![]()
1 Politics of belonging
From speech to visibility
On the basis of a critical reading of current scholarship in the field, the aim of this chapter is to suggest an analytically useful and theoretically innovative way to configure the relation between belonging and visibility. Drawing primarily on the works of Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière, the main claim of the book is that politics of belonging involves the production of particular arrangements of visibility which regulate what can and cannot be seen in the public sphere, but also the continuous disturbing and destabilization of such arrangements. In this chapter, I develop the argument in three steps. First, the concept of politics of belonging, some key theoretical influences and issues at stake in the literature, are investigated. Second, two analytical notions that are often central to research in this field are critically examined: narratives and publics, and the related concepts of counternarratives and counterpublics. It is argued that, though these notions remain important, their emphasis on speech has certain limits for analyzing politics of belonging. In the third part of the chapter, I suggest that researchers on politics of belonging should move beyond the stories told and the discursive spaces in which they are told, and explore the organization of appearance itself, the regulations and contestations of visibility and invisibility. As a springboard to the following empirical chapters, an analytical model is proposed, based on the idea that politics of belonging revolves around struggles to contain, amplify and contest visibility.
Politics of belonging: the issues at stake
Understanding politics of belonging: conflicts and intersections
The controversies enacted in Russian media that are analyzed in this book can be understood as boundary work, as ongoing negotiations of the collective’s boundaries, and thereby of the collective itself. Here, such struggles are referred to as cases of politics of belonging. This notion is used by feminist authors such as Nira Yuval-Davis (2006, 2011) and Floya Anthias (2006) to study contestations of boundaries and communities in a globalized world. In the words of Yuval-Davis: “(t)he politics of belonging involves not only constructions of boundaries but also inclusion or exclusion of particular people, social categories and groupings within these boundaries” (2011: 18). In comparison to other possible analytical starting points, such as citizenship or national identity, the politics of belonging approach has some advantages.
First, this approach by definition emphasizes the politically contested nature of boundary making. The construction of communities is viewed as an inherently conflict-ridden process intimately related to patterns of domination and unequal social positioning. For Yuval-Davis, projects of belonging are specific political efforts aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectives, which are themselves constituted and renegotiated through these projects (2011: 10). Importantly, she argues, not only hegemonic actors are engaged in such projects. Dominant conceptions of who is and who is not part of the political community are contested, negotiated and resisted by various actors. It is therefore, she argues, not enough to study dominant projects of belonging; we should also examine how such projects are rejected, accepted and challenged, not least by the very same groups that are constructed as outsiders (Yuval-Davis 2011: 25). In my view, this necessitates an analysis not only of different ideas put forward in conversations on belonging (e.g. debates between “ethnic” and “civic” conceptions of the nation), but a critical examination of the preconditions for the conversation itself; which subjects can participate in discourse, who is seen as qualified to speak, who can be understood, what is valid and even possible to say. This requires us to study not just discursive exchange but also how actors struggle to be heard, seen and recognized as political subjects, in Rancière’s words, partake in what they have no part (2010: 32). Rancière argues that “political conflict does not involve a conflict between different interests, but forms an opposition between logics that count the parties and parts of communities in different ways” (2010: 35).
Second, in addition to emphasizing the presence of conflict and domination, another advantage of the politics of belonging approach is that it does not a priori tie the construction of political communities to one specific category. For example, nationalism is understood as a historically specific way of constructing belonging that has been a privileged discourse of community formation in many parts of the world during the last two centuries, and shows little sign of receding despite globalization optimists’ expectations of postnational forms of belonging (Calhoun 2007). However, a politics of belonging perspective does not assume that this will necessarily always be the case. Moreover, as Brubaker (1994) argues, it is possible to recognize the importance of nationalism in politics and in the lives of ordinary people without analytically presuming and thereby reifying the existence of nations (whether seen as constructed or primordial). Nationhood is, he suggests, interesting as a category that is invoked in political struggles, and as an institutionally entrenched form of organization, rather than as a presumed real collective. The politics of belonging lens thus allows for an analytical openness as to which dimensions of belonging – perhaps nationhood, gender, religion, race, class – we should include in a particular study without beforehand defining an overarching principle.
The basis on which belonging is constructed is complex, and cannot be reduced to one single marker such as formal citizenship or ethnocultural affinity. I understand belonging as intersectionally produced, which means that different power structures, and various forms of positioning and social categorization co-construct, strengthen and interact with each other (Crenshaw 1991; Yuval-Davis 2011). Importantly, this is not simply a matter of adding different social categories or forms of oppression to one another. Norms of gender, for example, themselves contain ideas of sexuality, ethnicity and race. As forms of categorization they do not exist as separate and isolated phenomena but are mutually constitutive; they imply one another from the start, in contextually specific ways. Correspondingly, since narratives of nationhood involve specific ideas of how “our” women and men are, even persons perceived to linguistically, racially and ethnically qualify for national belonging, may be excluded insofar as they do not conform to the gendered and sexualized norms upon which the specific nationalism relies (Mosse 1985; Yuval-Davis 1997). Throughout the analysis I will examine how projects of belonging imagine communities in specifically gendered, sexualized and ethnicized ways, and how those intersectional formations may themselves be the target of contestation.
Projects of belonging involve the mobilization of emotions. According to Anthias, belonging has an affective dimension which has to do both with self-identification and others’ recognition: “to belong is to be accepted as part of a community, to feel safe within it and to have a stake in the future of such a community of membership” (2006: 21). One can formally be a citizen of a nation-state but feel as though one belongs to some other collective. Moreover, as Ahmed (2014) shows, not only does belonging appeal to and create emotions of love, hate and fear, but communities and their boundaries are themselves produced and reconstituted by the circulation of emotions.
Some projects of belonging do not explicitly stress ethnic, racial or religious commonalities but emphasize what they conceive to be shared ethical and political values, ideas about proper behavior and how social life should be organized (Yuval-Davis 2011: 18). For example, Frenchness may be associated with specific republican-secular ideals, and Swedishness with certain ideas of egalitarianism and social welfare. Though this appears to be a more inclusive way of constructing belonging, postcolonial and feminist scholars have pointed out that supposedly universalistic values are not based on a view from nowhere, but tend to reflect ethnocentric norms that rely upon an implicit or explicit devaluation of Others (Bhabha 1990; Scott 2007). In addition, some people’s adherence to the common ethos is taken for granted whereas others may be asked or feel obliged to demonstrate it. In Europe this has been particularly evident when it comes to which subjects are and are not expected to dissociate themselves from terrorism committed in the name of their religion.
Such cases of conditioned inclusion indicate that belonging is not always a binary relation of inside/outside, but more complex and ambivalent (as elaborated on p. 0). A benefit of speaking about politics and projects of belonging is precisely to avoid nailing down any essence of belonging itself. In this study, belonging is regarded not as an ontological question of being either included or excluded, but rather as an ambiguous and double-edged, and therefore powerful trope that is invoked in political contestations. Belonging, as understood here, is a matter of doing rather than being: as something that is continually performed, produced and transformed.
Imagined communities and mythical homelands
Projects of belonging aim to produce a feeling that one is part of a collective that predates one’s own existence and will continue to exist after one is gone. This requires, as demonstrated by Benedict Anderson in his studies on nationalism (1983), the work of imagination, our ability to imagine as “fellow co-nationals” people whom we never have met and never will meet. For Anderson, the emergence of modern nationalism was closely related to the rise of print capitalism and mediated public spheres in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, providing a site for imagining communities and their boundaries. This process involves constructing a narrative of a homeland, symbolically linking the imagined community to a certain geographical place and representing this bond as natural (Morley and Robins 1996). Recalling what was said about the structure of narratives in the introduction chapter, stories of homelands rely on an emplotment that highlights certain events and forgets others, and a specific chronotope outlining a specific past, present and future of the community. Narratives of homeland seek to produce a sense of wholeness and totality by erasing ambiguity and heterogeneity. As Anthias puts it:
the collective places constructed by imaginations of belonging gloss over the fissures, the losses, the absences and the borders within them. The notion of “imagining” also refers to the ways in which constructions of belonging serve to naturalize socially produced, situational and contextual relations, converting them to taken-for-granted, absolute and fixed structures of social and personal life. Such constructions produce a “natural” community of people and function as exclusionary borders of otherness.
(Anthias 2006: 21)
Narratives of homeland function as a form of myth: they depoliticize and naturalize historical contingencies, exclude complexity and contradictions and thus, when successful, “transform history into nature” (Barthes 1973: 129). The community, its boundaries as well as its imagined essence, are constantly reproduced by processes of symbolic purification, of expelling, displacing and projecting disturbing differences and disorders within onto the outside (Butler and Spivak 2010: 32). This search for purity and authenticity is accentuated in a world perceived to be increasingly volatile and changing. Catarina Kinnvall (2004) argues that cultural, economic and political globalization, associated with perceptions of reduced or even collapsed distances in time and space, increased border-crossings and rapid social transformations produce “ontological insecurity”: fears, vulnerability and anxieties concerning the stability of identity. In response, she argues, discourses of nation, religion and tradition are increasingly invoked as anchors sought to produce security and coherence. People’s longing for a safe and original homeland is manifested not only in essentialist politics but also in an increased everyday interest in history and cultural nostalgia, observable in architecture, popular culture and commodities (Boym 2001).
Feminists have criticized Anderson and other constructivist scholars of nationalism for understanding community formation as too homogenous a process, downplaying internal hierarchies and stratifications. Yuval-Davis (2011) stresses that imagining communities is a situated and contested process: people do not imagine communities in the same way, and are unevenly affected by those imaginations depending on gender, sexuality, class, race etc. In addition, postcolonial theorists have criticized Anderson for assuming that the Western model of imagined communities, once invented, came to work as a modular form of nationalism with global application, without considering how nationalisms differ globally (Chatterjee 1996). Recognizing those critiques, this study adopts a critical understanding of imagined communities and homelands, which involves not only reconstructing how certain communities are imagined and homelands narrated, but also investigating the discursive spaces in which imagination takes place, who can take part in the process of imagining, and who is privileged by the hierarchies naturalized by those imaginations. In addition, such an approach involves identifying the gaps and invisibilities of dominant imaginaries, and suggesting ways in which communities could be imagined in alternative ways.
The uncanny spectacle of the Other
Since the maintenance of imagined communities and ideas of homelands rely on continuous processes of differentiation and exclusion, individuals and societies are fascinated by Otherness: they watch, investigate, display, tell stories of, fantasize about, desire and abhor difference (Hall 1997). The function of Others as an object of gaze has been explored in colonial and postcolonial studies, showing how European imperialism has been justified by Orientalist discourses of “the East” as backward, savage, mysterious and feminine, allowing “the West” to imagine itself as progressive, civilized, rational and masculine (Said 1995). As will be developed in Chapters 3 and 5, Russian nationalism has historically been constructed in a field of tension between a symbolic East and West.
Because any idea of “what we are” will – implicitly or explicitly – define itself against “what we are not”, inclusion appears to be inextricably related to exclusion. As many theorists have struggled with, it is difficult to imagine a conception of community that does not leave someone or something outside. Whereas not all believe that belonging necessitates exclusion – bell hooks suggests the possibility of communities based on the welcoming of difference (2009: 183) – others are less optimistic, stressing that in practice, constructions of belonging are constantly accompanied by more or less hostile forms of othering. Kuntsman (2009) argues that belonging is always troubled by and intertwined with violence, the latter being deployed in the negotiation of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion and forms of humanization and dehumanization. Ahmed (2014) points to a similar link, emphasizing what she calls the “slippery work of emotion”, a sliding between violent and affectionate emotions, such as when hatred of others is justified and understood as motivated by love for one’s homeland.
Poststructuralist theorists of security have demonstrated how narratives of dangerous Others – internal or external – are central in delineating and affirming national belonging (Campbell 1998). Otherness is constructed intersectionally, deploying categories of national, racial, cultural, gendered and/or sexual difference, as well as notions of poverty and pathology. Thus, the figure of the dangerous Other ranges from ethnic and religious minorities, migrants, homosexuals to the virus-infected or mentally ill. Such processes entail the projection and displacement of disorder within onto Others, who come to appear as unambiguously evil. However, as Shapiro (1997: 57ff.) argues, this symbolic mapping, striving for an easily intelligible world where a self-sufficient, known and stable inside stands in contrast to a dangerous and chaotic outside, is never completed but always undermined by impurities and ambiguities which cannot be accommodated within a binary scheme of inside/outside.
As has already been suggested, the boundaries between belonging and non-belonging, between inclusion and exclusion, are, despite the dichotomous rhetoric of nationalism, always ambiguous, shifting and multidimensional. Belonging is not only a matter of locating people inside or outside imagined communities, but often involves conditionality, complicity and liminality. For example, as will be elaborated in Chapter 3, the gradual inclusion of gays and lesbians in Western societies – itself unequally distributed and based on certain norms of “proper” sexual deviance – has been accompanied by increased ostracization of populations not considered to share the “tolerant” attitudes to sexuality attributed to the West (Puar 2007). Whereas some minorities may be talked about as threats to a national community, on a more structural level they are used instrumentally to reaffirm its boundaries, by serving as Others against which national norms, whether understood as “tolerance of LGBT people” or “defending traditional sexuality” are defined. As...
