based on ‘intolerance and difference’, which lead to ethnic cleansing and genocidal violences and those situated in Europe. However, in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is those very European secular states where there has been violences against religious and/or ethnic groupings (Mahmood, 1996: 6) and in the case of refugees, a total negation of the value of Muslim migrant lives.
Modern European nations could be posited as contact zones (Pratt, 1996) as spaces for continual transculturation. Here, diasporised identities are disassembled and reassembled to form a ‘weave of differences’ that refuse ‘authenticity’, ‘tradition’ and as such narratives of ‘origin’ connected to blood and soil. The 21st-century resurgence of nationalism is a response to an imagined threat of syncretic creolisation. Although, rather than being experienced at the territory of the colony, the conditions are experienced at the centre of imperial thought and cultural dominance, Europe. Thus, any analysis of the visceral, affective flows between bodies and within nations requires an understanding of the space of cultural identities as they are made and remade. There are ‘complex relations of asymmetrical exchange … such change never takes place on equal terms … relations of cultural difference are also simultaneously relations of power, articulated in structures of hierarchization and subordination’ (Hall, 2017: 165). When thinking through the striations of affective nationalism, these striations are inevitably bound to the pain of oppression present in the everyday and embedded with the histories of transculturation. Nation and nationalisms are fissured with the politics of power, rights and inauthenticity.