Reimagining the Nation: Togetherness, Belonging and Mobility 9781447328476

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CLAIRE SUTHERLAND

REIMAGINING THE NATION Togetherness, belonging and mobility

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

CLAIRE SUTHERLAND

REIMAGINING THE NATION Togetherness, belonging and mobility

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773 702 9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978-1-4473-2628-1 ISBN 978-1-4473-3663-1 ISBN 978-1-4473-3664-8 ISBN 978-1-4473-2847-6

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The right of Claire Sutherland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover: image kindly supplied by Anthony Key Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

To S.

Table of contents List of figures

vi

Acknowledgements vii Introduction

1

one

Brexit nation

7

two

Home and belonging

27

three

‘The Europe we want’

45

four

The political space of the sea

61

five

Representation beyond the nation

79

six Conclusion

99

References

105

Index

121



v

List of figures 1.1

Anthony Key, Trespassing (2000)

2.1

Anthony Key, Bok Gwai/White Ghost (2005)

27

3.1

Ai Wei Wei, Untitled (2016)

45

4.1

Anthony Key, Battle of Britain (2007)

61

4.2

Anthony Key, Battle of Britain (2007), detail

62

5.1

Anthony Key, Culture to Go (2002)

79

6.1

Anthony Key, Going Home (2014)

99

7

vi

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Edyta Roszko for sparking my interest in the sea and to the Durham University students on my 2016–17 Nations and Nationalism module for helping me to think through some of the ideas in this book. Thanks also to Rupert Friederichsen for his support and to Lois and Clara: Girl Power!

vii

Introduction

One day in May 2016, I found a package in my pigeonhole at work. It was not another textbook from a publisher hoping that I would recommend it to my students. It was not a circular, an invitation, a catalogue or a letter. It was a thoughtful gift from a former student who wished me well, and identified themselves as having attended first-year lectures of mine years previously. I didn’t remember the student and was unlikely to have met them in person on the course, but they had sent me a sumptuous book related to my personal research interest in Vietnam. I was mystified. Their name was so unremarkable that my inept online searches yielded no leads, and there was no sender’s address. So this is my thank you. The book was called Vietnam Inc., by Philip Jones Griffiths (2016 [1971]), a reprint of a 1971 photo essay credited with further turning the tide of US public opinion against the Vietnam War. It lay on my desk for some time as an initial rifle through its pages had revealed images and captions so searing and disturbing that I could not bring myself to look again. Why? Surely, this was history. In 2015, I had contributed to a museum exhibition marking 40 years since the war’s end. Why did these images have the power to shock me all over again? On my desk lay another book, another photo essay, this time a thoughtful gift from my partner. It is a chronicle of refugees travelling to and across Europe (Kermani, 2015), and I have again been unable to do more than flick warily through the pages. Yet, together, these two works represent what I am frightened and fascinated by, namely, the power of nationalist ideology to justify aggression and exclusion.

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The exhibition that I helped curate was called ‘Vietnam: A Nation Not a War’. In truth, I had always avoided specialising in the Vietnam War itself in order to get precisely that message across. My research interest lay in how Vietnam imagined itself as a nation, just like any other nation-state, and how that permeated everything from its cityscapes, through its school textbooks, to its museums (Sutherland, 2010). I have always resisted starting definitions of nationalism as inherently bad, simply because I see nationalism everywhere. As the key legitimating principle of the global state system, patriotism is an incredibly powerful form of nationalism felt by people worldwide (Sutherland, 2012). There are lots of evil variants of nationalism, but we miss many of its manifestations if we focus on extremes. For millions of people the world over, loving, defending and identifying with their nation is as commonsensical as it is strongly felt. Therein lies the frightening, fascinating power of nationalist ideology for me. I was gripped by the escalation of the so-called European refugee ‘crisis’ in the summer of 2015. Surely, here, for all to see, was nationalism’s implacable logic laid bare. Nation-states arbitrarily opening and shutting borders and crudely sorting people according to nationality, as some sort of proxy for need. The European Union’s (EU’s) hypocrisy in holding itself up as a beacon of humanitarian values and a worthy recipient of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize while leaving thousands to drown in a vain attempt to reach its shores. The tent cities littering European islands, ports and borders, apparently a source of ‘shame’ to EU officials but nonetheless unshiftable, even by the EU’s impressive yet much-maligned bureaucratic apparatus. The unaccompanied children lost in their thousands and the UK Conservative government’s eventual pledge to take a few, but only to avoid an ‘embarrassing’ backbench rebellion. All on European soil. All in the name of EU member states, which justified keeping ‘Others’ out on the grounds that they do not belong to one of Europe’s national ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). Who are ‘we’? What is this national imagined community in whose name some cry that ‘we’ are full up, that ‘we’ do not want foreigners and immigrants taking ‘our’ jobs and diluting ‘our’ traditions? Why do

2

INTRODUCTION

we take nation-states for granted as dividing individuals and thereby defining their life chances? How do we grasp, challenge or even escape the embedded, all-pervasive principle of national belonging that governs so much of people’s lives the world over? That is what this book is about. It considers the central role of nations and nationalism in maintaining discursive divisions between insider and outsider, Self and Other, native and foreigner. Peter Nyers (2006: 3) notes that the word ‘state’ derives from the Latin word ‘stave’, meaning to stand (as do the words ‘status’, ‘static’ and ‘stasis’). By contrast, the later chapters of this book focus not on settlement, but on movement as embodied by the sea, in order to take a different perspective on nations and nationalism. The book imagines stepping outside ethnonational categories, using the sea to explore potential alternatives to nations as bounded communities (Anderson, 1991). Within a wider museums context that has long grappled with how to represent difference, memory, trauma and death (Sherman, 2008), maritime museums are one arena in which this reimagining is beginning to take place. Museums address the same questions of cultural representation and difference that underlie political framings of privileged insiders and unwanted outsiders, and so the insights that they offer can be effectively ‘scaled up’ to the international political arena. Since that day in May 2016, the UK has voted in a referendum to leave the EU, the UK government’s pledge to take in child refugees remains unfulfilled and the voices of right-wing, populist politicians grow louder across Europe and the US. Critical nationalism studies are needed now more than ever. This book takes the initiative in setting out an interdisciplinary, intercontinental agenda for further research. The work of Anthony Key is used to illustrate the ideas discussed in the book (except for a piece by Ai Wei Wei in Chapter Three). I first came across Anthony Key’s work in the now-defunct Manchester art gallery called Urbis, and felt compelled to use it in my lectures and conference presentations because it illustrated so well the ideas that I was interested in. Reading Key’s PhD thesis many years later, after having collaborated with him on my 2015 exhibition, I saw how his art practice had enabled him to achieve a clarity of understanding

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about his own identity and sense of home and belonging, but also brilliantly illuminate these concepts for others like me. Key’s art is conceptual yet playful. It focuses on food, which is how many people first encounter the ‘exotic Other’. His experience as a migrant to Britain is powerfully expressed in his artwork, from the sense of Trespassing evoked through barbed wire, through the waiting room for residency rights documented in Jerusalem (not featured here), to the cultural intermingling captured in many of his food-based works. Anthony Key’s work is abstract and yet accessible because it often uses humour and everyday utensils for Chinese cooking. It does not address national identity through predefined groups or even individual experience, but remains open to different interpretations, personal reflections and empathetic reactions. Key’s art prompts us to reflect on who ‘we’ are and how we identify with, or exclude, ‘Others’ who find themselves inside or outside ‘our’ chosen national community. Just as museums increasingly see their role as a forum for debate and ‘attempt to make room for a personal reflection’ (Lanz, 2016: 187), so Anthony Key prompts us to re-examine personal assumptions and prejudices around migration, integration and belonging. Chapter One of this book looks at the incipient ‘Brexit nation’ that is the UK today. In 2016, the word ‘Brexit’ quickly became established as a shorthand to describe the prospect of Britain and Northern Ireland exiting the EU. On 23 June 2016, this was confirmed by a UK-wide referendum result in favour of leaving, though a majority of voters in Northern Ireland and Scotland opted to remain in the EU. This referendum, taken together with Donald Trump’s successful US presidential campaign later that year, was widely heralded as a watershed moment across the political spectrum, not least by right-wing political leaders like Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom and Marine le Pen of the French Front National, who felt that their time had come. The consequences of the Brexit vote will be profound and long-lasting for people living in the UK and beyond, and the chapter seeks to understand what motivates individuals’ need for community in the context of a pervasive nationalist mood or atmosphere. Chapter Two examines the feelings of home and nostalgia that permeate nationalist

4

INTRODUCTION

atmospheres, using scholarship that transcends static associations of home with homeland. Chapter Three goes on to look at the EU’s failure to deal with the so-called migration ‘crisis’, which is, in fact, an ongoing challenge to the exclusionary logic inherent in the Schengen area and the ever-more accurate image of ‘Fortress Europe’. ‘Irregular’ migrants to Europe exemplify the ‘Other’, but they also trouble settled notions of insiders and outsiders, thereby prefiguring a more dynamic conceptualisation of belonging in the following chapters. Chapter Four broadens the scope of the discussion from the plight of migrants in the Mediterranean to the sea’s potential for theorising belonging in nonbinary ways. Chapter Five builds on this by examining representations of the sea in several museums with maritime associations, using their limited engagement with the materiality of the sea to call for greater attention to seaborne mobility as an alternative source of belonging. Readers interested in exploring everyday notions of national identity and belonging may wish to focus on Chapters One and Two. Those interested in theories that think beyond the nation-state may be more interested in Chapters Three to Five.

5

ONE Brexit nation Figure 1.1: Anthony Key, Trespassing (2000)

Anthony Key’s work entitled Trespassing conveys the reality and fragility of borders in a visceral way. It evokes barbed-wire fences that cannot be crossed without being branded a trespasser, and thus a criminal.

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Barbed wire in any form is visceral because it evokes danger and pain, reminding us that feelings are central to building borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The analogy with state borders and illegal immigrants is clear to see. Yet, by making the barbed wire out of Chinese noodles, brittle and broken in parts, Key is also suggesting the fragility of borders and perhaps also their impermanence. Were anyone to try to stretch these barbs to create an actual barrier, they would disintegrate. Also, by using a foodstuff associated with Chinese cultural stereotypes to create a border rather than be enclosed by it, perhaps Key is challenging the notion that national cultures can ever be delimited and defined. At the very least, Key is highlighting the violence of containment and the dangers of trespassing across constructed boundaries. His use of Chinese noodles also subverts the more positive connotations of so-called ‘ethnic’ food and takeaway shops, one aspect of migrant culture that Britons are quite ready to adopt. Minority ethnicity is a relational concept that only makes sense when set against the supposed community, homogeneity or authenticity of the majority. Yet, as we shall see later, these attributes are elusive, and exceedingly hard to grasp in non-racialised and non-nativist terms. In turn, the way in which legal and illegal migrants are frequently associated with being desirable and undesirable in both popular and political discourse also adds an emotional – or affective – charge to racialised constructions of ethnicity. As Tamara Vukov (2003: 343) notes: ‘immigration policy is a key institutional site in the public construction of the nation and its boundaries, particularly in terms of policies of selection and exclusion’. Anyone who defines the nation in opposition to recent or future migration absolves themselves of the difficult task of defining what unites so-called ‘native citizens’, to use David Miller’s (2016: 8) telling phrase. For example, politicians’ attempts to define Britishness or British values have often met with ridicule or indifference. Former Prime Minister John Major’s evocation of an English country idyll was insidiously unrepresentative, whereas the pronouncements of his successors Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron on British values clearly rejected fundamentalisms but were otherwise

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BREXIT NATION

so all-inclusive as to undermine any claim to national distinctiveness. This chapter explores the construction of the national Self and the foreign ‘Other’ by focusing on some of the ethnic and class divisions that characterise British society today, and how these link back to its colonial legacy. The final section explores how ideas of imagined community, both large- and small-scale, are closely interconnected with affect and emotion.

Homogenous nation Bridget Anderson (2013: 3) draws out the link between the nation and norms of ‘proper personhood’ using the term ‘community of value’, which she defines as follows: The community of value is one of the ways states claim legitimacy, and in this way it often overlaps with ideas of the nation. The British people uphold the rule of law, reward hardworking families, respect human rights, etc. The notion of ‘community’ facilitates a seamless switch between scales, between the imagined national community and the imagined local community. The community of value is further defined as based on liberal norms of individualism, freedom and property. It ‘does not acknowledge its own particularity’ (Anderson, 2013: 3), but is nevertheless used to distinguish insider from outsider. Anderson (2013: 4) goes on to point out that those deemed to be outside the community of value tend to include foreigners and migrants, but also benefit claimants, rioters, paedophiles and other criminals, among others. According to Anderson, a perceived failure to live up to liberal norms is what links the ‘non-citizen’ to the ‘failed citizen’ as undeserving of rights, protection and respect, and justifies the moral opprobrium heaped upon them. Attempts to distinguish economic migrants from refugees, or the undeserving poor from the war veteran fallen on hard times, seek to position individuals on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of this

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community of value. So-called benefit scroungers are deemed to be on the wrong side, for example, but hard-working families are on the right side. Economic migrants are also on the wrong side, unless they are hard-working, tax-paying, already legally in the UK and ideally good at baking or sports (Shukla, 2016). Child refugees are sometimes on the right side in principle, but often not in practice, and certainly not if they look older than their years – and so the ‘Othering’ goes on. Racialised, gendered and class stereotypes have an important role to play in these categorisations, which often ‘set up a homogenized “migrant” in conflict with a homogenized “white working class”’ (Anderson, 2013: 8). UK government models of ‘community cohesion’ premised on ‘sameness, reciprocity, mutual responsibility and a form of mutual connectedness and attachment’ (Ahmed and Fortier, 2003: 252) seek to bring together, but not question, such categories of people. Bridget Anderson’s argument regarding the community of value is unwittingly exemplified by a recent book entitled Strangers in our midst: The political philosophy of immigration by the Oxford University philosopher David Miller (2016). As can be divined from the title, the book is peppered with unexamined assumptions around ‘us’ and ‘them’. Miller does nothing to problematise who is included in the first-person plural ‘we’, the existence of state borders or his own Western perspective. The book’s introduction sets the tone: Should we encourage immigrants to join our societies, or try to keep them out? If we are going to take some in but refuse others, how should we decide which ones to accept? Or does everybody have a human right to enter in the first place? What can we ask of immigrants once they arrive? (Miller, 2016: 1) Miller goes on to rehearse standard arguments for and against migration. For example, he points out that democratic freedoms are based: on the tacit assumption that all those involved in the debate identify with the political community and have its best interests at

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BREXIT NATION

heart. Immigrants cannot count on this assumption being made in their case. So for them, speaking up against the government carries risks that native citizens do not have to face. (Miller, 2016: 8) Here, Miller simply assumes that migrants have enduring, exclusive loyalties to their country of origin that make them inherently suspicious to the ‘host’ state. Note also that naturalised citizens do not escape this suspicion since Miller specifies ‘native citizens’ as the only ones who can really identify with the political community, or nation. Miller (2016: 9) assumes a homogeneous national community of value that ‘wants and needs immigrants to become good, upstanding citizens[, which] may involve encouraging or requiring them to shed some of the cultural baggage they bring with them’. He then tenuously links this argument to a putative zero-sum game between higher immigration and a strong welfare state, and a cost–benefit analysis that asks whether it is ‘legitimate to tilt the scales in favor of the existing members of the political community’ (Miller, 2016: 11). Miller’s language mixes neoliberal economic calculation, variously citing the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and effects on gross domestic product (GDP), with unequivocal references to ‘proper personhood’ that present the ‘native citizen’ as implicitly morally superior. When he refers to the emotional impact of mistrust and ‘popular anxieties about immigration’, it is only to underline divisions ‘between native and newcomer’ (Miller, 2016: 10). Rather than question or problematise these categories, Miller entrenches and builds on them. Despite nods to cosmopolitanism and how the ‘stranger’ is experienced, Miller is incapable of stepping outside the all-too-familiar binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The result is an apology for the political status quo, an acknowledgement that migration is indeed to be feared and a defence of ‘the way we understand ourselves as members of political communities, with long histories and rich cultures’ (Miller, 2016: 19). This last point refers directly to the pervasive power of nationalism to cast peoples as the descendants and inheritors of ancestral traditions, values and ways of life.

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David Miller (2016: 18) explicitly assumes ‘a homogeneous “we” … in settled societies most of whose members have a sense that they and their ancestors are deeply rooted in a place’. Despite a stated concern with how people’s beliefs and attitudes might be changed, Miller does little to trouble his assumption of bounded political communities projected back into history and advancing down linear time. He is also remarkably chary of addressing race. Although he describes cultural difference in terms of dress, language, religion, cuisine and use of social space, the fraught politics of racialisation are conspicuously absent from this list, and from his discussion in general (Miller, 2016: 18). For example, in response to an illustrative example of a black student refused entry to a British university, he proposes that governments outlaw discrimination and work to raise school standards (Miller, 2016: 46). Nowhere does he acknowledge that racial discrimination may be illegal in the UK but is nonetheless endemic and deeply embedded in the state-centric logic that gives rise to all the divisive assumptions encapsulated in the phrase Strangers in our midst. Operating as it does from the abstract perspective of political philosophy, Miller’s work is all the more insidious because it gives intellectual credence to stereotypes of ‘us’ and ‘them’, only perpetuating instead of examining them. His premise is that immigrants bring cultural change and diversity to their ‘host’ country. In turn, this only makes sense in relation to an ideally homogeneous body politic, though even Miller (2016: 141) realises the inherent fallacy in this. This basic, simplistic frame of reference is no different to that of anti-immigrant groups and political parties. Miller’s use of apparently innocuous but orientalising and exoticising turns of phrase – such as when ‘the indigenous majority’ feels that immigration adds ‘spice to a previously dull national culture’ (Miller, 2016: 64) – only entrenches this prevailing view, as do uncritical references to ‘indigenous whites … immigrants and natives’ and ‘the social mainstream’ (Miller, 2016: 130, 134). Presenting these categories as things in the world (Brubaker et al, 2004: 32) rather than problematic perspectives on the world blinds us to their underlying, divisive logic.

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As Bridget Anderson demonstrates, the state’s ‘ideological work of manufacturing sameness’ is often racialised (Comaroff, cited in Anderson, 2013: 36), and all manner of policies, from policing, through education, to second-generation migrant integration, continue to have racial implications. For example, the 2001 Bradford ‘riots’ were most frequently cast as pitting white people against Asian immigrants, with the subsequent Cantle report advocating better integration of the latter. Anderson (2013: 101) questions these categorisations, noting that ‘there was no mention of whether or not the white participants in the disturbances were second generation children of white migrants’. David Miller (2016: 131), by contrast, cites the Cantle report ‘for evidence’ of the need for migrant integration. Although he usefully distinguishes between social, civic and cultural integration, Miller (2016: 144) ultimately concludes that it is in both immigrants’ and natives’ interests to embrace all three so that they can expertly discuss ‘the switchback career of some media celebrity’ over coffee with colleagues. Clearly, it is for the migrant to prepare for such an important eventuality. Miller does not envisage this as a reciprocal arrangement because he believes that the ‘native citizen’ should enjoy cultural predominance and safety in numbers. Anti-immigration rhetoric, which largely eclipsed the complex and multifaceted question of European Union membership itself during the UK’s 2016 referendum campaign, has become a dominant and pervasive frame of reference in British political debate. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have immigration control policies based on the questionable premise that immigrants are burdensome to UK society, and that were designed to draw the sting from the perceived electoral threat of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Alternative frames of reference that do not use migrants as scapegoats for the UK’s glaring economic inequalities, dearth of housing or creaking health service, among other issues, have not achieved the same dominance in public discourse and are thus much harder to advance and defend (Sutherland, 2005). The intensity of divisive rhetoric appears to have increased in the US since Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, since the UK voted for Brexit and since a series of

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terrorist attacks led to burkini bans on some French beaches. Years of anti-migrant rhetoric in Britain, including the Conservative Party’s long-standing pledge to cut net annual immigration to the tens of thousands, Theresa May’s record as Home Secretary and Ed Miliband’s ‘tough’ approach to immigration as Labour leader during the party’s failed 2015 general election campaign, have consequences for framing public discourse that cannot easily be undone. This was evident in the Brexit campaign, during which lies and racialised imagery were regularly employed, sometimes condemned and rarely withdrawn (Hobolt, 2016). There was an immediate and striking spike in hate crimes recorded in England and Wales (Corcoran and Smith, 2016: 18), as if the outcome of a referendum dominated by the question of immigration had made it easier for racists and xenophobes to vent their views and carry out attacks. All of these developments build on the same flawed premise that national imagined communities can be neatly bounded, delineated and kept separate from each other, and that immigration is a derogation from this ideal that should be resisted, controlled or, at best, tolerated. However, from Roman imperialism onwards, European history shows that this longing for homogeneity has no basis in fact (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010).

Postcolonial nation The British imperial historian Antoinette Burton (1998: 10) demonstrates how: in addition to the flow of European troops, travellers, and settlers from home to empire, there was a smaller but nonetheless influential movement of colonial peoples moving through the United Kingdom, making Britain at home a multiethnic nation and a site of diasporic movement across the whole of the nineteenth-century. The work of Burton and other critical historians of the British Empire demonstrates how colonialism has had a continuous and continuing

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impact on the former colonising power, as well as those colonised, in a way that has not yet reached public consciousness. In early 2016, the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign to remove a small statue of the 19th-century British imperialist and philanthropist Cecil Rhodes from an Oxford college alcove might have been considered a ‘niche’ expression of that fact, but its ramifications spread far beyond that august university. Timothy Garton-Ash (2016a), an Oxford professor of European history, reacted by candidly confessing that he had only recently begun to consider Britain’s imperial legacy, revealing an astonishing lack of self-reflection for an intellectual specialising in Germany’s post-war reckoning with its past. In Garton-Ash’s (2016a: online) view, ‘one can study history in Britain, and live as a politically conscious citizen here, without being pressingly confronted with this legacy. The British memory of empire is, I think, quite woolly – and that also means soft on ourselves’. Going on to reflect on an exhibition at London’s Tate Britain art gallery entitled ‘Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past’, Garton-Ash (2016a: online) observed that ‘the facing in question seems more like peering into something remote, exotic and half-forgotten than confronting something morally difficult’. By contrast, the students behind the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which originated in South Africa before coming to Britain, experienced the imperial legacy as something immediate and urgent, something that permeated their education, social mobility and life chances. In a contribution to the debate around Rhodes Must Fall, the novelist and academic Amit Chaudhuri (2016) echoed campaigners’ concerns about institutional racism. The 1998 public enquiry into the police handling of black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993 partly defined institutional racism as ‘discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’ (cited in Chaudhuri, 2016: online). In Chaudhuri’s (2016: online) assessment, the ‘word “unwitting” is key. It points to a moral economy in which it is possible to plausibly claim, and believe, that one is not a racist, while benefiting from a system that consigns many to invisibility’. For example, the

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very phrase ‘ethnic minority’ points to a classifying logic in which all those who belong to a nation where this kind of profiling is practised are complicit, since the term only makes sense in relation to a majority representing the norm. In the UK, that norm is white British. Every time I tick that box on equal opportunities monitoring forms – in the census, on job applications or when accessing social services, for instance – I participate in a form of categorisation that was originally introduced in colonial times for the purposes of coercion and control (Anderson, 1991: 165). I trust that institutions today are gathering such data in order to pursue progressive equality and diversity policies (having myself moonlighted as a university dean for equality and diversity). This categorisation nevertheless still defines difference along ethnic lines, albeit in order to address the inequalities that arise from precisely those divisions. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign drew attention to how colonialism affected colonisers as much as those colonised, and that social norms and national stereotypes today are still shot through with hierarchies and prejudices that first became established in the days of empire. Garton-Ash and Chaudhuri agree that it is not ‘morally difficult’ (Garton-Ash, 2016a: online) to ignore the legacy of colonialism in Britain today. For example, the predominance of Anglo-American, English-language texts on many a teaching syllabus does little to challenge the supposed superiority of the ‘Western’ gaze. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign objected to university courses that took Western history, science and culture as the reference point for evaluating the rest of the world, and demanded that the curriculum be decolonised too. This suggests that the key messages in Edward Saïd’s (1978) seminal work Orientalism have yet to permeate the academy, let alone public consciousness. It is to the pervasive impact of nationalism on identity and consciousness that we now turn.

Chauvinist nation Chauvinist nationalism looks down on ‘Others’ as somehow inferior. Chauvinists ‘attain their privilege only by dismissing, negating and

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pathologizing competing forms’ (Feola, 2016: 55). Even in the absence of such claims, national belonging, in principle, is only made possible by the process of ‘Othering’, or by defining some people as outside the imagined community. Indeed, when that which unites the ‘insiders’ is tenuous and hard to grasp (such as British values), opposition to the Other (such as radical Islam) can help define the nation-state’s identity (Closs Stephens, 2009). Any attempt to define ‘Britishness’ will undoubtedly fail to resonate with some members of the population because each individual’s identification with the nation will differ from their neighbour’s. People’s specific associations with national symbols are as unique as their life histories. At the same time, it is not easy to think outside the language of patriotism and nationalism, into which millions of children worldwide are socialised from an early age. As we shall see in later chapters, however, if we refuse ethno-national categorisations as organising principles and seek to step outside the nation-state frame, it is possible to glimpse other forms of solidarity and association. As a result of the boundaries created by ethnic categorisation, ‘the racialised are left with no appropriate vocabulary’ (Barabantseva and Lawrence, 2015: 925) to express their identities outwith these predetermined categories. For example, in her studies of a multicultural, inner-city estate in Nottingham, Lisa Mckenzie (2013: 1343) records respondents struggling to place themselves in terms of ethnicity and identifying as ‘more than just white’. Mckenzie’s work documents the assimilation of so-called black culture in working-class neighbourhoods and, consequently, the positive connotations of having mixed-race children. Hers is just one contemporary contribution to the ‘debate about the relationship between whiteness and belonging’ (Burton, 1998: 13) that rubs up against taken-for-granted norms of whiteness and the racialised hierarchies of privilege that were criticised by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. The way in which these norms permeate British society is no secret, but bear repeating: the disproportionate number of white, privately schooled students attending the UK’s top universities; the dominance of the metropolitan media by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge; the preponderance of old Etonians in the

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Conservative cabinet; the BBC’s repeated but piecemeal attempts to increase the diversity of its workforce; and the way in which the 2016 mayoral elections of Sadiq Khan in London – who describes himself as the son of a Pakistani bus driver – and Marvin Rees in Bristol – who self-identifies as the mixed-race son of a white single mother (The Guardian, 2016a) – are highlighted as exceptions to the norm. Respectively, Khan and Rees have been lauded as the first Muslim and the first Afro-Caribbean-heritage mayors of major European cities. Rees’s victory in a city built on slavery, where overt racism was still endemic in the 1960s, is indeed historic. However, although these men’s self-descriptions fit British minority ethnic (BME) categories, they also highlight their class as important exceptions to the norm. Rees (cited in The Guardian, 2016a: online) commented: ‘Look at our backgrounds. Sadiq is the son of a bus driver, I’m the mixed race son of a single white woman who spent time in a refuge’. In much the same way as the phantoms of empire haunt racialised understandings of difference in the UK, so a ‘social haunting’ arguably exists in some working-class communities today. During research into former mining towns blighted by pit closures under Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, Geoffrey Bright (2016) recounts how he struggled to interpret the anger and hopelessness of his young respondents, most of whom were born years after the events that shaped their families’ fortunes. Bright then witnessed in quick succession a rather stilted commemoration of a pit closure at Maltby in Yorkshire, staged as a conventional mock funeral, and an impromptu funeral celebration that took place in nearby Goldthorpe. Bright’s (2016: 148) field-notes capture that cathartic moment in 2013 when Margaret Thatcher died: What took place at Goldthorpe was extraordinary – a spectacular, improvised re-embodiment of the resistant, sometimes riotous, energy of the 84–85 strike [whereas] the Maltby funeral, earnest and grave as it was, struggled to find a rhetorical form appropriate to the loss.

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Bright’s (2016: 147) work highlights ‘the complex affective legacy of the absent coal-mining industry’, that is, how emotions and feelings in the present are bound up with the past. In the same way that time is telescoped for Rhodes Must Fall campaigners still feeling the legacy of colonialism in their everyday lives, so Bright’s young respondents were still living out the impact of a lost way of life. Bright cites a definition of ‘social haunting’ as ‘when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away’ (Gordon, cited in Bright, 2016: 148). Indeed, the idea of haunting suggests a wandering ghost that has not yet been laid to rest (Sutherland, C., 2014). According to Bright’s (2016: 150) analysis, Margaret Thatcher’s actual death offered a brief release from the dominant norm of ‘proper personhood’, which was duly enacted at Maltby in the ‘too emphatic performance of a dignified and well-behaved community united in its grief ’. Goldthorpe, on the other hand, harnessed the energy of the miners’ struggle in a spontaneous articulation of an ‘alternative value system’ (Mckenzie, 2013: 1356). This was expressed both through an ‘emphatic wish not to be middle class’ (Bright, 2016: 150, emphasis in original) and through resistance to injustice and insecurity, whether through inarticulate anger, spontaneous celebration or determined campaigning. All of these aspects are powerfully and vividly brought to life in Coal, a dance-work that toured Britain in 2016/17 and was choreographed by Gary Clarke, himself the son of a coal-mining community. In 2016, the eventual vindication of the families of 96 football supporters crushed to death in the 1989 Hillsborough stadium tragedy, in which police demonstrably sought to hide their own failings by smearing the dead, is an example of determined campaigning. The same police force was involved in the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ that pitted police against miners in June 1984. A public inquiry into what actually happened at Orgreave was ruled out by Conservative Home Secretary Amber Rudd in October 2016 on the grounds that ‘[d]espite the forceful accounts and arguments provided by the

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campaigners and former miners who were present that day, about the effect that these events have had on them, ultimately there were no deaths or wrongful convictions’ (Rudd, 2016: online). The Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign continues, indicating that the ghost of these events certainly has not been laid to rest. Margaret Thatcher herself made the connection between nationalism and the miners’ strike in her notorious speech to fellow Conservatives in July 1984. Referring to the 1982 Falklands War, she drew a direct comparison between the commanding general of the Argentinian forces and the leader of the miners’ union: ‘Galtieri and the Argentinians were the enemy without. Arthur Scargill and the miners are the enemy within’ (Thatcher, cited in Northern Echo, 2013: online). The title of Owen Gower’s (2014) documentary on the miners’ strike, Still the enemy within, suggests that this reading has yet to be revised. As the journalist David Conn (2014: online) put it with regard to events at Orgreave: ‘heavy-handed policing of the 1984–85 miners’ strike shaped the Britain we still inhabit’. Geoffrey Bright posits that Margaret Thatcher’s death prompted a brief resurgence of the spirit of the strike and a glimpse of another ‘way of living relationally’ (Bright, 2016: 151, emphasis in original) that was crushed. His research also found that Thatcher’s death seemed to galvanise others in precarious social positions to articulate this alternative sense of solidarity. Insecurity – or precarity – is evidently not a working-class preserve, and is bound up with feelings of fear that can persist even when one is in stable employment (Worth, 2015). Valerie Walkerdine (2010), in her ethnographic study of a Welsh post-industrial community devastated by its steelworks’ closure, notes that studies of community, imagined or otherwise, do not pay enough attention to the power of emotion in creating and holding them together. Her research describes how the residents of ‘Steeltown’ created a kind of protective barrier around their community; they were reluctant to move away or bring their private sorrows into the open for fear of creating conflict and losing their identity, their comfort in life and their sense that ‘we are all belonging to one another’ (‘Martha’, cited in Walkerdine, 2010: 103). Walkerdine highlights the fragility of

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a community that was always vulnerable to fluctuations in the global market for steel, and was then gripped by the almost visceral collective trauma of closure as a ‘blow to the basic tissues of social life’ (Eriksen, cited in Walkerdine, 2010: 109). Respondents felt intimidated by and distrustful of movement into or out of the community, which was ‘seen as a threat to the way things were, the sense that it was safe, you know everyone and therefore you knew who you were’ (Walkerdine, 2010: 107). In sum, emotional responses ranging from fear to anger to distrust arise ‘when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed’ (Gordon, cited in Bright, 2016: 148). Steeltown’s fear of incomers finds a clear corollary in nationalist, anti-immigrant discourse around the loss of ‘our’ way of life. Franck Billé extends Walkerdine’s use of psychoanalytic metaphors to examine people’s actual feelings of pain at the loss of national territory, and the disproportionate importance attached to borders as the places where national sovereignty and legitimacy are often played out in practice. Just as Walkerdine draws parallels between a sense of community and an infant’s need to be touched and held to feel comfortable in its own skin, so Billé (2014: 168) argues that national socialisation from an early age gives rise to ‘mental maps spanning both the individual and the national subject’. In other words, some people’s sense of self is so bound up with a national identity that they experience apparent threats to national sovereignty or national borders as tantamount to a personal assault, and react emotionally as a result. This suggests that describing perceived borders as a kind of protective yet porous skin enveloping the national imagined community is perhaps not so far-fetched (Billé, 2014: 175). Borders may actually be performed in manifold ways, but their enduring importance to people’s mental maps goes beyond the symbolic in constituting their sense of self. As such, perceived misalignments between the actual and imagined community can be profoundly emotionally destabilising, especially if people are also experiencing or fearing insecurity at work or in other aspects of their lives. People no longer know where they stand in relation to themselves and others because they find it difficult

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and unattractive to realign the national mental map that has guided them since childhood. With this can come anxiety and defensiveness.

Emotional nation Feelings and emotions are particularly pertinent to nationalism’s awesome mobilising power. The so-called politics of affect should be considered alongside institutional experiences, hegemonic discourse and other forms of socialisation in seeking to explain how and why we classify individuals so readily according to their nationality. Affect has been defined as ‘a set of resonances, sensations and intensities that circulate socially between bodies and accumulate to form a kind of backdrop or climate … that cements the feel of everyday life’ (Vukov, 2003: 339). Affect therefore goes beyond subjective emotions to describe a broader, more enveloping, atmosphere. For example, Angharad Closs Stephens (2016) looks to the 2012 London Olympic Games for a case study of nationalist atmospheres, as experienced not only in the stadia, but also through the wider scene-setting of the torch relay and its amplification through the national media, schools, nurseries and any number of related collective activities. Her focus on shared moods and feelings emphasises how nationalism is both ‘difficult to pin down and to resist’ (Closs Stephens, 2016: 184), particularly when large groups of people are moved to share in its profound ‘emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson, cited in Closs Stephens, 2016: 182). Others have noted how nationalism varies in intensity, remaining anchored in everyday associations even when it reaches fever pitch (Anderson, 2016a). Such approaches move away from binary thinking towards trying to capture nationalist atmospheres in terms of tonalities and reverberations (Closs Stephens, 2016). Rhys Merriman and Peter Jones (2016) have extended the use of heat as a metaphor in nationalism studies. Rather than describing some manifestations of nationalism as inherently ‘hot’ (Billig, 1996), for example, they instead describe nationalism as flickering like a fire. Merriman and Jones (2016) pay attention to the process whereby national symbols come together and interact with diverse audiences

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at specific times and in specific places, above and beyond the actual content of those symbols. That is, they are concerned with how nationalist feelings circulate between objects and bodies and coalesce differently around them depending on people’s different experiences. Something as mundane as a road can be highly relevant to the national ‘we’ (Pholsena and Tappe, 2013), for example, but its mobilising potential ultimately depends on its contingent capacity to generate emotions. Merriman and Jones (2016: 5) argue that the intensity of travellers’ national associations with a road can best ‘be understood through the variable capacities for different bodies to affect and be affected’. In sum, ‘national sensibilities seem to be characterized by highly contingent, relational, affective force-fields’ that are difficult to grasp but nonetheless constitutive of people’s sense of self and their capacity for political mobilisation (Merriman and Jones, 2016: 8). Socialisation and frequent repetition help to turn national associations into a familiar refrain, one that is not repeated ad nauseam, but periodically hummed quietly or belted out in unison depending on the time and the place. A national community imagined as a homogeneous ideal and a stable whole is a product of nationalist ideology. Highlighting the myriad ways in which people experience and feel the nation, however, serves to show how it is constructed in both affective and ideological ways. Nationalism’s emotional pull remains strong overall, even though it is variably embraced or rejected by different people. Its underlying narrative relies on the familiarity and linearity of both space and time, namely, the borderlines around nation-states and the timelines organising history into continuous national legacies or traditions. As discussed earlier in relation to David Miller’s work, many arguments against migration take this national frame as their unexamined starting point. At the same time, anti-immigration discourse frequently seeks to arouse or express fears that immigration will be on a scale that impacts existing residents’ quality of life, or hinders the nation-state’s capacity to represent its people. To put it bluntly, people who ‘inspire a persistent unease regarding their intentions or allegiances’ (Feola, 2016: 55) are often collectively categorised in terms of race, religion, ethnicity or

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nationality. They tend to be juxtaposed with a national community of value and required to assimilate (often vaguely defined) existing norms in order to belong. The validity of the norms themselves, chief among them the nation-state, its borders and its legitimating ideology, is unquestioningly assumed. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2007) points out in his book Lines: A brief history, it is unusual to consider the line as a subject of study in itself, rather than as something marginal that unobtrusively delineates the subject of study. Yet, considering how borders are performed helps to explain how national (and ethnic and racial) categories are created and experienced. Whether liberating or frightening, it is certainly disorienting to be ‘uprooted’ from the certainties of national belonging, to imagine history as disconnected and fragmented, and not to assume heritage and genealogy to be constitutive of identity. Approaching nationalism as both an ideology and a mood or atmosphere does more than pay lip-service to the importance of emotions in whipping up nationalist feeling. Rather, it recognises that fear, anxiety and mistrust of the ‘Other’ are central drivers of political attitudes and choices. It is not enough simply to suggest that these feelings are either misguided or justified. Rather, they must be addressed on their own terms in order to understand how they play into ethnic, national and racial categorisations.

Conclusion Paul Gilroy (2003: 264) pointed out that ‘close historical studies of the colonial domination … yield a different understanding of the state formation process than that which has emerged from histories of Europe as an innocent, integral and self-contained entity’. For example, Peo Hansen and Steffen Jonsson (2014) recovered the forgotten history of Eurafrica to show how closely post-war plans for European integration were linked to the continued exploitation of Africa. In turn, Antoinette Burton (1998: 28) has shown how traditional histories have presented ‘home and empire … as separate and distinct spheres: one, the source of Britishness, progress, and civilization; the other,

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precisely that – the other side of the world’. Ethnic categorisation as a means of management and control is a practice that has endured since colonialism. Collecting data according to ethnicity can be used in many positive ways: to track inequality; to plan affirmative action; to compare health risks; and to make policy accordingly. However, as the mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees (cited in Harris, 2016: online), also notes, these categories constrain and divide politically: ‘I’m here and I’m present. It’s the categories that are a problem, and the way they box us in’. In the wake of Europe’s so-called migration ‘crisis’, the referendum vote for Brexit and terrorist atrocities across mainland Europe, many commentators and ordinary citizens alike have detected a heightened mood of nationalist tension in the UK, the EU and the US. In this context, David Wearing (2016: online) poses the question ‘How do we challenge the frames which perpetuate the politics of hate?’, and responds as follows: We can continue on the present course, knowing from historical and immediate experience where this is leading, or we can break the frame, change the narrative, and push back hard against anyone still following the script that brought us here. In other words, Wearing proposes that we question racial, ethnic, national and other categories in order to undermine their dangerous potency. People can challenge prevailing norms and change the terms of political debate, including the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995), by finding their own language to mourn loss, channel anger at injustice or perform other ways of living. Such emotional responses are valid because they tap into a register of ‘affective nationalism’ that is often used to evoke warm feelings of national belonging (Bagelman, 2016: 1032). Anthony Key’s Trespassing, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, reminds us that borders are imbued with emotion but also that borders can be broken. In order to challenge nationalist assumptions and ethno-national categories, then, there needs to be a clear understanding of how apparently innocent notions of

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home, belonging and nostalgia can encapsulate the same static and essentialising understandings of insiders and outsiders as nationalist ideology. This is what I turn to in Chapter Two.

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TWO Home and belonging Figure 2.1: Anthony Key, Bok Gwai/White Ghost (2005)

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Anthony Key’s work entitled Bok Gwai/White Ghost is a free-standing structure that looks a little like a Wendy house. The wooden frame is covered with flattened foil takeaway cartons. Inside, these are moulded into a life-size replica of a kitchen, complete with shelves, a sink and drawers. Key created the work during a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), which described how Key’s work ‘scavenges from art and cultural histories as it struggles to find/build a new identity to define the ever-changing position of BritishChineseness’ (IMMA, 2005: online). Key himself describes how the work was inspired by coming to Dublin and finding his bearings by first sourcing ingredients to make Chinese food. Once surrounded by the ‘comfort’ of a kitchen stocked with familiar dishes, he felt ready to ‘negotiate’ his new environment, an experience he believes many migrants share (Key, cited in IMMA, 2005: online). In other words, Key created a sense of home by making the kitchen he used at IMMA his own, a memory rendered in foil for this piece of work. Comfort as ‘an embodied experience’ (Jain, cited in Lin, 2015: 289) results from a positive relationship between an individual and their environment. Key needed to recreate ‘home comforts’ in order to establish a positive connection with his wider surroundings. The title Bok Gwai/White Ghost takes us beyond an immediate sense of home, however, to reference the wider historical context that created the concept of ‘British-Chineseness’ in the first place. As Key (cited in IMMA, 2005: online) explains: The term bok gwai (white ghost/foreign devil) is a pejorative term used by local Chinese and aimed at the white colonizers of South China, after China’s defeat in the Opium wars. The title is used here not only to describe the piece but also to reference those historical interchanges between the British and the Chinese that resulted in the ‘coming home’ of former British/Chinese as migrants to the UK. Key’s kitchen is thus embedded in a much wider history of mobility, understood as the way in which movement is experienced. Mobility

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means much more than simply moving from A to B, since travel is often replete with political and moral associations. In centuries past, leaving one’s town or village was a rare occurrence requiring a clear purpose (Peters, 2015: 264). Traders and crusaders might be relatively well regarded, but nomads, drifters and flâneurs tended to be viewed with suspicion. Exemplified in the racist stereotype of the wandering Jew (Sutherland, 2016a) believed to belong to no nation, transgressive travel also deviates from the bounded, homogeneous nation-state as an established norm. This chapter understands attitudes to migration – attitudes that often frame ‘irregular’ economic migrants as transgressive and in opposition to the bounded nation-state – as a proxy for historically deep-seated, racialised prejudices regarding ‘them’ and ‘us’. It considers some examples of current political discourse around the nation and migration, particularly in the UK, and explores how the underlying assumptions might be challenged and ultimately transcended by focusing on alternative conceptions of home and belonging.

Othering Xenophobic, far-right nationalism deals in the same currency as mainstream nationalism but pushes its exclusionary ‘us’ and ‘them’ logic to extremes. That is why it is impossible to completely separate patriotism from chauvinism; both belong on the same nationalist continuum. In other words, it is impossible to condemn xenophobes without calling into question one’s own ‘love of country’. What separates a xenophobe from a patriot is how they define where the ‘cut’ should come between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but both share the premise that the cut should be along national lines (Ataç et al, 2016: 533). The entire nation-state system is implicated in the periodic rise and fall of far-right nationalism in Europe over the last two centuries because that nation-state system represents the categories that make xenophobia thinkable. For example, without France as a taken-for-granted entity associated with a native, rooted population (‘de souche’), the Front National’s call for ‘La France aux Français’ (‘France to the French’)

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could not resonate with some self-defined members of that population. Acknowledging the continuity between patriotism and xenophobia on a nationalist spectrum is crucial to understanding the slippages that can easily take place in political discourse, what the UK Conservative peer Baroness Warsi has called ‘respectable xenophobia’. As Warsi put it: ‘When politicians express shock and condemn the rise of hate crime, what I ask is, take a long, hard look at yourselves first’ (The Guardian, 2016b: online). Her argument is that divisive political rhetoric and the simplistic ‘Othering’ of migrants, Muslims, Jews, refugees and foreigners in UK political debate helps to make hostility towards ‘them’ more acceptable. In other words, everyone must challenge and examine their assumptions around who they consider to be ‘one of us’ and ‘one of them’ because the very existence of nationalist categories creates the conditions for those categories to be filled with potentially racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. National pride and patriotism shades into chauvinism as soon as people start making claims to exceptionalism. During the UK’s 2016 referendum campaign on whether to leave the European Union (EU), the Vote Leave side’s calls to make Britain great again echoed those of the then US presidential candidate Donald Trump and implicitly harked back to the colonial era, when ‘Britannia ruled the waves’ and the UK was an undisputed world power (Al Jazeera, 2016). As discussed in Chapter One, the lack of public engagement with Britain’s colonial past still makes it possible to portray this era in a positive light, as a golden age when the UK actually had strong global stature. Importantly, however, this was also an era when the ‘white man’ was clearly racially, spatially and hierarchically distinguished from his imperial ‘Other’ and carried the self-imposed ‘burden’ of civilising ‘new-caught sullen peoples/Half devil and half child’ (Kipling, 1929: online). Thus, the call to make Britain great again elides the outrageous racism encapsulated in this line from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘The white man’s burden’. It also elides the history of colonial oppression and the UK’s long interpenetration with its colonial subjects (Burton, 1998, 2003). In this instance, the distance separating

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patriotism, chauvinism and racism is wafer thin, and the clear potential for slippage between them comes to the fore. This argument is certainly not new. In a 1999 article entitled ‘Are there good and bad nationalisms?’, David Brown demonstrated that the ideal types of liberal, civic nationalism and atavistic, closed, ethnic nationalism were not inherently good or bad, and that, in practice, all nationalisms contained elements of each: ‘[B]oth forms of nationalism seek to tie the component individuals into communities of obligation which are depicted as persisting through time, and both have the capacity to prioritise either the collectivity or the individual’ (Brown, 1999: 300). Nevertheless, otherwise thoughtful scholars can dismiss nationalism as ‘pernicious’ (Closs Stephens, 2013: 1) and national identity as ‘essentially pre-political’ (Spencer and Wollman, 2002: 201) due to its negative connotations, without reflecting on how most individuals are bound up in narratives of national belonging (Antonsich, 2014). As I have written elsewhere, this suggests a ‘refusal to see the same core principles at work in both “banal” and “hot” nationalism’ (Sutherland, 2012: 37). One cannot condemn nationalism outright without condemning one’s own cultural connection to a nation, or political defence of a nation-state, or patriotic loyalty towards a national ideal. To take the Netherlands as an example, the far-right platforms of Dutch politicians Pim Fortuyn (died 2002) and Geert Wilders have been characterised as ‘creative and provocative innovations of a well-established and widely used repertoire of nationalism’ (Van Reekum, cited in Kešić and Duyvendak, 2016: 595). In the postcolonial, South-East Asian context, Engseng Ho (2013: 147, 148) argues provocatively that ‘nationalists have become the true inheritors of the Orientalists … reducing and purifying diverse cultural material into singular identities with which to mobilise the masses’. By contrast, Benedict Anderson (1998) drew on his South-East Asian expertise to make a plea for the essential goodness of nations based on their appeals to the welfare of innocent future generations, the sacrifices of fallen ancestors and the best intentions of the living. In Anderson’s (1998: 368) own words: ‘Each in a different but related way shows why, no matter what crimes

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a nation’s government commits and its passing citizenry endorses, My country is ultimately Good. In these straitened millennial times, can such Goodness be profitably discarded?’. Pheng Cheah (2003), in turn, has written about how the nation, freed from the deadening hand of the state, still has the potential to embody freedom and emancipation, particularly in a postcolonial context. I have shared Pheng Cheah’s optimism in theory (Sutherland, 2016a). In practice, however, I wonder what it will take for those who profess love for their country – as former UK Prime Minister David Cameron did on leaving office – to take his colleague Baroness Warsi’s ‘long, hard look’ at how their patriotism relates to nationalism’s extreme manifestations. How does one resist and ultimately escape the presumption of national belonging and ethnic heritage underlying the commonplace question ‘Where are you from?’ and, if the proffered answer does not match the questioner’s (often racialised) expectation, the follow-up ‘Where are you from originally?’. How do we fathom the emotional pull of an ideology that is now such a common-sense identifier that it is difficult to leave behind? One way is to look back to a time before the Westphalian system of sovereign states that came to be legitimated through the concept of the nation (Sutherland, 2016b). Another way is to place the nation-state’s margins and its marginalised population at the centre of inquiry (Scott, 2009; Harms, 2011). Yet another way, and perhaps the most challenging, is to transcend the nation-state frame altogether (Squire and Closs Stephens, 2012). As Ilker Ataç, Kim Rygiel and Maurice Stierl (2016), among others, have shown, migrant struggles offer new ways of thinking about political community. Refugees, migrants and activists have become politicised and mobilised at points ‘where gradients of wealth and poverty, citizenship and non-citizenship appear especially sharply’ (Walters, cited in Ataç et al, 2016: 529). While many of them use the language of state citizenship to articulate their claims to rights, others are expanding the concept of citizenship itself and subverting its exclusivity to engage in ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2012), regardless of their actual legal status. Although some theorists believe that citizenship will forever be associated with state control, others argue that it can

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be redefined as empowering, and that it can transgress legal frontiers. The latter approach emphasises that migrants play an active role in the process of (re)defining citizenship, rather than being cast as the passive foil to the all-powerful nation-state. Fundamentally, this ‘calls into question the givenness of [the] body politic and opens its boundaries wide’ (Isin, cited in Ataç et al, 2016: 532). It is extremely difficult to step outside common-sense ethno-national categories that continue to have such strong purchase on ways of seeing the world today (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 16). Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov (2004) emphasise the need to think about nations and ethnicity not as really existing, bounded wholes, but as particular – albeit pervasive – cognitive processes. Looking at ethnicity in this way undermines any clear, ‘objective’ divisions between nationalism and the long-debunked ‘science’ of racism. This does not amount to equating racism and nationalism. Rather, it suggests that both are cognitive processes dividing populations into bounded groups. Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov (2004: 43) draw attention to the process of ‘how people see the world, parse their experience, and interpret events’, thereby recasting ethno-national categories as a particular way of seeing that may often be ‘easier to think’ than alternatives, such as class (Brubaker et al, 2004: 46). Analysing such categories as cognitive processes rather than actually existing units enables us to question and weaken their largely taken-for-granted status in political discourse. Anthony Key’s work Bok Gwai/White Ghost draws attention to the many layers of history, culture, socialisation and prejudice that shape the categories we use to label people in ways that become instinctive. As discussed in Chapter One, ethnonationalism’s powerful ideological pull should be considered alongside nationalist atmospheres and their emotive force. Grasping a nationalist feeling or mood is no easy task, but the next section takes a further step towards theorising nationalist atmospheres through the concept of nostalgia.

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Nostalgia The word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 17th century from the Greek for ‘return home’ (nostos) and ‘longing’ (algia) in order to describe a perceived medical condition (Boym, 2007: 1). Today, it refers to yearning for an often idealised place but also for another, better time, such as childhood. Like a double exposure, nostalgia superimposes what is lived and what is longed for (Boym, 2007). It can certainly telescope history, blurring the boundaries between then and now, here and there. Nostalgia works against the idea of linear time and steady progress through history, and opens itself up to the realms of imagination, fantasy and mythology. Above all, ‘nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory’ (Boym, 2007: 3). As such, nostalgia is not an idle pursuit. It can help make sense of the displaced self, but it can also entrench national divisions when directed towards a particular homeland. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that buoys nationalist ideologies, but it is highly subjective and operates at different levels of community belonging. Finally, and contrary to Svetlana Boym’s (2007: 12) reading that ‘the nostalgic is never a native’, I do not believe that one need be an exile or even leave home to feel nostalgic ‘for the loss of an “enchanted world” with clear borders and values’ (Boym, 2007: 12). Indeed, natives’ feelings of nostalgia for a fondly remembered past or the prospect of a better future may provide a link to anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Jan-Willem Duyvendak (2011: 1–2) notes: ‘Almost all politicians in Western Europe today – from across the political spectrum – apparently believe that some people are more entitled to inhabit particular places than others … fuelling nostalgia for a time when populations were – supposedly – still homogeneous’. Nostalgia takes different forms. Following Boym (2007: 14), restorative nostalgia ‘signifies a return to the original stasis’. On the other hand, ‘[i]nstead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster the creation of aesthetic individuality’ (Boym, 2007: 14). In other words, reflective nostalgia can question and subvert the object of longing, as opposed to restorative nostalgia, which invests in and upholds the idea of a unified whole. For example, exile from a lost

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homeland can trigger nostalgia that is articulated in various ways, ranging from a constant yearning for return, to ‘reflective nostalgia [that] thrives on the longing itself ’ (Moorti, 2003: 359). In fact, the subjective nature of reflective nostalgia undermines the very foundations of restorative nostalgia. By highlighting the breadth and variety of personal connections with belonging, reflective nostalgia necessarily casts doubt on unitary, selective and linear narratives of the nation, which is often the object of longing. Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, offers a ‘comforting collective script for individual longing’ (Boym, 2007: 14). This is more easily politicised and mobilised than reflective nostalgia, which offers a different, more subjective kind of comfort. Boym (2007: 14) notes that those who indulge in restorative nostalgia tend to ‘imagine that “home” is forever under siege, requiring defense against the plotting enemy’. This view has been articulated by both US President Donald Trump and the Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s 2016 referendum on EU membership. Consider the following excerpt from an EU referendum campaign broadcast aired on BBC Radio 4: Vote leave to regain control of immigration and borders. Vote leave to stop future migrants from countries like Turkey, Serbia and Albania entering Britain freely. Vote leave and we can have a points based immigration system like in Australia, that is safer and more humane. Vote leave to deport dangerous criminals and terrorists who threaten our safety. This text assumes a loss of control and creates a sense of impending threat from future migrants, heightened by direct references to dangerous criminals and terrorism. The UK, though not named directly, is portrayed as a place of safety where ‘we’ live. A safe and humane immigration system is also evoked as a reflection of ‘our’ values. The message conveyed is that ‘our’ safety depends on purging undesirables and carefully selecting and controlling who comes in as ‘they’ pose an inherent risk to ‘us’. Similarly, restorative nostalgics have a strong feeling of insecurity that affects their world view, whether

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they actually find themselves in a precarious position or not (Worth, 2015). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, steps outside the rigid chronological time and the bounded space that are absolutely central to Benedict Anderson’s (1991) conception of the nation as an imagined community, discussed further in Chapter Four. The Vote Remain campaign in the UK’s EU referendum proved incapable of articulating a coherent alternative to the Leave campaign’s restorative nostalgia. At least one commentator in favour of remaining in the EU acknowledged that the Remain campaign had not effectively addressed people’s ‘fear’ of immigration and of losing sovereignty (Maddox, 2016). Indeed, critics complained that both the Leave and the Remain campaigns had focused too much on stoking fears, illustrating how closely the referendum was bound up with emotions linked to insecurity and threat. On the Vote Remain side, for example, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne emphasised that a vote to leave would necessitate an emergency budget, which did not, in fact, come to pass (Hobolt, 2016: 1262). Clearly, however, underlying structural issues that are outside the scope of this discussion help to explain why that sense of threat resonated with the electorate. As Richard Harris and Martin Charlton (2016: 12) concluded in their geographic analysis of the EU referendum vote, ‘the story is perhaps less about the EU itself but one of industrial decline and growing social and economic inequality, overlapping with nationalism’. Prior to the internecine divisions that consumed the UK Labour Party after the EU referendum in 2016, some Labour MPs and general election candidates did think about how to reconnect with voters following the Conservatives’ clear victory in 2015. A collection of essays entitled Labour’s identity crisis: England and the politics of patriotism (Hunt, 2016) argued that Labour needed to embrace English patriotism to win back working-class voters. Diagnosing a hollowing out of what it means to be British, its editor, Tristram Hunt MP, admired the spirit of democracy in Scotland’s 2015 independence referendum debate and called for something similar to take place in England, hoping to be ‘pleasantly surprised’ as the country reconnected with radical traditions and hence the Labour Party (Hunt, 2016: 2). Other contributors

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sounded a more cautious note, however, describing Englishness as a ‘vehicle for nostalgia, dissatisfaction with a sense of decline in living standards and local area, and perceived threats to cultural identity’ (Stride, cited in Hunt, 2016: 3). Hunt (2016: 13) also acknowledged ‘a deep feeling of nostalgia for the lost certainties of the past’ in his own post-industrial constituency of Stoke-on-Trent, from which he has since stepped down to become director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. As the site of one of the British National Party’s best results in the 2010 general election, the example of Stoke-on-Trent might suggest that Hunt’s search for a sense of Englishness could be less harmonious, colourful and beautiful than the pointillist paintings he evoked. Yet, in an analysis redolent with references to empathy, loyalty, change, fear, loss and anger, Hunt planned to channel emotion and nostalgia into positive patriotism and support for Labour. Reading it alongside other contributions to the volume (Khan, 2016; Stride, 2016), however, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems doubtful that Hunt had examined the symptoms carefully enough to be so confident in proposing this cure. His proposal amounted to little more than an alternative vision for restorative nostalgia based on renewed patriotism. There was little self-reflection on the problematic nature of patriotism itself, nor any attempt to critique the sources and drivers of that patriotism. The next section further explores the remarkable tenacity of ‘the nation-as-home ideal’ (Duyvendak, 2011: 1) in order to sustain just such a critique.

Home The concept of home, and its derivation ‘homeland’, is closely entwined with feelings of belonging and security. It is also linked to relationships and can be imagined on several scales. In assessing the impact of prolonged displacement on refugees and others, Cathrine Brun and Anita Fàbos (2015: 7) have noted how analyses of ‘“the national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995) tend to assume migrants’ home as elsewhere, refugees themselves as out of place, and the close association and inseparable bond between home and homeland’. The

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authors problematise the idea of home as a secure haven, and offer the analytical framework of home, Home and HOME to denote, respectively, the daily acts of homemaking, feelings of belonging expressed through heritage and values, and the global political and historical context in which ideas of home are framed and understood. These concepts operate at different analytical scales or levels: the first (home) focuses on the self and immediate family; the second (Home) connects with evocations of community; and the third (HOME) relates to wider nation-building discourse. We see home and HOME evoked in Anthony Key’s Bok Gwai/White Ghost, for instance. A key theme running through all three conceptions of home is that people articulate their sense of belonging in ways that are not necessarily linked to a native homeland or ancestral origins. By dissociating home from a single and fixed national origin that is in opposition to movement and migration, the authors show how different places can provide the components of home, Home and HOME, such as economic security and a sense of belonging. Brun and Fàbos’s three analytical scales offer a useful way of thinking about home without necessarily referring to homeland, and imagining community without ethno-national categorisation. While acknowledging the continued importance of the nationstate as a source of identity, Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004) focus on differentiating ways of being from ways of belonging. Similarly to Brun and Fàbos’s work, this allows us to move away from the culturally charged division between the rooted native – whose loyalty is assumed – and the foreign migrant, whose loyalty is untested (Miller, 2016: 8). Ways of being refer to what individuals actually do in their everyday lives as opposed to the identities commonly associated with specific activities, such as interacting with relatives abroad. That is to say, actions can be considered ‘ways of being’ independently of whether individuals choose to adopt corresponding identity categories by defining themselves as members of a diaspora, for example. Ways of belonging, on the other hand: signal or enact an identity which demonstrates a conscious connection to a particular group. These actions are not symbolic

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but concrete, visible actions that mark belonging such as wearing a Christian cross or Jewish star, flying a flag, or choosing a particular cuisine. (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004: 1006) In sum, ways of belonging are self-aware and declare an affiliation, whereas ways of being do not. What is intriguing here is the potential mismatch between a person’s way of being – their cultural preferences, habits and social contacts – and their explicit identification with any given way of belonging. So, one person may identify strongly with their ancestral homeland without ever having lived there or maintained contacts, while another may choose to emphasise transnational belonging, or belonging to a country that they have consciously embraced without assimilating its dominant culture (however defined). Decoupling ways of being from ways of belonging peels people’s personal predilections away from the ethnic and national categories to which they are often assigned. Ways of belonging are chosen, and not seen as more or less genuine for all that. Neither are they fixed. The benefit of this approach is that it focuses on the individual without being atomistic; people are still clearly embedded in a social field (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004), whether or not that defines their personal way of belonging. In other words, it ‘lets people be’ without predefining any ethnic, national or other allegiance. One or more nations may still play a part in people’s ways of being and belonging, but by no means do they purport to represent a person’s primary affiliation. Anne-Marie Fortier (2007) has noted how small-scale communities are often used as a proxy for the imagined national community, demonstrating how media representations of local communities are ‘scaled up’ to be representative of the nation-state. Fortier’s research indicates that government and media representations of national cohesion already draw on local communities’ experience of proximity, intimacy and face-to-face contact as ‘national character models’ (Herzfeld, cited in Fortier, 2007: 107). The stereotypical idea of poor neighbourhoods rife with criminality and dysfunctional families as somehow representing ‘Broken Britain’ is one negative

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instance of ‘Othering’ citizens as outside the national community of value (Anderson, 2013; McKenzie, 2015). In turn, Amanda Wise (2009) has noted the way in which local conflict can be quickly mediatised through an ethnic lens, as in the 2005 Cronulla ‘race riots’ in Sydney, Australia, or the 1969 riots that have haunted Malaysian and Singaporean politics ever since. A more recent example is how a spate of sexual assaults in Cologne during Germany’s 2015 New Year celebrations were presented through the prism of the attackers’ ethnicity, nationality and refugee status (Fischer, 2016). Migrants and refugees collapse the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ensure that the culturally local and distant are closely intertwined in practice, thereby blurring the boundaries of the idealised community of value that nation-states purport to represent (Sutherland, 2014). Sarah Ahmed and Anne-Marie Fortier (2003: 251) contrast definitions of community that ‘resist liberal individualism or defensive nationalism’ with those ‘premised on ideas of commonality’. However, a third view sees community itself as a constraint. For all its positive connotations, belonging to a community requires someone to be accepted as part of it, and it requires much individual and collective work to maintain. ‘Outside belongings’ (Probyn, cited in Ahmed and Fortier, 2003: 256), or people defined through non-belonging, are not always the result of a community doing the excluding. They can also signify individual struggles against ascribed identities, existing borders and ways of remembering, forgetting and silencing. Ultimately, Ahmed and Fortier suggest decoupling community from identity in an attempt to find other forms of ‘common ground’. They envisage ‘“we” as a site of collective politics, but not as a foundation’, thereby signalling a more dynamic approach to how ‘social differences are both invented and performed’ (Ahmed and Fortier, 2003: 257). In other words, people should be able to come together independently and in spite of their identities. The emerging field of research into conviviality analyses how everyday togetherness happens and how people live with difference (Nowicka and Vertovec, 2014). However, the normative element in conceptualisations of conviviality emphasises mutual respect and the

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‘joyful aspects of spending time connecting’ (Nowicka and Vertovec, 2014: 349), revealing a tendency to equate conviviality with positively connoted sociability. As noted earlier, this underplays the constraints and maintenance work inherent in belonging to a community. The sociologists Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (2014: 407) have played a leading role in recent moves to investigate ‘what material, social and discursive conditions underpin those societies and communities that seem to cope well with diversity’. Inspired by the work of Paul Gilroy, they use the concept of ‘convivial multiculture’ to designate everyday performances of togetherness, complete with the hard work of negotiation and maintenance that these entail. According to their definition, ‘conviviality can be understood as an atmosphere and an affect. It is intimately related to a sense of becoming, and “becoming” occurs inter-subjectively’ (Wise and Velayutham, 2014: 407; see also Herzfeld, 2016a: 6). Elsewhere, Joe Painter (2012) has paved the way for an alternative approach to articulating togetherness by pointing out that commonality is not inherent in the concept of the neighbour. Instead, the concept of the neighbour stands for a simple relationship of proximity. Painter (2012) has examined the ethics of neighbourly relations through a discussion of the biblical commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’ and the parable of the Good Samaritan. The everyday practices and constraints inherent in neighbourly relations are regulated by a set of norms and expectations as to what is deemed acceptable, without any necessary link to notions of belonging. Similarly, the idea of home, though imbued with ideas of belonging and security, does not necessarily include anyone else. In other words, one can be home alone, and as Anthony Key’s Bok Gwai/White Ghost reminds us, one can create a feeling of home independently of rootedness in a particular place. Using concepts like conviviality, neighbour and home in ways that do not premise ‘groupism’ (Brubaker, 2002) or ethno-national categorisation is important in questioning community formation and its ‘scaling up’ to the national level. Migrants often report feeling caught between two worlds: never accepted in their country of residence but never quite at home in what they consider their homeland (Topçu et al, 2012). The stranger and the

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foreigner occupy a liminal space that defines the boundary between Self and Other, insider and outsider, citizen and alien. The analytical challenge is to transcend the ‘reification of people as representatives of fixed categories’ (Herzfeld, 2016a: 35). According to the noted scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson, it is the notion of ‘homogenous, empty time’, understood as people’s ability to imagine the ‘steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity’ (Anderson, 1991: 26) of their compatriots and members of other nations beyond their own, that provides the basis for appeals to members of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. However, renewed attention to nationalism’s personal, emotional and psychological aspects serves to ‘restore awareness of … the cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld, 2016a: 32) on which it also depends and thrives. Anthropological studies are invaluable in operating a rapprochement between the national and local frames of analysis. Michael Herzfeld (2016a: 5), for one, calls for a stop to ‘treating both the nation-state and essentialism as distant and unreachable enemies of everyday experience, and to understand them instead as integral aspects of social life’. In The comfort of things, Daniel Miller (2008) uses domestic interiors and objects to understand how people relate to others and to the wider world physically, emotionally and ideologically. Similarly, Maja Povrzanovic Frykman and Michael Humbracht (2013) focus on how objects create continuity, as opposed to community, in migrants’ lives. Reading objects in this way means that they retain their emotional charge and are constitutive of identity (family heirlooms, tastes of childhood home) without being framed as nationally symbolic. A remembered recipe is not, first and foremost, a Romanian delicacy, for example, but reproduced as a way of being (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004), and a coffee habit picked up in Italy – or Australia – is not necessarily a cipher for belonging to its national culture. Rather, these practices create a sense of homeliness bound to an individual’s history and chosen identity, not their place of birth, genealogy or any other way of belonging (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Personal belonging and collections, particularly of cheap mementoes, have been linked to so-called ‘cultures of comfort’. As Dydia DeLeyser

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(2015: 215) notes, certain objects ‘work to link people to places, to each other and to different times. Kitsch souvenirs work to connect travelling to dwelling, loss to remembering, object to emotion’. These and other mundane items – like Anthony Key’s kitchen in Bok Gwai/White Ghost – are also meaningful because they link individual experience to ‘broader narratives’ of belonging (DeLeyser, 2015: 219), which may step outside national referents. Collecting has been described somewhat dismissively as a ‘tool of nostalgia’ (DeLeyser, 2015: 211), but therein lies the power of a practice that is, as Daniel Miller writes and Anthony Key shows, fundamental to creating the comforts of home. Heonik Kwon’s (2008) definition of home as a place where ‘memory can be settled’ sums up how home (and Home, and HOME) can be decoupled from ideas of native belonging and rootedness to describe other ways of being and belonging. To complement the preceding discussion of reflective and restorative nostalgia, this section has offered some conceptual tools to enable critical thinking beyond ethno-national categories and outside the national box.

Conclusion National ‘topologies of association, meaning, feeling and remembering’ (Merriman and Jones, 2016: 14) become embedded in people’s way of life through socialisation, repetition and familiarisation. Kate Hepworth (2015: 3) has theorised how so-called ‘illegitimate outsiders’ are ‘ascribed different degrees of legitimacy, as distinct from their actual legal status’, in a given nation-state. As a value judgement, this legitimacy can be linked to ‘clandestine’ arrival, perceptions of ‘excessive mobility’ considered incompatible with national loyalty and the relative productivity of migrants as contributors to the national economy. In other words, some irregular migrants may be perceived as more legitimate than those who, in fact, possess legal citizenship but are racialised as alien or ‘out of place’. Hepworth’s (2015: 65) analysis of migrant domestic workers as ‘intimate foreigners’ clearly chimes with ‘intimate encounters’ (Killias, 2014) between Malaysian

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citizens and their Indonesian maids, for example. Even though their legal status may differ from case to case, these migrant workers find themselves forging close relationships with their employers while still being regarded as outsiders, in the sense that they are not deemed to belong to the archetypal ideal of a homogeneous national community. Nevertheless, their daily lives subvert the divisive logic of clearly separating the national ‘us’ from the foreign ‘them’. In the complex realm of migration and citizenship, ethno-national categories clearly play a central role in distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’ (Cheah, 2003: 8). However, this chapter has shown how migrants, in particular, can also articulate resistance to these dominant narratives by their very way of life. Keith Taylor (1998: 953) imagines the past not as a precursor to the present, but as something ‘radically heterogeneous’. What if the present could also be considered heterogeneous, without delineating people temporally according to national narratives, or spatially into bounded territories? As Svetlana Boym (2007: 18) states: It is up to us to take responsibility for our nostalgia and not let others ‘prefabricate’ it for us. The prepackaged ‘usable past’ may be of no use to us if we want to co-create our future. Perhaps dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should not come to life. Chapter Three looks specifically at migration to the EU, where dreams and reality strongly diverge.

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THREE ‘The Europe we want’ Figure 3.1: Ai Wei Wei, Untitled (2016)

In February 2016, Ai Wei Wei, the renowned Chinese artist and political dissident, clad the neoclassical columns of Berlin’s Konzerthaus with 14,000 life jackets transported from the Greek island of Lesbos. In September 2016, he placed rubber lifeboats across the high renaissance windows of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Ai Wei Wei was also

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photographed lying on a beach in a pose reminiscent of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was washed up in Turkey in November 2015. These were all artistic responses to the time Ai had spent on Lesbos and a means of drawing attention to the plight of refugees there. Ironically, the lifejackets were whisked directly to where many of their erstwhile wearers would like to be. In Berlin, the lifejackets clung to an example of Europe’s Greco-Roman architectural heritage, just as their wearers had clung to overcrowded boats and the hope of freedom and security. However, another reading of Ai Wei Wei’s work suggests itself: perhaps the lifejackets are keeping the European edifice afloat (Friederichsen, personal communication, 2016). Perhaps they are somehow stopping it from crumbling under the weight of its own inadequacies and inconsistencies. As the work of a world-famous political dissident, the scale and reach of Ai Wei Wei’s work is clearly different to Anthony Key’s artistic practice. Nonetheless, both artists confront us with the question ‘Who are we?’ in arresting ways. Do ‘we’ identify as part of a ‘community of value’ (Anderson, 2013), defined in national or continental terms? Are ‘we’ different from, and perhaps superior to, others, or are ‘we’ hiding our deficiencies and prejudices behind spurious and arbitrary borders that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’? The tendency of all European Union (EU) member states to take unilateral action with regard to welcoming or stemming refugee flows has been abundantly clear since the summer of 2015, if not before. An agreement to redistribute asylum seekers across Europe has remained all but a dead letter, the Dublin convention has been suspended in practice and the failure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s calls for a collective response has raised fundamental questions about EU solidarity. Yet, the European Commission has doggedly stuck to its aim of lifting all border restrictions in the Schengen area, despite a creeping reintroduction of controls. At the heart of this is a colossal failure of imagination; a failure to imagine a European project that does not simply replicate the ‘us’ and ‘them’ logic of bounded national communities, and a failure to justify why the movement of those who happen to live inside the prized Schengen construct should be made

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ever easier at the same time as the barriers against those in Europe’s ‘backyard’ (Dati, 2016) grow ever-more murderous. Senior figures at the very heart of the EU, including Federica Mogherini (the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) and Martin Schulz (former President of the European Parliament), have warned that the EU’s future hangs in the balance. Commentators have echoed the gravity of the situation for the EU’s raison d’être: three of its fundamental principles are at stake: that the continent’s problems can be best solved by cooperation; that freedom of movement across the EU is in the public interest; and a belief in European values and respect for human rights. (The Guardian, 2016c: online) The title of this chapter – ‘the Europe we want’ – is taken from a statement by Angela Merkel in September 2015, warning that ‘[i]f Europe fails on the question of refugees, this close connection with universal civil rights … will be destroyed and it won’t be the Europe we want’ (Merkel, cited in Dearden, 2015: online). Similarly, in late February 2016, Merkel criticised Austria’s stance of limiting daily intakes of refugees with the words: ‘When someone starts to define limitations [to immigration], others have to suffer. That is not my Europe’ (Merkel, cited in Olterman, 2016: online). These concerns were rendered all the more poignant as continental European politicians worried about making potentially counterproductive contributions to the debate on Britain’s exit from the EU, which actually paid little attention to the strengths and weaknesses of EU integration itself (Hobolt, 2016). The number of deaths of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean in 2016 is the highest on record at 4,578, equivalent to one in every 40 (UNHCR, 2017: 7). When the price of preserving Schengen as the EU’s supposedly greatest achievement is barbed wire, teargas and criminal inaction as men, women and children drown daily, does that not devalue the achievement? When the price of preserving European

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wealth and privilege is to lambast and prosecute people-smugglers as a demonstrably ineffectual migrant deterrent, or play a deadly cat-andmouse game of interception and pushback, while turning a blind eye to the massive and morally questionably profits of the refugee industry, is that price worth paying? When people pile up outside the EU’s ‘gated community’ (Herzfeld, 2016b: online), turning Europe itself into a humanitarian disaster zone, what does that really say about ‘us’ and ‘them’? At the very least, it questions the EU’s status as a bordered zone of ‘airbrushed achievement’ (Walker, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2016: online) to be protected – and this appears to be the EU’s aim – at all costs. The logical and ethical incoherence of the EU’s current position can be approached through the following three questions: What is ‘the Europe we want’?; What is ‘my Europe’ and what does it stand for?; and, most importantly, Who are ‘we’? This chapter addresses these questions in turn, and considers the importance for the EU of moving beyond the modern geopolitical dichotomy of insiders and outsiders.

What is ‘the Europe we want’? The foreword to Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson’s (2014) book Eurafrica, though written only in 2014, evokes a very different era, when the EU’s stability and rule of law were a great prize to be shared with Ukraine and Ukrainians (as long as they stayed on their side of the border). As at the end of the Cold War, and on the breakup of Yugoslavia, the EU offered Ukraine the tantalising prospect of membership – or at least partnership – and thus a share in what Ukrainians apparently wanted. As José Manuel Barroso, then President of the European Commission, made clear: ‘They want freedom, they want prosperity, they want stability’ (Barroso, cited in Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: xv). European flags waved in the streets of Kiev were greeted as ‘stars of hope’ and signs of Ukrainians being ‘part of the European family’ (Barroso, cited in Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: xv), a sentiment even echoed by then UK Prime Minister David Cameron. Spool forward to 2016 and it could be argued that migrants at the gates of Europe want nothing different, regardless (for once) of whether

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they are classed as economic migrants or asylum seekers. Nor do those European citizens travelling freely to teach English in Bulgaria, service boilers in the UK or retire to Spain. What makes the EU’s interpretation and facilitation of these pretty universal human desires so different from place to place? What is the moral justification for the further securitisation of ‘Fortress Europe’ in order to save the Schengen agreement? Why is Schengen worth saving more than the souls reaching the shores of Spain, Greece and Italy and the many thousands more who have drowned, predictably and avoidably, since and despite the short-lived moral outrage caused by Alan Kurdi’s death? Why is this so-called ‘crisis’ repeatedly presented as a zero-sum game of either stability or humanity, suggesting that ‘having it all’ is impossible? Hansen and Jonsson (2014: 259) use the term ‘continentalism’ to signify a kind of nationalism writ large, or the bordering off of one regional community from another. Indeed, the discourse about the security of the EU’s borders certainly has a nationalist ring. The sole basis of EU solidarity on this issue is to keep the ‘Other’ out and erect a solid barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’, while the infighting continues unabated; hence the idea evoked by Ai Wei Wei’s work that lifejackets are all that is keeping the EU afloat. Continentalism is being played out judicially and politically across the EU, where ‘supranational policy regimes, harmonization and cross-border cooperation are not dismantling national borders so much as facilitating the extension of exclusionary national borders beyond traditional territorial ones’ (Vukov, 2003: 348). That is to say, the freedom of movement accorded citizens of the Schengen zone is dependent on the securitisation of its common external border against the unwanted ‘Other’. Migration and asylum only became part of EU affairs as a result of the Tampere European Summit in 1999. The Tampere summit signalled a diplomatic move from low to high politics that – as the EU’s ongoing difficulties in agreeing and enforcing a common response to unabated migrant arrivals show – is not reflected in the reality of current immigration policy or crisis management. The EU’s inability to overcome its member states’ aversion to ‘burden-sharing’

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and redistributing asylum seekers across its territory has been taken to indicate the exhaustion of the European integration project itself. In the wake of the Eurozone crisis, the so-called migrant ‘crisis’ and Britain’s vote to leave the EU, member states’ reassertion of principles of national homogeneity and sovereignty has been seen to trump intra-European solidarity, leading to its paralysis and the rise of populist, right-wing parties offering clear, simplistic and divisive answers to the uncertainties of our age. At the end of August 2015, as Chancellor Angela Merkel temporarily opened Germany’s borders to those fleeing Syria’s civil war, her statements suggested that ‘the Europe we want’ is one that upholds human rights and noble values. At the same time, the use of the first-person plural ‘we’ denotes an imagined community at the EU level, which necessarily excludes its constitutive ‘Other’. Confronted with that ‘Other’, variously imagined as the poor, the persecuted or the supposedly culturally alien, EU countries have proved either openly xenophobic or singularly unwilling to articulate the ethical and economic imperatives of accepting migrants into Europe. Neither is there clear evidence of long-term structural planning in order to ensure that pressures on housing, health and education caused by new residents are not felt disproportionately by already disadvantaged households (McKenzie, 2015). Peter Nyers (2008) notes that the ‘body politic’ tends to be a starting point for political analysis, one against which waves wash and migrants bump up. Although clearly not a nation-state, the EU is nonetheless a ‘geo-body’ (Thongchai, 1994; Shore, 2000), which defines and polices ‘irregular’ migrant flows. Its strictures deem who is ‘irregular’ and its agency, Frontex, enforces the EU border on land and on sea, sometimes far from the EU’s own territory and territorial waters. Nick VaughanWilliams has argued that critiques highlighting the inconsistencies between the EU’s humanitarian principles – enshrined in the EU’s 2011 Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM) – and border practices like pushback and ignoring distress calls do not go far enough. In his view, ‘situations in which some “irregular” migrants are endangered precisely by the authorities associated with humanitarian border security’ are not a question of improper implementation

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of the EU’s humanitarian principles, but ‘lethal modes of political abandonment’ and part of the very logic of border securitisation (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 12). It is useful to consider the EU using Bridget Anderson’s concept of a ‘community of value’. As discussed in Chapter One, Anderson (2013: 2) defines this as ‘composed of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture, or language – that is, its members have shared values’. To scholars of nationalism, this definition clearly overlaps with some common attributes of nations, and Anderson acknowledges this. However, the EU itself also claims to be a community of shared values, as expressed in the 2001 Laeken Declaration, the 2007 Berlin Declaration, the 2011 GAMM framework, the Copenhagen criteria for accession and the conditionality it imposes on trade agreements with third countries. It is this community of value on whose behalf then EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso accepted the Nobel peace prize in 2012 and to which Angela Merkel doggedly refers. Phrases like ‘Europe’s disgrace’ and ‘shame’ to describe the terrible humanitarian situation in Idomeni, Lesbos, Chios and elsewhere along the EU’s borders explicitly refer to these putative shared values. These are values that member states now only honour in the breach of previous resettlement agreements or by recognising – in the case of Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaitė – that a deal to swap migrants with Turkey is ‘very difficult to implement and is on the edge of international law’ (Grybauskaitė, cited in Rankin and Mason, 2016: online). Thus, Europe’s refugee crisis goes hand in hand with a crisis of European values, and therefore a crisis of the European community of value itself. In the words of EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos on visiting the makeshift camp in Idomeni on the Greek border with Macedonia: ‘The situation is tragic, an insult to our values and civilisation’ (Avramopoulos, cited in Smith, 2016: online). The EU’s current rhetoric surrounding its management of migrants clearly pits everything the EU stands for against the migrant ‘Other’ as a potential threat to its achievements. In other words, the EU draws

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a line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in the starkest terms. For example, EU Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos has also stated: All that we have achieved in the last 60 years is at stake and we have to do what we can to uphold and safeguard these achievements.… We cannot have free movement if we cannot manage our external border effectively. (Avramopoulos, cited in Rankin et al, 2016: online) At the same time, the EU has been gripped by a prolonged series of so-called ‘crises’, such as the euro crisis. This is a widespread but risky nomenclature that, in turn, authorises ‘emergency’ measures. As noted earlier, the migration ‘crisis’ led to a ‘one in, one out’ bargain with Turkey. This was presented as a way of undermining smugglers’ business model, when surely a more effective way of undermining their business model would have been to ensure migrants’ safe passage to European shores and process them there. A simple ferry ticket is the failsafe way to disrupt the market in ropey dinghies and useless lifejackets, and to save lives at sea. Instead, the EU and member-state leaders continue to stand by in the full knowledge that men, women and children are dying unnecessarily, while heaping moral opprobrium on smugglers. The hypocrisy here is quite breathtaking. The European ideal has sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean with those lives lost. An organisation much maligned for its bureaucracy has failed to organise, failed to cooperate and failed to save lives, while migrants continue to perish at sea. The decision to repurpose humanitarian aid that was originally ring-fenced for third countries to within its own borders is a not inconsiderable acknowledgement of the EU’s failure to act, but even this has not effectively addressed the shocking conditions in Idomeni and elsewhere. Peter Nyers (2006: 4) argues that the ‘refugee question’ is not a problem to be solved or a crisis to be mastered, but a more fundamental challenge to rethink the political: ‘It is not that there are no other ways of being or acting politically but rather that the success of statism as a social movement has rendered these alternatives either unacceptable or

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unthinkable’. Reversing the hegemonic, common-sense assumption of state primacy means that ‘the mobility of people is reinterpreted as ontologically prior to any attempts by border security authorities to control them’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 8). The grim determination of migrants who continue to die in or around the Channel Tunnel, who doughtily march around the fences erected before them, or who cross fast-moving, freezing waters with babes in arms to continue their journey north testifies to their resilience in the face of periodically opening and closing borders and crude categorisations in terms of nationality, not need. The violence inherent in border securitisation and enforcement has become more visible, no longer confined to the watery realms of the Mediterranean. Not content with barbed wire and inaction in the name of deterrence, member states like Hungary have begun to defend ‘Fortress Europe’ with tear gas, riot police and automatic detention. From a classic International Relations perspective, ‘the violence involved in securing the external borders of the state is justified as a necessary precondition for civil political relations to flourish within the political community’ (Nyers, 2006: 3). In the EU’s case, internal harmony is clearly dependent on keeping foreigners at bay, and the two are explicitly linked in its rhetoric.

What is ‘my Europe’ and what does it stand for? As discussed further in Chapter Four, it is only fitting that the Mediterranean should be a starting point for challenging the status quo and imagining another way of conviviality, understood in its original sense of convivere, or living together. As we have seen, nation-states still dominate understandings of political community. Rethinking representations of borders as lines on a map does not of itself disrupt monolithic, static imaginaries of nation-states. Bordering practices may be recast as fluid and deterritorialised, but they nonetheless still underpin the enduring hegemony of the nation-state and its creation, the EU. The clichéd language of migrant flows, often expressed threateningly in terms of floods and waves, strengthens this perspective by emphasising the idea of a dynamic force fluidly circumventing

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obstacles only to crash against an immoveable object, namely, the sovereign nation-state. The academic literature examining the politics of encounter and border practices has mapped the performativity and hence the inherent dynamism and mobility of the body politic itself (Cuttitta, 2014; Tazzioli, 2015). For example, Thongchai’s (1994) geo-body could be imagined in the EU case with limbs that reach beyond its physical location, grasping at benefits beyond its boundaries and pushing back presumed undesirables. Nick Vaughan-Williams (2015: 4) has explored this biopolitical metaphor to show how the EU has ‘co-opted’ humanitarian principles and thereby made it more difficult for it to be held accountable for human rights abuses. In turn, Paolo Cuttitta (2014: 200) contends that selected narratives – principally, the ‘tough’ and the ‘humane’ – are played out in ways directed at voters, migrants themselves and their countries of origin. Both the Pope and Ai Wei Wei have travelled to the Greek island of Lesbos in support of the humane narrative, for instance, and to highlight the plight of migrants making the short but perilous crossing from Turkey to Europe. However, borders are also frequently performed out of public sight and well away from the physical line marking territorial limits. For example, a foreign consulate denying a visa, coastguards pushing back migrants on the high seas, private security firms running migrant detention centres and foreign countries hosting them, all amount to the ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring’ of borders (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 6). Peter Nyers, Nick Vaughan-Williams and others question the dichotomy between border control and migrant movement conceptually and theoretically. However, it is also important to place the quandary facing the EU in historical context in order to show that it is merely following the well-trodden, nation-building path of bordering, forgetting and exclusion found in imperial attitudes towards (un)civilised society. As Antoinette Burton (1998: 9) has noted, postcolonial historians of Empire ‘question the legitimacy of a national history that views the nonwhite populations of the late twentieth century as fallout from the disintegration of empire rather than as the predictable outcome of centuries of imperial power and engagement’.

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Similarly, Adam McKeown’s (2008: 8) account of 19th-century controls on migration from Asia to the US sounds remarkably familiar today, specifically, ‘the development of modes of control that were compatible with and could even produce “free” movement’. McKeown examines how the US reconciled restrictions on immigration with democratic, liberal values of freedom and progress, a process the EU is engaged in right now. He shows how border controls themselves served to create and entrench a racist hierarchy between the civilised West and the backward rest, which, in turn, justified the US’s ‘manifest destiny’ in colonising the Philippines, for example. As McKeown (2008: 364–5) puts it with the evolution of US migration law in mind: the series of concepts used to project North Atlantic history as the trajectory of world history: natural rights, civilization, family of nations, modernization, the community of liberal states, and, as often as not, globalization itself … helps naturalize global difference and justify new projects of expansive regulation. His comments also ring true for contemporary Europe. The 19th-century process of differentiation in matters of migration and representation has directly shaped the ‘common-sense’ basis on which the EU tortuously tries to base its distinction between European ‘insiders’ – who should benefit from free movement and progressive policies – and outsiders – who are not even deserving of safe passage to the processing ‘hotspots’ that will determine their (safe) return to a (questionably safe) third country such as Turkey. The EU’s plan to take migrants from Turkey in return for seaborne arrivals – an example of what Timothy Garton-Ash (2016b) has called Überrealpolitik (surreal politics) – is another nail in the coffin of the EU’s community of value. The ultimate twist is that the price of Turkey’s cooperation was to revive the prospect of Turkish accession and allow EU-wide, visa-free travel for Turks, thereby opening up another front on the ‘migration issue’. Sure enough, the Vote Leave side in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum campaign made much of the ‘threat’ of Turkish immigration. As Bridget Anderson (2016b: online) commented,

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the ‘one for one’ deal with Turkey was clear evidence of the EU’s existential, identity crisis: ‘not a refugee crisis facing Europe, but a European crisis facing refugees’. In Ai Wei Wei’s installation, refugee lifejackets may be hanging limpet-like from a symbol of Europe’s Greco-Roman heritage, but they could also be seen as an exoskeleton holding together a crumbling construct whose raison d’être increasingly appears to be maintaining the chauvinistic distinction between the European ‘us’ and the foreign ‘them’.

Who are ‘we’? As Simon Cottle (2014: 83–4) has noted: ‘global inequalities and the condition of precariousness they produce, it seems, become symbolically reproduced in and through the mainstream news media, in its categorizations of “them” and “us”, and through its occlusions and dissimulation of global interdependency’. Press coverage of migrants seeking to enter the EU has been increasingly subverted by the rise of online citizen journalism and the intervention of migrants, activists and artists. The advent of digital news media has arguably enhanced a cosmopolitan perspective that ‘has long been associated with the capacity of journalism to bring “home” distant realities and to inspire a sense of care and responsibility beyond our communities of belonging’ (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013: 150). Indeed, there is now greater emphasis in some professional journalistic practice on bearing witness to suffering, complete with its moral and emotional connotations, as opposed to adopting a detached and supposedly objective perspective (Cottle, 2014: 85). This so-called ‘injunction to care’ (Cottle, 2014: 88) has been accompanied by the apparent emergence of a ‘new solidarity’, which some have ‘celebrated for challenging the communitarian reflex of national media that use stories of distant others so as to orient their publics back towards their own imaginary centre’ (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013: 151). However, others have questioned whether journalistic responses in the face of natural disasters or refugee flows really do undermine the privileged Western gaze.

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Following Hannah Arendt, Pheng Cheah (2014: 79) defines solidarity as a principle ‘that leads to the establishment of a community of interest’ in pursuit of what is right or good, as opposed to a politics of pity that emanates from hierarchies of power and fundamental inequality. The media is clearly key to mobilising feelings of empathy, compassion, identification and solidarity in response to refugees, but evidence suggests that these feelings are unstable and subject to reversal (Karakayali, 2016). For example, the image of the dead toddler Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach ‘produced a “seismic shock” in terms of change of opinion (from being inimical to “migrants” to empathic to “refugees”)’ (Vis and Goriunova, 2015: online). However, its impact was brief and the impetus for political change was limited. By contrast, the consolidation of a German backlash to Angela Merkel’s refugee policy has been linked to the media impact of the sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, and the subsequent spike in support for the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland in the German regional elections of March 2016 (Fischer, 2016). Nevertheless, we can look elsewhere for examples of solidarity as defined by Cheah. Kym Rygiel has placed the ever-growing number of migrant deaths at sea within a wider legal and commemorative context, highlighting some attempts by activists and victims’ families to pursue justice, offer a dignified burial, or at least mark the failure to provide a ‘welcoming Europe’ (Infomobile, cited in Rygiel, 2014: 69). Similarly, Maurice Stierl (2016) chronicles three of many commemorative interventions that have sought to show solidarity with migrant victims and thereby create an ephemeral sense of community across conventional borders of belonging. This so-called ‘grief activism’ rejects preordained national solidarities, as embodied in monuments like the tomb of the unknown soldier, in order to create political community anew. That it does so by including the dead is poignant, destabilising and provocative. For example, one German artists’ collective was widely criticised in Germany for moving crosses commemorating East Germans who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall to the EU’s external borders, which it characterised as far more murderous ‘death strips’ (Todesstreifen). The

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collective’s defiant retort to criticism included the claim ‘Every society only mourns its own victims’ (Zentrum für politische Schönheit, cited in Stierl, 2016: 183), signalling once again the difficulty and even moral opprobrium associated with escaping the banal nationalism (Billig, 1996), or patriotism, of many commemorative performances. However, the central importance of the dead to every nationalist project, variously expressed in terms of heroic sacrifice, intergenerational heritage and tradition, ancestry, or the fundamental belief in national longue durée, also make this a particularly pointed and potent form of resistance to nationalism. Focusing on how ‘seemingly diverse and fragmented communities subverted national co-ordinates in appropriating experiences and practices from other anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles’ (Turner, 2016: 149) has the added advantage of opening up an array of nonEurocentric cosmologies and political imaginaries as potential resources for rethinking the EU’s ‘community of value’. The ringing phrase repeated in migrant struggles, ‘We are here because you were there’ (De Genova et al, 2016: online), encapsulates the postcolonial, nationalist context of the European crisis playing out today. In his hugely influential book entitled Imagined communities, Benedict Anderson (1991: 115) wrote of the ‘skein of journeys through which each state was experienced’ initially by colonial functionaries, increasingly by indigenous intelligentsia and today by migrants. The EU’s failure of imagination lies in its inability, despite its supposed supranationalism, to put skeins before states. McKeown’s (2008: 28) description of a ‘modern world where states were taken for granted more than mobility’ still stands. When it comes to migration, EU solidarity starts to disintegrate in the face of member states’ perceived national interests, as demonstrated by their refusal to honour the migrant redistribution agreement. This is not only a failure of imagination, but also a failure to reflect historical fact. As Benedict Anderson suggests and Antoinette Burton shows, the well-documented movement of colonised people to the imperial centre represents a ‘critical challenge to traditions of Western history-writing dependent on the progress of the territorially bounded nations out

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of which such narratives have been produced’ (Burton, 1998: 11). In other words, official nation-building in Europe has still not embraced the postcolonial critique of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). As Michael Herzfeld (2016a: 4) has noted: ‘the absurdity of the human condition surely comes to a head with official claims to everlasting nationhood’. My argument is that the EU is hamstrung by the same failure to acknowledge its imperial influences (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014), the spurious distinction between intra-European mobility and external migration, and – understandably for a world order organised as it is – an inability to imagine human relations as skeins rather than states. Almost 40 years on from the publication of Edward Saïd’s (1978) Orientalism, the lessons of history have yet to have any great impact on European imaginings of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Conclusion The EU’s frontiers are a key subject of study in the critical borders and migration literature, which homes in on violent bordering practices and seeks sites of resistance that work ‘against the traditional logic of community which relies on modalities of homogeny and cohesion’ (Turner, 2016: 147). As we have seen, historical representations matter. The Nobel prize-winning EU presents itself as a beacon of democracy, human rights and values that Angela Merkel can conjure simply as ‘my Europe’ and the ‘Europe we want’, in the face of ‘the most egregious human rights abuses in the context of EUrope’s border crisis’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 116). Bridget Anderson portrays the community of value as reflecting a liberal worldview, produced from a ‘history and culture that does not acknowledge its own particularity’ (Anderson, 2013: 3). However, as Hansen and Jonsson (2014) have shown in their book Eurafrica, the European integration project is a very particular product indeed. As they carefully document, the EU grew from imperial states’ post-war concern with retaining soonto-be former colonies within their sphere of influence. Marianne Hirsch (2012: 15) has used the term ‘counter-history’ (as distinct from counterfactual history) to describe untold stories like that of Eurafrica.

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Hirsch highlights the importance of counter-history in challenging official national histories, but this is a concept clearly applicable to the European case too. Hansen and Jonsson show how the European project remains riddled with racialised, hierarchical assumptions that shape its border and migration policy in a way that parallels the 19thcentury US (McKeown, 2008). Elsewhere, I have analysed a FrancoGerman school textbook that casts European integration in a positively heroic light (Sutherland, 2010: 152–6). I myself have uncritically taught students the founding myth of European integration, consisting in the post-war consensus to bind France and Germany, the Schuman declaration, the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community to control the raw materials of conflict, and so on, in a longue durée litany of treaties from Rome, to Maastricht, to Amsterdam and to Lisbon. I shall never do so again. Lavery, Dixon and Hassall (2014: 2573) have coined the term ‘sk[e] in’. This evokes both how communities can be imagined as forming a protective, secure skin holding people in place, as discussed in Chapter One (Walkerdine, 2010), and the ‘skein of journeys’ cited in Benedict Anderson’s (1991: 115) Imagined communities. I like to think that this canonical work in nationalism studies also holds the key to another way of belonging, one derived from skeins of journeys and not national imagined communities. It is fitting that the early journeys to which Anderson refers were mainly by sea because, as discussed in the following chapters, ‘the sea as a space of politics can upend received understandings of political possibilities and limitations’ (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 260). Recalling Benedict Anderson’s account, Kimberley Peters (2015: 264) singles out ‘imperialising sea journeys’ as unravelling ‘assumptions of bounded, rooted life’. Peters (2015: 265) is drawing attention to the sea as a privileged medium for exploring the ‘cultural connotations, affective registers and political purposes’ of different mobilities, and so it is to the sea that I now turn.  

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FOUR The political space of the sea Figure 4.1: Anthony Key, Battle of Britain (2007)

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Figure 4.2: Anthony Key, Battle of Britain (2007), detail

Anthony Key’s work entitled Battle of Britain peppers a map of the UK with hundreds of tiny flags, each representing a Chinese takeaway shop. There are concentrations in urban areas, but the coverage is otherwise quite even and extensive, reaching into some of the remotest parts of the British Isles and Northern Ireland. The title of the work harks back to the Second World War and the air battles of 1940, which served to thwart a Nazi German invasion on British soil. Pins litter the two-dimensional map rather like those used to plot troop movements in an old-fashioned army headquarters. In turn, the red flags recall Chinese imperial banners that might have been paraded on the battlefield. The work has resonance today because it suggests conflict and even pitched confrontation. Indeed, it evokes a battle for Britain that is uncannily prescient of the 2016 UK referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU), in which antiimmigration rhetoric and feeling played an important part (Hobolt, 2016). Above all, the link made between the Second World War and the present day suggests tropes of (Chinese) immigrants as ‘Others’, foreigners and even invaders, drawing parallels with wartime divisions into friend and foe, patriot and enemy. Battle of Britain demonstrates

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that racialised national distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ continue into peacetime and organise everyday life, right down to the mundane activity of ordering takeaway food, or a so-called ‘Chinese’. This chapter takes up Key’s critique to explore a different approach to thinking togetherness, one that steps outside the flatly delineated, cartographic imaginary depicted in his piece. In other words, it rejects ‘methodological nationalism’, understood as an approach that takes the nation-state for granted as a category of analysis (Sutherland, 2016b). The chapter starts with a discussion of Benedict Anderson’s (1991) Imagined communities before going on to review academic literature that has broken the bounds of methodological nationalism by using the sea as an alternative source of concepts and ideas. The final section then considers how this literature might be put to work for rethinking belonging, focusing principally on empirical examples from South-East Asia. Related scholarly projects are well under way in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences. For example, Engseng Ho puts pre-colonial Malay texts in the context of the Indian Ocean, thereby extricating himself from the confines of an imagined national community (Anderson, 1991). As Engseng Ho (2013: 147) notes: Larger units of analysis, such as oceans, empires and diasporas have now become accepted frames or objects of investigation. The time seems ripe to now turn our gaze in the other direction, back towards the single nations and states we have been striving to transcend, to view them afresh through new, transregional lenses. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU will also be a ‘transregional’ undertaking, requiring relationships to be disentangled and reestablished across the world, but its consequences will nonetheless be most keenly felt in the UK. Commenting on the aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the EU in June 2016, the journalist Zoe Williams (2016: online) pointed out that ‘we [in the UK] must question, rather than merely accept, the new nationalism’. Ho’s work is just one

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example of how broader geographical and historical perspectives can challenge nationalism far better than any analysis that is itself premised on ‘methodological nationalism’. For example, Ho contrasts politics in Malaysia today, which is structured around ethnic Malay primacy, with a history of seaborne trade and intercultural exchange. He explores an alternative, partnership-based political language that ultimately ‘blurs the line between local and foreign’ (Ho, 2013: 152) and so transcends the national referent. As EU leaders continue to grapple with the so-called refugee ‘crisis’ and the UK moves towards Brexit, it is important to consider perspectives that question the political ‘rules of the game’, which are very often premised on the nation and ethno-national categorisation.

The imagined nation The late Benedict Anderson’s (1991) Imagined communities has deservedly become a classic work in nationalism studies across the humanities and social sciences, not only for the quality of its scholarship and its pithy definition of nationalism, but also for its persuasive evocation and explanation of how the nation is constructed. Yet, Anderson’s (1991: 26) evocation of the nation as a ‘solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ is strikingly monolithic, implacable and ignorant of individual difference and inequalities of power. As critics have pointed out, it assumes the intimacy of a national space that is often racially inflected and ethnically hierarchical, and it does not question who is equipped or allowed to share in that national space (Kelly, 1998). Apparently directing his remarks towards a (noncreationist) Western readership, Anderson constructs the imagined community in opposition to the medieval Christian belief that God was orchestrating events according to His own divine plan, something imagined temporally as ‘an idea of simultaneity [that] is wholly alien to our own’ (Anderson, 1991: 24, emphasis in original). Anderson evokes an era when it was not deemed incongruous or anachronistic to see local church benefactors depicted in biblical scenes, religious frescoes or stained-glass windows ‘because the medieval Christian mind had

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no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present’ (Anderson, 1991: 23). Partha Chatterjee (1996, 2005) long ago critiqued Anderson’s (1991: 24) assumption that this understanding of time had been completely superseded and that his readers all shared ‘[o]ur own conception of simultaneity’ as regulated by clocks and calendars. Borrowing a phrase from Walter Benjamin, Anderson called calendrical time the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ that enabled individuals to imagine the simultaneous activity of their co-nationals without ever meeting even a fraction of them in the flesh. Together with ‘bounded seriality’ – Anderson’s phrase for nations imagined as coexisting side by side in discrete, bounded units – this does indeed correspond to the commonsense notion of the nation that many take for granted today. However, as Chatterjee pointed out, there are many other ways of imagining political community in space and time. Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004) use the term ‘social field’ to examine multidimensional, dynamic networks of social relationships unconstrained by national boundaries. In so doing, they aim to transcend either/or assumptions around migrant assimilation and transnational connection, and move away from nation-states as the taken-for-granted focus of much political and social analysis. To Levitt and Glick Schiller, distinguishing between home and abroad in a binary way is of limited use since individuals can identify with both at once. They point out that migrants can be enmeshed in networks that stretch across several states, and that ‘the nation-state container view of society does not capture, adequately or automatically, the complex interconnectedness of contemporary reality’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004: 1006). Consequently, Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004: 1007) refuse to ‘take rootedness and incorporation in the nation-state as the norm’. It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this approach because, as discussed in previous chapters, the idea of roots is fundamental to common-sense notions of native belonging to a nation-state. The native is the touchstone of rootedness and authenticity in all nation-states that advance a dominant way of life (Leitkultur) or

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‘community of value’ (Duyvendak, 2011; Anderson, 2013). Examples of this include the slippery notion of British values, as well as France’s fundamental principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité. Both are apparently open to all, but natives have the advantage over naturalised citizens because they are schooled and socialised with regard to national institutions and cultural markers. As Engseng Ho (2013: 148) points out with reference to South-East Asia, ‘native status ineluctably entail[s] cultural content’. Candidates for naturalisation can also be held to a higher standard of ‘super-citizenship’ than so-called ‘native citizens’ in demonstrating national loyalty, for example (Anderson, 2013: 109). The very phrase ‘native citizens’ (Miller, 2016: 8) and the widely employed Ausländische Mitbürger (foreign co-citizens) in Germany suggest that shared citizenship status does not erase this hierarchy of belonging, even with the passage of time (Back and Sinha, 2012; Hepworth, 2015). However, if rootedness, as embodied in the ‘native’, and naturalisation, as an approximation of making native (Fortier, 2012: 698), are no longer aspirational norms, then the defining distinction between native and foreigner begins to lose its bite. Agnieszka Halemba (2015) argues that some inhabitants of Transcarpathia, which has variously belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and now Ukraine, choose to be anational in the sense that they are ‘not looking through a national lens.’ That is to say, they believe that ‘states as polities should not be expressions of national aspirations but resources which people use in order to shape their lives according to their everyday needs and priorities’ (Halemba, 2015: 143). As Halemba notes, this strategy can be observed in Eastern Europe even as it is buffeted by competing nationalist claims. Similarly, Rogers Brubaker (2002: 2) noted that ethnicity was ‘largely irrelevant’ to his respondents in the Transylvanian town of Cluj, even though they were surrounded by ethno-nationally structured politics and everyday, taken-for-granted markers of belonging and social interaction. In both cases, the researchers’ informants were indifferent to or had actively ‘opt[ed] out of the national discourse’ (Halemba, 2015: 135). This anational attitude should be distinguished from so-called anti-nationalist nationalism,

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recently identified by Kešić and Duyvendak (2016: 583) in the Dutch case as a dynamic, self-critical and ironic but nonetheless nationally bounded ‘cultural imagination’. It should also be distinguished from cosmopolitan or regionalist perspectives in that anational individuals still accept state institutions and citizenship as structuring their lives, without them necessarily being a focus of national loyalty and pride. Finally, an anational stance is different from the anti-nationalist NoBorders platform, which is explicitly constructed in opposition to the nation-state (Marciniak and Tyler, 2014: 18; Anderson et al, 2009). Nevertheless, all of these approaches demonstrate that alternatives to ethno-national categorisation are thinkable and perhaps even possible. Elsewhere, for example, I have looked at how historians of South-East Asia have resisted writing histories that anachronistically project nationstates back through time in order to bolster national legitimacy in the present (Sutherland, 2016b; Taylor, 1998, 2013). I have also considered how Vietnamese ancestor worship and a corresponding belief in ghosts can aid reflection on modes of citizenship and belonging that do not necessarily divide ‘them’ and ‘us’ along national lines. For his part, Engseng Ho (2013: 164) imagines a polity ‘in which contemporary position and action count for more than origin’. Significantly, his historical analysis begins by ‘floating a language of politics’ (Ho, 2013: 152) that is enabled through maritime connections, and it is to the sea that we now turn for further alternatives to ethno-national categorisation.

The sea If we take the nation to be a relatively recent insertion between ‘the cosmic-universal and the mundane-particular’ (Anderson, 1991: 23), then the sea is an excellent starting point from which to critique and potentially transcend it. Though the Exclusive Economic Zones established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) represent an extension of territorial sovereignty, the complex materiality and movement of the sea itself offer an escape from the rigid organising principles of bounded seriality and homogeneous,

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empty time (Anderson, 1991). In their article entitled ‘Wet ontologies, fluid spaces’, the geographers Phil Steinberg and Kim Peters (2015) cast off from territorial markers of sovereignty and belonging to think through the sea instead. To them, the ‘ocean suggests that we think with a different, nonlinear, nonmeasurable notion of time’, and they explicitly distance themselves from depicting history in bounded epochs (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 255). Clearly, this approach tacks away from Anderson’s idea of homogeneous, calendrical time to propose more fluid ways of understanding connectedness. It reminds us that nations are not necessary, but merely one imperfect mode of political organisation among others. In an era when ‘good’ patriots are pitted against ‘bad’ xenophobes (alongside racists and Islamophobes) in the US and much of Europe, we would do well to enquire whether variations on a nationalist theme are the only options at our disposal. Far from being the empty opposite of land – a blank foil to teeming territory – the sea itself is inhabited in all sorts of ways, not least by people. Maritime trade and resource extraction, from fishing to drilling for oil, are key indicators of human consumption and economic exchange. The sea also changes constantly in response to all sorts of atmospheric and environmental pressures, making it not only a metaphor, but also a measure, of human coexistence on this planet. As Anthony Key’s Battle of Britain illustrates, nation-states tend to be imagined cartographically as two-dimensional, clearly delineated, ‘bounded serialities’. Thinking through the sea, by contrast, reminds us of the hidden depths beneath the water’s (constantly churning) surface, and that we need to bring the ‘geophysical into relation with the geopolitical’ (Elden, cited in Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 252). Just like shoals of fish that cannot be pinned down to a specific stretch of water, as well as the unmappable fluidity of seawater itself, people can also resist being ‘tabulated into grids’ (Tagliacozzo, 2009: 111). When Steinberg and Peters (2015: 257) move from the sea as a ‘theory machine’ to apply their wet ontology to politics and governance, they turn to the South-East Asian uplands rather than the sea itself as a political space. And yet, the neighbouring South China Sea (or East Sea or West Philippine Sea, depending on the nation-state

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perspective) well illustrates the shifting and ambivalent divide between land and sea, and the even greater challenge of controlling waterborne human populations. Another appropriate laboratory for applying these ideas would be the watery realm of the Mekong Delta, which has been likened to a quagmire (Biggs, 2011) for those who try to govern it. Seaborne lives and livelihoods are useful aids to thinking outside the nation-state container, without fetishising mobility as an alternative to the static unit of the state. The discussion that follows is motivated by the exclusion of involuntarily mobile refugees, displaced and trafficked people, and precariously employed migrant workers from the rights and protections afforded to state citizens, rather than by the privileged pursuit of freedom or emancipation through movement (Sutherland, T., 2014: 946). Consequently, it draws on literature critiquing statecentric perspectives on ‘marginal’ populations. The sea is more than a guiding metaphor for thinking about political space; it is also ‘a space of political struggle’ in itself (Hallaire and McKay, 2014: 136). However, foregrounding the sea as a political space has been criticised as potentially reproducing the very ‘static and essentialist spatial ontology that it aims to subvert’ (Steinberg, 2014: 26; Wheeler, 2015: 34). In other words, seas are in danger of simply mirroring ‘landlocked’ (Peters, 2010: 1261) imaginaries as essentialised containers, albeit ones characterised by ‘exchange and interaction’ (Steinberg, 2014: 25). According to this view, watery mobility replaces territorialised homogeneity, thereby creating a new category that can be subjected to control (Steinberg, 2014: 25). Casting the sea as a cosmopolitan space in opposition to nation-state homogeneity certainly shifts the focus from land to sea and from unity to mobility, but nonetheless still conforms to a bounded, ‘jigsaw-puzzle view of the world’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 11). By contrast, scholars of so-called ‘uneven geographies’ have been drawing attention to the ‘spatial disruptions … turbulences [and] disarray’ (Tazzioli, 2015: online, emphasis in original) that are embodied in migrants’ lives, on the one hand, and in the materiality of the sea, on the other. When the two intersect, the result is both a conceptual and empirical challenge to the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995) that maps citizens onto

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neatly bounded territories and keeps the migrant ‘Other’ outside; insecure, unprotected and literally ‘all at sea’. The Mediterranean archetype of ‘a basin-defined social continuity across space and time’ is regularly transposed to other seas across the globe (Wheeler, 2015: 31; see also Steinberg, 2014). Charles Wheeler’s (2015: 31) question ‘When is one more Mediterranean comparison one too many?’ addresses the tendency to press any number of watery environments into this unifying category. One way to resist such a move is to focus on how the sea is actually experienced and constituted, as opposed to treating it as a metaphor for rethinking land-based relations. As discussed in Chapter Three, the bounded and delineated cartographic imaginary of the Mediterranean itself has already been disrupted by the EU’s own ‘outsourcing’ of some of its border controls to third countries (Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Martina Tazzioli (2015: online) notes that ‘the map of the Mediterranean as a sea of (un)safe mobility is changeable’ due to the temporary, shifting and patchy nature of EU and member-state enforcement of both humanitarian principles and military security vis-à-vis migrants. Consequently, the idea of the Mediterranean as ‘a basin-defined social continuity’ begins to break down and, by extension, so does the EU’s projection of control over the Mediterranean space. In turn, this challenges some of the fundamental principles underlying the European integration project. As discussed in Chapter Three, the EU’s treatment of migrants clearly highlights the tensions and hypocrisy surrounding its self-ascribed humanitarian and security remits (Vaughan-Williams, 2015). A crisis designates a state of exception; widespread use of the term in this context signals that the established European order is threatened but that normality should resume once the crisis is resolved. After all, migrants can only be ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ in relation to an established, state-centric norm. However, when migrant movement succeeds in disrupting the settled nation-state imaginary itself, then the critique cuts deeper; it is the very ‘citizen epistemology’ (Tazzioli, 2015: online) separating ‘them’ from ‘us’ that is challenged. Migrants to Europe from Africa and the Middle East often experience the sea directly in terms of ‘spatial upheavals’ (Tazzioli,

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2015: online), frequently with tragic consequences. When the migrants who do reach Europe elude state institutions – or well-meaning nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for that matter – by appearing only fleetingly or disappearing unpredictably, they subvert conventional state control mechanisms that count, categorise and ‘border’ individuals into named groups. That is to say, their mobility cannot be clearly ordered and demarcated in terms of state ‘legibility’ (Scott, 1998). While the category of migrant is extremely visible in national discourse as a scapegoat or a cipher for the ‘Other’, in practice, migrants often have to render themselves invisible in order to survive the state system (Marciniak and Tyler, 2014: 8). However, the categories that divide ‘us’ as citizens from ‘them’ as migrants are not immutable. Accordingly, by ‘not fixing in advance the spatial units and spatial scales on which migrants act’ (Tazzioli, 2015: online), alternative modes of political togetherness and belonging become thinkable outside predetermined categories of race, ethnicity and nationality (among others). For example, migrants and activists already come together sporadically and temporarily, imagining spaces that cannot be plotted on any conventional map and enacting forms of solidarity that transcend the ‘citizen epistemology’ of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Rygiel, 2014; Stierl, 2016; see also Rostock, 2014). Migrant mobilities that are ‘under the radar’ in that they do not follow flight paths, ferry routes and officially mappable, traceable movements can resemble those of fishermen who see the world from a non-state perspective (Roszko, 2015, 2016). To take one example, a Senegalese fisherman may variously experience the sea as a site of local knowledge, status and power, as providing an increasingly precarious livelihood, as a source of conflict and competition, as a route to employment in Europe, and as a zone of resistance to state patrol and control (Hallaire and McKay, 2014: 136). In each instance, except perhaps the last, the sea as a political space is defined as much by an anational perspective on the world as an explicitly anti-national one. Tariq Jazeel challenges his readers to approach the world ‘from outside the categories of western thought’ by asking ‘how can I know difference in ways that do not prescribe otherness in my own terms?’ (Jazeel, 2011: 88). He argues that individuals, and especially

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those categorised as migrants and minorities, should be seen as active participants in or agents of plurality, rather than passive recipients waiting to be included in a nation-state construct. As Jones, Jackson and Rhys-Taylor (2014: 6) have noted, this approach ‘is not about a normative descriptor of settled or desired multicultural relations, but about a way of understanding the ongoing relations between people and social formations which make one another up’. It aims to interrogate and step outside the settled, ethno-national dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that underpins the nation-state and ‘the sovereign feeling of our place that is at stake in the face of the stranger who comes “in-here”’ (Jazeel, 2011: 92, emphasis in original). This does not mean exploring counterfactuals, or looking for roads not taken (Duara, cited in Taylor, 1998). Rather, the focus is on the ‘forging of new representations’ (Biggs, 2009: 143) and trying to reveal perspectives, narratives, approaches and insights that already step outside the nationstate frame. As Michael Herzfeld (2016a: 20) notes; ‘Nation-state ideologues tend to divide the world into Manichaean pairs and to coerce or seduce their citizens into adopting the same rhetoric for the moral organisation of their own everyday social relations. But people’s actual uses of that rhetoric may be deliberately irreverent or even subversive.’ What is more, people are sometimes completely indifferent to Manichaean pairs, and step outside them altogether. The final section explores this further in the context of South-East Asian seas.

South-East Asian water worlds In his classic work entitled Routes, the anthropologist James Clifford (1997) sought to challenge the notion that ‘roots always precede routes’, exploring instead ‘human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis’ (Clifford, 1997: 3, 2). Similarly, in the Asian context, Tagliacozzo, Siu and Perdue (2015: 1, 6) contrast ‘intact national space as a starting point’ with ‘historical routes where trading emporiums served as multi-ethnic arenas for social exchange, cultural fusion and political conflict’. Rather than assuming fixed, pre-existing places and identity categories, these authors look instead at how identities are

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created as a fusion of manifold influences in a specific space and time (Tagliacozzo et al, 2015: 3). One practical consequence of this is to draw the sea, as a privileged medium for trade, travel and exchange, into scholarly analyses of South-East Asia. As noted earlier, this does not entail erasing sovereign territory or creating an essentialised regional unity based on shared understandings of the sea. Rather, it means being attentive towards and inclusive of ways of belonging that are exemplified on and through the sea. In the ongoing dispute over the sovereignty of the South China Sea, both China and Vietnam have attempted to draw the sea into their orbit. Vietnam has sought to redefine itself as a ‘sea-oriented’ nation (Roszko, 2015), and China has long mapped its wide-ranging claim in its passports, thereby entrenching it in millions of citizens’ national imaginaries. China has also built up disputed tidal reefs into islands so as to claim the exclusive economic zone around them (a practice condemned in a 2016 UNCLOS ruling by the Court of Arbitration in The Hague). By demarcating their claims in this way, both states seek to extend their bounded territorial sovereignty into the sea. This contrasts starkly with refusing to take any fixed identity as an analytical starting point, so as to transcend prefigured ethnic and national divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. To take one example of the latter approach, Heather Sutherland (2003: 3) evokes the historic ‘integrating rhythms’ and networks of the South China Sea and Bay of Bengal as ‘reinforcing identities to which modern political borders were utterly irrelevant’. According to this reading, the importance of geographic location or native belonging pales in comparison to people’s economic and cultural orientation. This is highly relevant to contemporary political concerns because it offers new ways of thinking about borders, security and solidarity, all of which are at the core of Europe’s ongoing, so-called ‘refugee crisis’ that was discussed in Chapter Three. Historians of South-East Asia have gone a long way towards rejecting essentialising, nationalist historiography and imagining the world across different planes and clusters instead (Taylor, 1998; Sutherland, 2016b). Heather Sutherland’s survey of scholarly comparisons between

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the South China Sea and the Mediterranean, inspired by the classic work of Fernand Braudel, noted how they tend to be driven by a quest for regional coherence and identity, as expressed through the sea. In other words, historians have often used the sea to delimit the historical and cultural boundaries of South-East Asia (Sutherland, 2003). As discussed in the previous section, such approaches – and comparisons with the Mediterranean more generally – have significant limitations, but they nonetheless represent analytical attempts to move away from methodological nationalism and its reliance on nation-state borders. Focusing on ‘surface orientations’ (Taylor, 1998) or ‘densities of interaction’ (Sutherland, 2003: 19) de-emphasises borders between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This, in turn, highlights patterns of movement, relationships and exchange without searching for a unitary identity, territorial or otherwise. For example, the boat-dwelling peoples commonly known as sea nomads who live on South-East Asia’s seas challenge the very idea of belonging to a territorially bounded nationstate (Chou, 2012). Their vision of the South-East Asian region ‘as a network of places connected by inter-related kinship ties’ (Chou, 2006a: 1) offers a radically different vision of a borderless world that is delimited only by the extent of their maritime mobility. Cynthia Chou notes how the Orang Suku Laut living around the Indonesian Riau islands south of Singapore tend to perceive state borders as temporary, with different eras of colonial and postcolonial control washing over but not effacing their alternative world view. Nevertheless, the Orang Suku Laut must navigate externally imposed borders in order to fish, trade and earn a living. Ultimately, Singapore and Indonesia aim to sedentarise and classify them according to a mainstream ethnic category, such as Malay (Chou, 2006b: 128). Therefore, the sea is clearly more than a metaphor, or ‘a mere conceptual tool for understanding (often) non-watery phenomena’ (Anderson and Peters, 2014: 7) such as nationalism. As this example shows, the sea is actually a site of struggle where nationalism has a real impact. The imposition of nation-state borders cuts across the Orang Suku Lauts’ lives and livelihoods by impeding their mobility.

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In the historical context of the South China Sea in the 17th century, Charles Wheeler (2015: 34) shows how so-called Chinese ‘pirates’ subverted this oversimplified, state-centric moniker that was applied to them. Their lives and loyalties also challenged nationalist histories of Vietnam ‘from the water up’ (Wheeler, 2015: 34). To take a contemporary example, Edyta Roszko (2015, 2016) demonstrates how both China and Vietnam have used fishermen as ‘pawns’ (Song, 2015) to bolster their claims to sovereignty over the South China Sea’s disputed Paracel and Spratly islands. Roszko demonstrates how this is not only an anachronistic strategy, but also denies the fishermen agency in crafting their own narratives of the sea, which tend to emphasise commonalities and connections over national borders. In particular, it silences histories of the Cham, a diverse group of once seafaring, Muslim and Hindu (Balamon) communities living around the South China Sea, who have been subjected to centuries of forced displacement. Roszko’s (2016: 39) ethnography of fishermen ‘beyond the nation-state frame’ does not juxtapose Vietnamese, Han and Cham ethnic categories as separate pieces making up a ‘jigsaw-puzzle view of the world’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 11), but rather proposes different ways of seeing the world that problematise just such takenfor-granted categories. By taking fishermen’s narratives on their own terms, Roszko shows that their communities were not homogeneous and closed, but ‘part of a larger, maritime nexus, linked by religion, trade and a cosmopolitan outlook’ (Tagliacozzo, cited in Roszko, 2016: 39–40). Historically, Cham territory included several kingdoms in what is today Central and Southern Vietnam. South-East Asia’s Cham ‘federation’ disintegrated following decisive Vietnamese defeats in the 15th and early 19th centuries, prompting some Cham to take refuge on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Others took waterborne flight to the Mekong Delta spanning Cambodia and Vietnam, though some Cham narratives of origin dispute this today. As Philip Taylor (2007: ix) notes, members of contemporary Cham communities tend to have a remarkably cosmopolitan world view shaped by their involvement in long-distance trade and travel. Cham communities living among

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the complex waterways of the Mekong Delta and on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia appear at first sight to exemplify a self-contained, traditional lifestyle revolving around their Muslim faith. Yet, their members are often multilingual, highly mobile across large areas of South-East Asia, and therefore interculturally skilled and savvy (Taylor, 2007: xi; Tran, 2016). In some cases, these attributes subvert the Vietnamese state’s attempts either to develop Cham communities or essentialise their tangible and intangible cultural heritage (Salemink, 2016). In others, Cham rely on Islam or narratives of multiple origins to sidestep the common belief that they descend from the historic empire of Champa. As an anthropologist, Taylor is interested in how self-identifying Cham define their ethnicity. He suggests that ‘[j]ust as we might best understand Cham localities as places in motion, we can also gain much by seeing their culture in process’ (Taylor, 2007: 17). So, even though Taylor focuses on an apparently clearly defined ethnic group, his study focuses on his respondents’ fluid and multifaceted interpretation of that ethnic identity, rather than an inventory of its objective, immutable characteristics. In so doing, Taylor approaches ethnicity not as ‘a thing in the world, but a perspective on the world’ (Brubaker et al, 2004: 32). Roszko, Taylor and Chou’s dynamic accounts of South-East Asian ‘water worlds’ suggest that their protagonists navigate across and around national identities and borders while maintaining alternative cultural representations of themselves and their cosmologies. Nevertheless, national imaginaries seem to splash across their everyday lives, periodically drenching them without succeeding in defining them. They may adopt a ‘situational ethnicity’ (Brubaker et al, 2004: 51) depending on circumstance, necessity and all sorts of instrumental and emotional triggers, but this is not to suggest that there exists some other underlying essence to replace ethnic or national categorisation. Cham identity is not somehow more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ in a hierarchy of ethnic and national groups, for example. Rather, all forms of labelling are merely one way of seeing the world that should be questioned and oftentimes resisted (Brubaker et al, 2004).

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Conclusion In stark contrast to the ongoing disputes over state sovereignty in the South China Sea, the sea itself can be conceived as a source of identity for those who live on and from it. This goes against state-centric, binary conceptions of fishermen, for example, as either ‘pawns’ or ‘pirates’ in relation to competing state claims (Song, 2015). Similarly, the EU’s ‘refugee crisis’ is only worthy of the name inasmuch as migration flows threaten established borders between nation-states and that of ‘Fortress Europe’ as a geo-body, or a body politic writ large (Thongchai, 1994). In this way, some critical scholarship on South-East Asia connects with current research in critical migration and citizenship studies that tries to transcend static notions of nation-state citizenship as ‘an already settled identity, one that is deemed essentially exclusionary from the outset’ (Ataç et al, 2016: 529). Instead, critical migration scholars emphasise movement over stasis, routes over roots and relationships of solidarity over nativist narratives. Under the interdisciplinary aegis of critical nationalism studies, this chapter has brought some recent theoretical contributions to this literature together with studies of South-East Asia, and it has used the materiality of the sea to explore alternative approaches to identity in a series of South-East Asian cases. As migrants make the perilous and often deadly journey across the Mediterranean, and the Dublin Convention that hitherto governed migration to the EU breaks down, so state borders within the Schengen area spring up again to re-establish the frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. With the European project clearly unable to cope with refugee arrivals and reeling from the blows of the Eurozone crisis and Britain’s exit from the organisation, member states revert to nationality as the lowest common denominator around which to structure political debate. We come full circle to the kind of confrontational tone evoked by Anthony Key’s work Battle of Britain, with which this chapter began. In order to resist the rhetoric and realities dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’, we should follow Zoe Williams’ (2016: online) call, also introduced at the beginning of this chapter, to challenge the mainstream nationalism that ‘regurgitates false absolutes’. The following chapter further explores the

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sea as a political space for thinking beyond nationality, using maritime museums and ‘saltwater sociality’ (Schneider, 2013) as a means to do so.

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FIVE Representation beyond the nation Figure 5.1: Anthony Key, Culture to Go (2002)

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Anthony Key’s work entitled Culture to Go consists of eight plastic takeaway food containers full of cassette tape, seven of which are stacked inside a plastic bag bearing the British Museum’s name and slogan: ‘illuminating world cultures’. The eighth container sits open in the foreground, its contents tangled and shiny. Key has talked about using the ‘takeaway carton intact as an iconic container to talk about immigrant cultures’ (Key, cited in IMMA, 2005: online). Thus, symbols of immigrant culture sit inside the bag, just as the British Museum is an actual repository for many thousands of material objects representing ‘Other’ world cultures (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010). However, the open container sitting outside the bag complicates this simple message. Cultures are not actually closed off containers, capable of being neatly stacked inside an encompassing British emblem without affecting it in any way. Cultures are open, messy, complex and ready to spill out of their confines. Indeed, Key’s later work uses foil takeaway containers that can be flattened, stapled together endlessly and ‘formed around things’ (Key, cited in IMMA, 2005: online), thereby moving away from the very idea of cultures as bounded. Key’s choice of cassette tape to symbolise cultural content is intriguing given the power of all media and especially social media to create collectivities ‘no longer confined within the representational politics of a single geographic nation’ (Moorti, 2003: 360). To me, it suggests ‘the impossibility of maintaining an “authentic” culture in an age of transnational flows’ (Moorti, 2003: 363–4). Anthony Key’s (2004: 29–30) account of how he came to make Culture to Go after attending a conference on contemporary Chinese arts at the British Museum is worth quoting at length because it addresses the themes of this chapter, namely, migration, museums and mobility: I cut up the audiotapes of the conference into eight-inch strips to represent brown soy noodles, and then placed these noodles into the new-style, microwaveable, plastic takeaway cartons. The eight ninety-minute audiotapes of the entire conference were transformed into eight takeaway dishes – in Chinese eating

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culture, eight dishes signify a banquet. I placed the takeaway dishes in a British Museum carrier bag, not unlike the plastic carrier bags used by Chinese takeaways, to suggest that the British Museum is the biggest Chinese takeaway in Britain, taking away our culture. Deborah Root has suggested that appropriation is an instrument of conquest that works by ‘commodifying’ cultural difference.… It is also a way of managing the danger that this cultural contamination can produce by containing the fear of the other into neatly packaged manageable products. In this way immigrant culture is kept alive and at the same time anchored firmly and safely in the past. Culture to Go addresses the persistent ideal of national homogeneity directly, pointing to its consequences for the migrant ‘Other’ in particular, and Key acknowledges that the British Museum has begun to reflect on its ethical responsibilities in this regard. Key’s work makes the point that museum representations have an important part to play in how we interpret the world and how it is interpreted for us. Therefore, this chapter looks to selected exhibits from maritime museums for representations that may inspire alternative ways of imagining togetherness. It is appropriate to study museums in a critical nationalism context for a number of reasons. Museums exist to represent a bewildering variety of histories, as well as slippery notions of (national) identity, in accessible ways. In their competition for visitors and funding, museums can no longer afford – quite literally – to be dusty repositories from a bygone age. As noted earlier, many European collections are the result of imperial conquest, something that is only now being highlighted as museums address the implications of where and how their displays were acquired. Museums’ transformations over time both reflect and help shape the cultural zeitgeist in their respective constituencies. Witness the decision to repurpose France’s existing (foreign) ethnographic and (French) folklore collections into three new museums highlighting immigration, cross-Mediterranean links and global cultural diversity, respectively (Dias, 2008). Museums focus on the objects and narratives

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that arise from human encounters and exchange, presenting them in educational, entertaining and evocative ways. Thus, they offer both an accessible insight and a contribution to the imaginaries that define the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with their far-reaching consequences for people’s lives. Ironically, museums also tend to exhibit objects – or goods – that often benefit from greater freedom of movement than the people who produce them. Taking France as an example, Nélia Dias demonstrates how its evolving museum landscape is closely linked to official understandings of citizenship and republican values. She points out how ‘cultural difference and cultural diversity refer, in the French case, to distinct ways of conceiving alterity and its place within the nation’ (Dias, 2008: 128). In practice, this means that cultural difference is celebrated alongside but not within the French cultural canon. The principle of laïcité (imperfectly glossed as secularism) precludes recognition of cultural diversity since it is incompatible with another French foundational principle, that of égalité. France’s museums may have moved away from collecting according to the categories of ‘primitive or peasant’ (Dias, 2008: 129), but their renewal and reorganisation continue to be predicated on promoting a republican understanding of citizenship that refuses identity politics. In other words, they may have disavowed distinctions between civilised and uncivilised, urban and rural, in creating dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but the discerning gaze remains national and metropolitan. For example, artworks once deemed exotic and primitive are now hailed as masterpieces on a par with Western cultural production and worthy of exhibition in the Paris Louvre. Nevertheless, those masterworks are still judged by French standards, alongside (and not integrated into) the French cultural canon. Thus, the nation still looms large in the construction and recognition of the ‘Other’, now defined as equal rather than inferior, but still on the French nation’s own terms. Building on the conceptualisation of the sea developed in Chapter Four, this chapter explores museums as privileged sites for stepping outside ethno-national categorisations. It discusses three maritime museums located along the Mediterranean littoral and asks whether

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they offer fresh ways of thinking that go beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’. These are the Museu Maritimo Barcelona, the Galata Museo del Mare in Genoa and the Musée des Civilisations Européenes et de la Méditerranée (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations), known as MuCEM, in Marseille. What all three museums have in common is that they make a more or less explicit statement about the ongoing ‘migration crisis’ in the Mediterranean. While some elements of the exhibits discussed reproduce conventional dichotomies of belonging, others challenge and even transcend them. It is important to note that I travelled freely across national borders to visit these museums. I crossed the Mediterranean from Spain to Italy by ferry and then took a bus into France past the town of Ventimiglia, where ‘illegal migrants’ are encamped as they try to leave Italy. I thus enjoyed unencumbered mobility at the same time as others (and I use the term advisedly here) made treacherous journeys in unseaworthy vessels because such access routes are denied to them. I paid the price of a ferry ticket; others paid with their lives.

Museum narratives Museum objects and works of art can entrench but also challenge dominant nation-building paradigms in powerful ways that open up alternatives to ethno-national categorisation. Similarly to television productions, museums impose both a narrative and a visual ‘feel’ on their creative output, in the form of thematic exhibitions. As ‘3D narratives’ (Albano, 2014: 2) that create atmospheres and evoke emotion through film, photographs, objects, layouts and other sensory techniques, museum spaces are multifaceted fora. As part of the ‘heritage industry’, museums are often a key point of contact for tourists and schoolchildren. The first are the flipside of migrant mobility in a world characterised by ‘the detention of “irregular” populations (for example, undocumented migrants) and the enhanced mobility of “regular” citizen-subjects (for example, tourists)’ (VaughanWilliams, 2016: online). The second are tomorrow’s patriots (Killias, 2014). Above all, museums embody a particular narrative; from their

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architecture to their exhibitions, from their education programmes to their exits through the gift shop, they tell a story that very often relates or reacts to overarching, nation-building discourse. Maritime museums continue to make strong, yet understudied, contributions to debates surrounding migration and ethno-national identity. Although the Galata Museo del Mare’s immigration galleries have been studied in some detail (Cimoli, 2015; Lanz, 2016), these analyses have been framed in a migration museum context, as opposed to that of the maritime museum of which they form a part. In many cases, maritime museums contribute to national identity-building just as much as national museums. For example, Elena Stefanou (2012) has shown how certain naval commanders have been sacralised as Greek national heroes, their body parts preserved in maritime museums and periodically worshipped like saints’ reliquaries. At the same time, other maritime museum exhibits use seaborne narratives and events to question the simple binaries that divide native and foreigner. Kirsten and Frida Hastrup (2016: 7) set out to critique the ‘dualistic worldview that water worlds explode’. Specifically, they aim to move beyond bounded notions of culture that are positioned in opposition to nature. In a museums context, this divide is exemplified in the way aquariums and maritime museums are quite separate institutions, even though they are ostensibly concerned with the same water worlds. Barcelona, for example, boasts the world’s largest aquarium for Mediterranean species, which forms part of the same port complex as the Museu Maritimo. However, the two are linked neither physically nor thematically. Similarly, Genoa’s aquarium sits quite apart from the Galata Museo del Mare, even though it is only a short distance away along the port. Yet, studying the sea is an interdisciplinary endeavour (Hastrup and Hastrup, 2016) and there is a strong argument for bringing together the political, natural and cultural in a maritime museum context. Seaborne explorers long complemented ‘the scientific mode of knowing nature’ (Straughan and Dixon, 2014: 455) with artistic impressions by including painters on their expeditions, for example. Works of art are also regularly incorporated into museum exhibits in order to enhance presentation and interpretation, and

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featured prominently in the Museu Maritimo Barcelona’s response to the refugee crisis. A sense of shame featured strongly in the Museu Maritimo Barcelona’s temporary exhibition entitled Mar Mort Mans (Sea, Death, Hands). Staged from May to September 2016 in the museum’s freely accessible foyer, it brought together a series of art installations, photographs and videos that together made an explicit political statement in the name of the museum and its employees. The central work, designed by a teenaged artist, consisted of life jackets shaped into a domed, tent-like structure on the ground and a large rubber dinghy festooned with lifejackets hanging from the ceiling. A huge panel introducing the exhibition was positioned on the floor directly underneath it, featuring an aerial photograph of people tightly packed onto a dinghy at sea. As we saw in Chapter Three, lifejackets are a powerful and widely used visual metaphor for the refugee crisis. There is a parallel to be drawn here with suitcases as symbols of migration, used even to the point of cliché. The positioning of the dinghy and panel, however, defied expectations, drawing attention to the volume of the space. The empty, dangling life jackets appeared still more sinister as visitors gazed up at them from a perspective that suggested they themselves were under water. To this extent, the exhibit succeeded in conjuring the sea as a three-dimensional space, even if its materiality remained absent. Alongside the central installation of Mar Mort Mans, a film accompaniment showed individual museum staff members in turn, each holding up a whiteboard bearing a single word or phrase, including ‘What if it was us?’, ‘Children don’t understand borders’ and ‘It could be our kids’. Blame for the migrants’ suffering was then indirectly attributed to the European Union (EU) through a clip of a European Parliamentarian denouncing supporters of EU migration policy, ending with the words ‘I wonder how you can sleep at night’. This video attempted to arouse empathy for Mediterranean migrants’ plight, though without giving them a voice. However, selected migrant voices were heard elsewhere in the exhibition in a video piece from the museum collection entitled Solo Ida (One Way Ticket) by Manuel

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Soubiès (2005). This consisted of a series of migrant testimonials voiced over a video of a calm sea, displayed alongside two further pieces that directly addressed questions of belonging. The first, entitled De l’autre côté (On the other side) by Tatiana Maltaverne (2004) was composed of three coconut husks filled with a clear substance resembling water and featuring tiny figurines. On close inspection, these revealed themselves to be a group carrying suitcases standing opposite beachgoers in swimwear, veiled women waving across the water and eight men in a rubber dinghy. Next to this, the ambiguously titled A donde vayas iras conmigo (Wherever you go you will go with me) by Pavel Miguel (2007) was composed of a rough-hewn wooden boat and oars set atop a series of uprooted tree stumps. Using evocations of the sea juxtaposed with ideas of rootedness, alterity and mobility, these works all spoke directly to the themes of this chapter. Of the three museums, the Museu Maritimo Barcelona’s temporary exhibit offered the largest-scale, most varied and most explicit statement on the Mediterranean migration ‘crisis’. An oversized, visually arresting panel depicting black migrants covered in red blankets displayed in its permanent exhibition also recorded the museum staff’s ‘shame’. The MuCEM’s comment, by contrast, is more understated. It has printed Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’ – in 11 languages along its exterior façade. This is in keeping with the discourse of rights prevalent in its permanent exhibition. More directly (though not as prominently displayed), the Galata Museo del Mare addressed a panel-sized letter to visitors that connects the age-old fear of sea monsters with the fear of seaborne migrants as a menacing ‘Other’. This is discussed later in the context of their Mare Monstrum exhibition. Yet, in all three cases, the materiality of the sea rarely makes an appearance. In a sector that clearly follows the paradigmatic division between nature (aquariums) and culture (museums), the actual and metaphorical potential of the sea to trace human connection, togetherness and belonging is underused.

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Maritime narration Referring to the relationship between humans and nature in the context of climate change, Hastrup and Hastrup (2016: 10) note how ‘the present moment allows or indeed forces us to dispense with the “between,” and to dive directly into the consistent fluidity of everything social’. The museums discussed here have yet fully to exploit the sea as a medium of and a metaphor for social fluidity. As Day and Lunn (2003: 290) note, maritime history has a much broader reach than naval history, encompassing social histories of dockyards, fisheries, beach resorts and all sorts of seafarers, among many other themes. Today, most people’s daily lives are lived far from the sea (Straughan and Dixon, 2014: 474), but thinking through the sea’s rhythms can nonetheless offer fresh perspectives on mobility and collectivity. In the Museu Maritimo Barcelona, the materiality of the sea is indirectly addressed through a series of boat sculptures fashioned from driftwood and other beachcombed items. It also surfaces in a pile of rubbish displayed to draw attention to the pollution of the seas. Although driftwood is still at one remove from the sea, its polished forms are nonetheless evocative of the sea’s movement and friction. As will be discussed later in the chapter, Katharina Schneider (2013) points to the explanatory power of driftwood for understanding social relations on the tiny island of Pororan, which lies off the larger Baku island in the autonomous province of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. The only time the Museu Maritimo Barcelona directly invokes the sea is in a temporary exhibition about artists who painted underwater. A closed-off corner bathed in blue light illustrates how colours change at different depths, but no further props or images are provided to evoke the artists’ immersion in the sea. Elsewhere, water is striking by its absence. For example, the boats displayed under the soaring vaults of the historic shipyards that house the museum are literally stranded. They are also largely decontextualised, with minimal labelling and no pictures, mannequins or objects to conjure how and where they would have been used. This deprives the artefacts of the essential element that gives them meaning, mobility and purpose. Although the

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shipyards were once open to the sea, which still laps the harbour a few metres away, water is now largely invisible throughout the museum. Only one painting depicts the drama of the 16th-century sea battle at Lepanto, far removed from the replica galleon that forms the museum’s centrepiece, and only one backdrop in a vitrine shows a large expanse of sea as the setting for the 19th-century bathing boom. Even in a maritime museum, the sea itself is an alien place. The materiality of the sea respects neither the constructed borders between nation-states, nor the constructed border between nature and human culture. Further, the sea is alien because it is a reminder ‘that the very boundary between “like” and “unlike” is illusory’ (Dean, cited in Helmreich, 2009: 17). In Alien Ocean, Stefan Helmreich (2009: 9) writes about the sea ‘as a symbol of life writ large’ in the biological sense, but also draws attention to the darker side of the sea ‘as a space of drowning, death and shipwreck … imperialism, the Middle Passage, submarine warfare, and radioactive waste’ (Helmreich, 2009: 12). Fear of the sea transfers onto people that come from the sea and the language used to describe them. As Helmreich (2009: 17) notes: Alien species are often dressed up in imageries of the primitive and rootless, tokens for anxieties about those ethnically or racially other to the people describing them. These are aliens defined as the opposite of natives and, often, as those outside the nation.… An alien nation might be a nation that comprises nations. Or, more radically, it might undo the idea of nation as such. The sea as imaginary and materiality reflects ‘us’, not as a flat mirror, but as a repository of the fear and incoherence that is bound up in the ideology of nation. It transcends ‘us’ and ‘them’ by highlighting the important part of ‘us’ that is projected onto ‘them’. Richard Welch and Ruth Panelli are interested in the role of fear in promoting the illusion of collective belonging. As they put it, following Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘“self ” and “other” are more closely entwined than is acknowledged in binary constructions that promote the “self ” and demonise the “other”’ (Welch and Panelli, 2007: 370).

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In turn, the pejorative connotations of terms like ‘waves’, ‘floods’ and ‘swamp’ used to describe migrant ‘flows’ are often condemned without being analysed for their watery associations. The wide-ranging and thought-provoking exhibition at the Galata Museo del Mare in Genoa, entitled Mare Monstrum (a play on the Latin term for the Mediterranean – Mare Nostrum – which can be roughly translated as Monstrous Sea), successfully draws out such connections. At the time of my visit, a reduced-size exhibit remained in place following the end of the main exhibition in January 2016. This lacked a number of the artefacts reproduced in the catalogue, but the imposing, whale-shaped doorway and sub-aquatic blue walls remained intact. Like the Museu Maritimo Barcelona, the Galata Museo del Mare is partly housed in, and in this case named after, historic shipyards designed for building galleys. Indeed, a galley is one of three full-scale replica ships featured in the museum. Spread over three floors, the Galata Museo del Mare is much larger and more ambitious in scope than the Museu Maritimo Barcelona, and the museography is much better developed. For example, visitors can go on deck or inside all three replica ships, which have life-size mannequins, furnishings, audio soundtracks and films to help the visitor imagine life on board. A 4D cinema offers a simulation of a storm at sea, and visitors can steer one of the replica ships in a video game projected onto a large screen. Several hands-on activities, such as trying to turn a galley’s oar, add to the experience, and information panels are plentiful, clear and accessible. The museum is organised chronologically around the history of Genoa as a sea port. Numerous period paintings of historic ships and sea battles ensure that representations of the sea do feature in the exhibition, though the sea itself is not actually visible from the museum. As suggested earlier, depictions of the ‘Other’ can be so very frightening precisely because they tell us something about ourselves. The Mare Monstrum exhibition (Galata Museo del Mare, 2015: 87) addresses this directly in its thematisation of the slave trade and zombies as ‘horrors from the sea’, and by describing the sea as ‘the place that transports and channels the horrors of slavery and migration’. According to the exhibition, the zombie as a figure of the living dead originated in

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Haitian voodoo as a form of retribution for sins committed. Plantation owners cynically exploited slaves’ belief in zombies to prevent them from committing suicide, since the prospect of an eternity of suffering was even more unbearable than enduring a lifetime of cruelty and pain. Consequently, ‘the zombie is not, originally, a monster to be feared, but something one has fears of becoming; a non-person like the ones to which our society tends to reduce migrants and the “new slaves” of globalisation’ (Galata Museo del Mare, 2015: 87, author’s translation). Linked to this, the exhibition highlights US horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the ‘real horror’ (Galata Museo del Mare, 2015: 88) was not slavery, but the danger of white America itself being colonised and zombified. The Mare Monstrum exhibition catalogue closes with the following statement: The deployment of a racist and xenophobic armoury (they’re taking our jobs, they bring illness, they bring prostitutes, they are terrorists) shows once again how people’s lowest depths lie within themselves [il vero abisso dell’uomo e in se stesso] and that the fear, now as then, is above all fear of the other. Because, after all, everyone different to me is a monster. (Campodonico, cited in Galata Museo del Mare, 2015: 93, author’s translation) An information panel featuring anti-immigrant headlines from Italian newspapers conveys much the same sentiment to museum audiences. As in the Museu Maritimo Barcelona, it is framed as a direct communication from museum staff to its ‘Dear visitors’. As a further visual reminder, dioramas of vessels elsewhere in the museum also show giant squid tentacles emerging from the waves. This gloomy but apt assessment of widespread attitudes towards seaborne migrants (among other ‘outsiders’) contrasts sharply with Pororan islanders’ reportedly very different, more open, attitude to new encounters as harbingers of potentially agreeable and mutually beneficial new relationships (Schneider, 2013), discussed in the next section. As its name indicates, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations is not strictly a maritime museum. First conceived in

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2000 and opened in 2013 to coincide with Marseille’s designation as European Capital of Culture, it is the flagship site for the city’s ongoing redevelopment of its port, and houses collections derived from the reorganisation of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Nevertheless, its location, theme and architecture suggest a close relationship with the Mediterranean that justifies its inclusion here. Built on reclaimed land and encased in a delicate lattice of reinforced concrete by its architect Rudy Ricciotti, the new structure closely communicates with a seascape visible from the walkway winding around the building, from a bridge linking it to the historic Fort Saint Jean and from large roof terraces on both parts of the museum. However, the museum’s permanent exhibition is less willing to engage with the sea itself. Its four guiding themes of agriculture, monotheism, citizenship and voyages of discovery largely turn their back on the sea. The choice of themes is justified at the outset on the basis that this is what distinguishes Mediterranean civilisations from those of other littorals, with the South China Sea and the Pacific cited as specific examples. The museum’s agriculture theme, centred on wheat, vines and olives, begins by positing that humans first separated themselves from nature through cave paintings and, later, sculptures of wild animals. A huge screen dominates the exhibition space with clips of vineyards, wheat fields, close-ups of wizened hands holding earth, subtitled ‘terre – terroir – territoire’ (‘earth, terroir, territory’) and ‘agriculture-culture’. When water does appear, it is as rain, river, waterfall or channel. Fishing is relegated to a corner display consisting of a fishing boat, a series of six drawings of fisherfolk and a film about the contemporary decline of the Mediterranean fishing industry. Despite the museum’s name and location, then, the sea does not constitute a unifying or collective identity in this exhibit. In the words of Lambert, Martins and Ogborn (2006: 482): [the] overemphasis on human agency … makes for a curiously static and empty conception of the sea, in which it serves merely as a framework for historical investigations, rather than being something with a lively and energetic materiality of its own.

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The museum’s main thematic focal points lie elsewhere, and this largely unacknowledged absence of the sea makes for a disjointed exhibition overall. As Nélia Dias’s (2008) analysis of the French museum sector suggests, the MuCEM clearly reproduces France’s prevailing national narrative of liberté, egalité, fraternité. For example, the MuCEM’s citizenship theme takes Athens as its starting point, but then prominently features busts of Marianne in her Phrygian cap (a symbol of the French Revolution) and a guillotine, alongside a map depicting where the death penalty still exists across the world. A large screen features nine European, North African and Israeli women talking about their professional lives, surrounded by a series of male and female, ancient and modern busts, as if to compensate for the acknowledged exclusion of women (and slaves) from Athenian democracy. Thus, the language of citizenship rights takes on a decidedly French flavour. In the final section devoted to voyages of discovery, the sea momentarily takes centre stage, with a huge screen showing a film of crashing waves and roiling waters, alongside a smaller screen discussing the life and times of early European explorers. Although in stark contrast to the agricultural images in the first film, its aim is to encourage the viewer to think of the sea from the landed perspective of European adventurers setting out to cross an unknown ocean. Leading up to this screen, a Japanese mermaid model is exhibited alongside a panel about the sea as a fearsome place and some objects of European desire, thereby acknowledging why they came to be in the museum collection. The exhibition then meanders through sections on the seven ancient wonders of the world and the grand tour before ending with a series of three artworks. According to their labels, two of these were explicitly chosen to encourage visitor reflection on the Mediterranean itself. The first of these, Circle of Confusion (1997) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, asks whether it is even possible to represent the Mediterranean, whereas the MuCEM interprets the second, Middlesea (2008) by Zined Sedira, as presenting the Mediterranean at the confluence of cultures. The visitor’s final but somewhat belated impression of the exhibition, then, is of the sea and its multiple meanings.

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Although the MuCEM, Galata Museo del Mare and Museu Maritimo Barcelona do engage with the meanings and materiality of the sea itself to varying degrees, this remains limited overall and at the margins of their permanent exhibitions. Yet, there is great potential to make the sea much more central to the representation of maritime ‘water worlds’ (Hastrup and Hastrup, 2016). Some scholars have attempted a kind of psychogeography of the sea, while others have focused on how people experience and perform identities on and through the sea (Peters and Anderson, 2014). Diving into the sea can be intellectually refreshing as well as literally so, and can help transcend ‘landlocked’ and static dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Kim Peters (2014: 424), for example, shows how ‘the liquid materiality of the sea’ plays havoc with the idea of fixed, linear borders. As Jen Bagelman (2016: 1026) puts it: ‘immersed in this fluid field, it’s a stretch to think of community as confined within the strictures of national borders’. What is more, the vastness, depth and changeability of the sea make state surveillance and control more difficult, variable and therefore onerous than on land (Peters, 2014: 427). This can spark new ways of thinking politically about being with others and moving through the world that are not predicated on the linear passage of time and a ‘solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (Anderson, 1991: 26). The final section of this chapter briefly discusses one anthropological study that could form the basis for representing belonging in terms of mobility rather than through a static, national frame. Translated to a museum context, it could also be used to transcend the division between museum and aquarium.

Imprint and Impact The anthropologist Katharina Schneider (2013) has carried out a rich ethnographic study contrasting social relations on her ‘mainland’ field site (actually the large island of Baku in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea) with what she terms ‘saltwater sociality’ on the small, neighbouring island of Pororan. Schneider’s findings emphasise the importance to mainlanders of ‘following the road’, which is at once

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a literal and metaphorical exhortation to respect the delineations of villages into separate family groups, linked, in turn, to a myth of common descent. In other words, ‘following the road’ also means ‘following the footsteps of the ancestors’ (Schneider, 2011: 187). Such a world view is redolent with aspects of nationalism that emphasise common roots and compartmentalise populations into bounded, nation-state territories. By contrast, Schneider describes how one of her informants pointed to a piece of driftwood to explain social relations on the island of Pororan. The Pororans’ world view, Schneider argues, is bound up with the fact that their livelihoods come from the sea (as opposed to market gardening on the Baku mainland), that their settlements are less orderly than those on Baku and that they have less knowledge of or interest in their ancestors than the inhabitants of Baku. On the mainland, social relations are mapped onto neatly bounded residential areas, so that, in principle, visitors can immediately ‘see who is who’ (Schneider, 2011: 192) by looking at the settlement. On the other hand, at the time of Schneider’s fieldwork in the mid-2000s, Pororan islanders had a tendency to move frequently and build wherever there was space. They also reported experiencing the passage of time very differently when at sea. Alongside historical and economic factors, Schneider suggests that part of the explanation for this difference lay in an objectification of social relations that was based on movement rather than stasis. As she puts it: Pororans keenly observe and often draw attention to the movements of fish, tides, wind, plankton, driftwood, rain, spirits and coral rubble around the island. All of them, as the islanders describe them, bump into each other, take unexpected turns, and make appearances that surprise people.… Within this saltwater environment, in which everything and everyone is constantly in motion and impacts upon others, a mode of objectification that relies on impacts to create constantly changing relations comes to appear as distinctively ‘saltwater’. (Schneider, 2011: 194, 195)

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In practice, Pororans spend a great deal of time commenting on each other’s actual movements around the island, and are loath to make plans in advance due to the inherent unpredictability of movement (Schneider, 2011: 189). On market days, Schneider observed a tendency for Pororans to accord less value to shared ancestry and hierarchical relationships of rank than to actual, regular exchanges. Schneider clearly states that the mainland way of life premised on ancestral roads is not static, but that roads nevertheless lay down a traditional route to be followed in future. For example, she discusses how tradition was used as a strategy for survival and security during the Bougainville crisis (1998–2001) and subsequent peace process (1997–2005), which turned on independence from Papua New Guinea. This strategy involved a certain contingency in the return to ancestral ways, despite being presented as continuous and apolitical (Schneider, 2011: 197). Pororans, by contrast, ‘are trained to perceive the shifting forms and unpredictable movements of various elements of their marine environment, as well as of humans and their settlement. They are not used to perceiving temporally and spatially enduring roads’ (Schneider, 2011: 199). Schneider usefully sums up the opposing perspectives on Baku and Pororan as characterised by imprint and impact, respectively. In sum, the Pororans’ sea-based identity offers one example of a mode of belonging derived from movement rather than being built on bounded, static notions of difference. It would be instructive to try to represent this in an aquarium, but more difficult to do so in the ‘dry dock’ of a maritime museum. In any case, such an exhibition would take a very different approach to cultures of belonging than Anthony Key’s depiction of boxed-in Chineseness in Culture to Go. In his outline of a politics of dwelling, Tim Ingold (2005: 507) notes that: It is a mistake to equate dwelling with rest or stasis. For being at home in the world entails action and perception, and to act and perceive one must move about. But enclosure blocks movement,

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converting the places that people inhabit to containers in which they are imprisoned. No-one can be at home in a prison. Ingold’s critique is directed at a ‘landlocked’ view of the world intent on dividing nature and society, but his comments are also extremely relevant to nation-state containers legitimated by nationalist ideology. In particular, his use of the concept of home recalls other ways of theorising belonging, as discussed in Chapter Two. National belonging is not a common-sense notion. It is a relatively recent way of imagining and organising human populations politically that now has huge emotive power. The common practice of scaling up community formations to the national imagined community is also still pervasive. However, as Schneider’s ethnography of the Pororan islanders shows, there are other ways of thinking belonging derived from seaborne mobility that might also be scaled up to represent alternatives to nationalist thinking. This is less about people’s actual movement or how well-travelled they are, and more about the mindset and preconceptions that they use to make sense of human relationships. It is possible for someone to live in the same place for a lifetime without necessarily feeling enclosed or hemmed in by strictures as to who can or cannot belong to their local or national community. Without roaming far from their island, Pororan relationships are constantly made and remade without apparent recourse to ancestry or to other familiar demarcations of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Saltwater, as well as providing their livelihoods, provides them with a model for living that is far removed from ethnic categorisation and national belonging. Theirs is just one way of perceiving togetherness that transcends the nation-state frame that so many take for granted.

Conclusion Both the Galata Museo del Mare and the Museu Maritimo Barcelona encourage visitors to confront their fears and prejudices around seaborne migration through their thought-provoking exhibits Mare Monstrum and Mar Mort Mans. Ann Day and Ken Lunn (2003: 305)

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note that ‘as direct experiences of obvious maritime connections diminish, [heritage] presentations can produce a romanticised and uncritical perspective’. Both of these museums avoid that pitfall, albeit only in temporary exhibits that have a tendency to be more risky and challenging than permanent displays. Yet, these maritime museums have as-yet-untapped potential to make the materiality of the sea much more central to their exhibitions and, by extension, to challenge conventional understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This chapter has explored ‘saltwater sociality’ (Schneider, 2013) as just one means of transcending the nation-state frame that so often defines migrants as aliens and outsiders, all the better to protect citizens from the fear of the unknown. The freedom from the pressures of everyday life and social relations that Pororans feel when out at sea (Schneider, 2013: 39) chimes with Jon Anderson’s (2014: 114) study of how ‘[k]ayaking on the sea gives humans the opportunity to be other than who they are on land, and gives them a new way of looking at the world as a consequence’. This kind of engagement with the exciting experience of being on water also gives rise to a heightened sense of risk and fear, hence associations ‘with death, implying an escape from the conscious weight of material being’ (Strang, 2015: 58). Tantalising as the sea may be, people’s ultimate need for a sense of security, twinned with fears that immigration will upset ‘social cohesion’, result in an immensely powerful political discourse. The dangers of the deep, as embodied in fabulous monsters or lurking invaders, resonate with humans’ primal fear of disorder and chaos disrupting their lives.

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SIX Conclusion Figure 6.1: Anthony Key, Going Home (2014)

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The work by Anthony Key entitled Going Home looks like a tree trunk. It is solid, wooden and cylindrical and made of many layers, though these are built from the inside out and not the outside in. However, Going Home is not natural; it has no roots. It is constructed from hundreds of chopsticks painstakingly stuck together to create a satisfying, huggable whole (Key said that he knew the work was finished when his wife walked in and embraced it). Metaphors referring to roots are often used approvingly to describe where a person ‘truly’ belongs. A nation-state’s relationship to its territory is also assumed to be deeply rooted in both space and time, as exemplified in the crafting and retelling of that nation’s history. Conversely, rootlessness tends to be viewed with suspicion, such as the racist stereotype of the wandering, cosmopolitan Jew (Sutherland, 2016a). However, to quote the introductory video from Catalonia’s Museum of the History of Immigration: ‘man is not a tree. He has feet and moves’. Therefore, I think Anthony Key’s Going Home is a better way of considering the idea of belonging than metaphors of rootedness. At the same time, Going Home is a solid, bounded whole, much as nation-states are imagined today. Nation-states tend to be depicted as exercising sovereign control over defined territories and regulating traffic across borders in an orderly way, using a wide range of sophisticated security measures. This imagery is reinforced by political maps that neatly delineate where one nation-state ends and the next begins. Yet, ongoing migration to the European Union (EU) has shown how patchy and arbitrary border enforcement and applications of the label ‘illegal migrant’ can be. On the one hand, borders as lines continue to have huge symbolic importance for state sovereignty. Building a fence between Mexico and the US, for example, or along Hungary’s frontier, shows political resolve and projects the power to stop migrants in their tracks. The detention of migrants arriving on Mediterranean islands like Italy’s Lampedusa and Greece’s Chios and Lesbos can also be seen as fulfilling this function. On the other hand, however, borders are increasingly being analysed as an oft-repeated performance rather than taken as given. As Joe Painter (2010: 1105)

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puts it: ‘international border controls are only effective for as long as those enforcing them turn up for work each day’. Politicians across the globe currently operate within a system premised on national populations organised into bounded states. General elections appeal to voters on the basis of national solidarities, whether defined in state (eg British, Spanish) or sub-state (eg Scottish, Welsh, Catalan) terms. This also tends to apply to EU elections, as it did to the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the EU, in which the principle of European-wide solidarity or its practical benefits – such as redistributive structural funding to relatively poor UK regions – was conspicuous by its absence. That is, political community is still defined in national terms that are more or less inclusive. This book has sought to question the logic of nationalism and chauvinism as reflecting and perpetuating historic and economic inequalities, starting with colonialism. It has explored why nationalism still has such power to mobilise and galvanise by paying attention to the importance of affect, emotion and nostalgia in shaping political attitudes. Furthermore, it has tried to step outside ethno-national categories using the materiality of the sea as a more mobile space for thinking about belonging. The colonial introduction of the census to South-East Asia entrenched bounded and exclusive ethnic, racial and national categories there (Anderson, 1991: 165). Census and other such statistical data continue to be collected extensively across the globe and used for policymaking in all areas of public life, from housing, through university admissions, to equality and diversity initiatives. Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov (2004: 34) note how census categories can ‘eventually reshape lines of identification … creating new kinds of persons for individuals to be’. However, even when census categories are periodically modified in order to capture change through intermarriage and migration, they serve to entrench the prevailing view of community diversity as multiple ethnicities and nationalities living side by side. In turn, applying the notion of multiple identities to individuals suggests a finite set of identifiers that a person can choose to inhabit, rather than taking a more dynamic and holistic view of people as engaged in a constant process of becoming (Appadurai,

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1990). This is not simply a top-down process, but one that is routinely appropriated and adapted by people to describe themselves and others, most obviously through stereotypes. Although the ability to classify is necessary to make sense of the world, social categorisation tends to overestimate in-group sameness and out-group difference. Turning to the sea offers no escape from the implacable logic of ‘them’ and ‘us’ when it is imagined as a flat, mirror-like surface that merely reflects maritime characteristics back onto static, national stereotypes. When taken on its own terms and those of its inhabitants, however, the sea offers new ways of imagining social relations. In the final analysis, people’s emotional need to feel comfortable, secure and ‘at home’ vitiates many open and fluid understandings of belonging because these needs are so solidly tied to ‘thick’ notions of territorialised, rooted, cultural identity and nationalist, often racialised, restorative nostalgia. As Jan-Willem Duyvendak (2011: 93) notes: ‘emotive culturalization thus stresses the need for loyalty to the nation-state and demands proof of such feelings from immigrants. It includes the warning that immigrants who do not manage to feel at home should go “home”’. Duyvendak points out that many migrants (to the Netherlands, in this instance) do feel at home, at Home and even at HOME there according to the typology discussed in Chapter Two (Brun and Fàbos, 2015), but this is not actually what the ‘host’ nation demands of them. Rather, it demands that ‘native citizens’ (Miller, 2016: 8) should be able to feel at home on their terms, now and in the future, thereby reproducing the exclusionary logic of nationalism. In the Netherlands, ‘a society where everybody can feel at home’ is an official policy goal (Dutch Cabinet, cited in Duyvendak, 2011: 102) and an apparently laudable aim. However, its execution exemplifies a sense of native entitlement that radiates widely across many countries’ migration policies, integration policies, citizenship policies and beyond. In a very real sense, ‘we’ are all nationalists now. The work entitled Repatriation by Anthony Key, reproduced on the cover of this book, was installed in 2003 in the drawing room of Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, London, which was once the home of the early 19th-century English architect and collector Sir John Soane.

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Key covered all the pheasants (a bird indigenous to Asia) depicted on the original chinoiserie wallpaper with native British crows, thereby ‘mirroring dominant attitudes towards minorities in the idea of repatriation – “Go back to where you belong” is a comment often directed at immigrants’ (Key, 2004: 46). The point of Key’s critique was to push the unifying thrust of nationalism to its logical extreme and turn it back on Britain. If foreigners are repatriated for not being British, then how many of Britain’s national treasures and cultural accretions (not to mention pheasants) should also be repatriated? Similar to patriotism, a feeling that reaches into many people’s living rooms, the seemingly gentle and unobtrusive pattern of the wallpaper conveys a stark message about who has a right to belong, and who is unwelcome, or ‘not quite right’. Far from blending into the background, this particular wallpaper reminds us that all is not well with a world order premised on ethnonational categorisation and all-pervasive national distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

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120

Index

A

colonialism, 81, 101 British 14-16, 24, 30, 54, 59, community, 10, 20, 21, 39-40, 59, 93, 96, 101 belonging, 34, 96, 101 bounded, 12, 14, 23 imagined 21, 23, 42, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64-5 of value, 9-10, 24, 40, 46, 51, 55, 58, 59, 66 Conservative Party, 13, 14, 18, 20, 36 conviviality, 40-1

affect, 22, 23, 25, 101 Ai Wei Wei, 45, 46, 49, 56 anti-Semitism, 30 atmospheres, 22, 24 Avramopoulos, Dimitris, 51, 52

B Barroso, José Manuel, 48, 51 belonging 3, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 68, 74, 96, 102 Blair, Tony 8 borders, 7, 21, 24, 49, 53, 54, 59, 60, 71, 74, 77, 93, 100-1 ‘Brexit’ referendum, 3, 4, 13, 14, 25, 30, 35, 36, 47, 55, 62, 63, 101 British National Party, 37 British values, 8, 17 Brown, Gordon 8

E emotion, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 34, 36, 101, 102 ethnonational categories 13, 17, 24, 25, 33, 41, 66, 67, 71, 76, 82, 83, 101, 103 European Union (EU) 54, 59, 60, 70, 100 refugee ‘crisis’, 2, 46-8, 49, 50, 55, 58, 70, 77, 85 Nobel Peace Prize, 51 Falklands War, 20 Fortuyn, Pim, 31 Front National, 29

C Cameron, David, 8, 32, 48 Cham, 75-6 chauvinism, 16-18, 29, 30, 31, 56, 101 citizenship, 32, 33 Clarke, Gary, 19 class, 33 middle, 19 working, 17, 18, 19, 20

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44, 57, 62, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 86, 100 miners’ strike, 18, 19, 20 minority ethnicity, 8, 16, 72, 76, 103 mobility, 28-9, 43, 53, 58, 71, 83, 86, 87, 94, 95 Mogherini, Federica, 47 museums, 4, 81-4, 87 British, 80, 81 Galata Museo del Mare, 83, 84, 86, 89-90, 93, 96 maritime, 3, 84, 87, 88, 97 MuCEM, 83, 86, 90-2, 93 Museu Maritimo Barcelona, 83, 84, 85-6, 87, 89, 90, 93, 96 Muslims, 30, 76

G Grybauskaite, Dalia, 51

H Hillsborough disaster, 19 home, 24, 28, 35, 37, 41, 43, 65, 102 Hunt, Tristram, 36, 37

I immigration, 8, 9, 35, 36, 49, 53, 55, 58, 70, 77, 80, 83, 89, 97, 102 Islam, 76 radical, 17 Islamophobia, 30 

J

N

Jews, 30 ‘wandering’, 29

nation, 64, 88 nation-state, 32, 42, 53, 63, 65, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, 97, 100, 102 national identity, 4, 21, 24, 31, 76, 81 nationalism, 1, 2, 11, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 31, 33, 42, 49, 67, 77, 96, 101, 102 methodological, 63, 74 native, 8, 11, 65-6, 102 nostalgia, 34-5, 37, 43, 44, 101, 102

K Key, Anthony, 3-4, 7-8, 25, 289, 38, 41, 43, 46, 61-3, 68, 77, 79-81, 95, 99-101, 102-3 Khan, Sadiq, 18 Kurdi, Alan, 46, 49, 57

L Labour Party, 13, 14, 36, 37 Le Pen, Marine, 4 Lesbos, 45, 46, 51, 54, 100

O Orang Suku Laut, 74 Orgreave, Battle of, 19-20 Orientalism, 31 Osborne, George, 36 othering, 17, 24, 29, 30, 40, 49, 50, 51, 62, 70, 71, 82, 86, 88, 89-90

M Major, John, 8 Merkel, Angela, 46, 47, 50, 51, 57 migrants, 11, 12, 13, 23, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43,

122

INDEX

P

T

patriotism 2, 17, 29, 30, 31, 37, 58, 68, 103 Pororan, 90, 93, 94-5, 96, 97

Thatcher, Margaret, 18, 19, 20 time, 68 linear, 12, 23, 24, 34 Trump, Donald, 4, 13, 30, 35

R racialisation, 12, 13, 14, 17, 30, 60, 63, 64, 102 racism, 15, 30, 33, 90 Rees, Marvin, 18, 25 Rhodes must fall, 15-16, 17, 19 rootedness, 12, 38, 65, 66, 86, 100 Rudd, Amber, 19, 20

U

S

Warsi, Sayeeda, 30, 32 Wilders, Geert, 4, 31

UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), 13

V Vietnam 1, 2, 67, 73, 75, 76

W

Scargill, Arthur, 20 Schulz, Martin, 47 sea, 3, 60, 67-72, 73, 77, 78, 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 97, 101 Mediterranean, 53, 70, 74, 77, 81, 82-3, 85, 91 South China, 68, 73, 74, 75, 77, 91 socialisation, 21, 23, 33, 43 South-East Asia, 31, 63, 66, 67, 68, 72-6, 77, 101 stereotypes, 10, 12, 29, 102

X senophobia, 29, 30, 50, 68, 90

123

This book develops new ways of thinking beyond the nation as a form of political community by seeking to transcend ethnonational categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on scholarship and cases spanning Pacific Asia and Europe, it steps outside assumptions linking nation to state. Accessible yet theoretically rich, it explores how to think about nationhood beyond narrow binaries and even broader cosmopolitan ideals. Using cutting-edge critical research, it fundamentally challenges the positive connotations of British patriotism and UK politics’ increasingly shrill anti-immigrant discourse, pointing to how these continue to reproduce vocabularies of belonging that are dependent on ethnonational and racialised categorisations.

Claire Sutherland is a senior lecturer in politics at Durham University, UK. Her main research interests are nationalism and nation-building, particularly in Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

CLAIRE SUTHERLAND

With a cross-continental focus, this book offers alternative ways of thinking about togetherness and belonging that are premised on mobility rather than rootedness, thereby providing a constructive agenda for critical nationalism studies.

REIMAGINING THE NATION

‘A thrilling, passionate and timely book that takes us from Europe to Pacific Asia and back again to consider the frightening, fascinating power of nationalist ideology.’ Angharad Closs Stephens, Swansea University

CLAIRE SUTHERLAND

REIMAGINING THE NATION Togetherness, belonging and mobility

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