Angharad Closs Stephens

The affective atmospheres of nationalism

What would it mean to understand nationalism as an atmosphere? This article makes a theoretical contribution to cultural geographical works on ‘affective atmospheres’ as well as to critical approaches to the study of nationalism by addressing this question. It examines how nationalism operates affectively and atmospherically through a discussion of the event of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the ‘happy atmospheres’ of being together that circulated in the course of those Games. The key claim of the article is that addressing the nation’s affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical for understanding how nationalism endures and, furthermore, how it appears especially difficult to critique. As such, the article points to different ways in which thinking about nationalism as an ‘affective atmosphere’ builds upon the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ but also takes it further by inviting an attentiveness to the different tonalities and intensities of nationality and shifting the focus from a subject identity or bounded community to the question of how affective forces congeal around particular objects and bodies and echo as part of an assemblage. Finally, this article makes a contribution to debates around the relationship between affect, atmosphere and politics by asking how national affective atmospheres might be resisted.What would it mean to understand nationalism as an atmosphere? This article makes a theoretical contribution to cultural geographical works on ‘affective atmospheres’ as well as to critical approaches to the study of nationalism by addressing this question. It examines how nationalism operates affectively and atmospherically through a discussion of the event of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the ‘happy atmospheres’ of being together that circulated in the course of those Games. The key claim of the article is that addressing the nation’s affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical for understanding how nationalism endures and, furthermore, how it appears especially difficult to critique. As such, the article points to different ways in which thinking about nationalism as an ‘affective atmosphere’ builds upon the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ but also takes it further by inviting an attentiveness to the different tonalities and intensities of nationality and shifting the focus from a ...

“Seven Million Londoners, One London”: National and Urban Ideas of Community in the Aftermath of the 7 July 2005 Bombings in London

This article explores the different ideas of community circulating in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Specifically, it compares the idea of a community in unity with a more cosmopolitan, urban idea of community. While these two ideas seem to present sharply different responses, the article questions the extent to which the cosmopolitan model offers an alternative to the nationalist idea of community. Drawing on various discussions about how ideas of community are produced through different understandings of time and origins, the article argues that in this specific case both the national and the cosmopolitan accounts of community worked according to a very similar logic, and therefore risked reproducing similar problems and exclusions. Consequently, the article suggests that the task of exploring alternative conceptions of community must involve greater sensitivity to the politics of time and other approaches to the politics of origins. This challenge is pursued through the motif of the city as a site expressing a different temporality and thus a different idea of community from that expressed in traditions of national belonging.

Politics through a web: citizenship and community unbound

What happens to citizenship when the nation and the state are no longer assumed to be the inevitable starting points from which politics is defined? This paper considers how a refusal of the nation as political community and a questioning of the state as guarantor of rights and responsibilities reconfigure our understandings of citizenship. We do this by taking as a metaphor and analytical entry point an art installation developed by artist Tomás Saraceno titled 14 Billions (Working Title). Forming an exaggerated version of a black widow spiders web, this installation offers us a way of engaging politics in relational terms. Inspired by this installation, we ask: how are the categories of citizenship and community troubled or reconfigured when we address sociality and politics from a relational perspective? In which ways does 14 Billions prompt us to address questions of spatiality, power, coexistence, and contestation differently from those accounts of citizenship that remain wedded to the state as a contained geographical unit and to the nation as an imaginary of political community? And finally, how might this web installation suggest an intervention into the broader problematic of ‘citizenship without community’ that forms the focus of this theme issue? We address these questions by way of an engagement with the ‘lines’, ‘gaps’, and ‘tension points’ presented by 14 Billions and argue that an understanding of citizenship as based upon membership appears inadequate when we address politics through a web. In so doing, we contend that the provocation of citizenship without community presents a challenge that does not simply demand a shift from the nation to the state or the reaffirmation of a rights-bearing subject; rather, this provocation leads us to argue that politics involves more than a search for inclusion and recognition, whilst the web installation offers us a way in to thinking about politics through heterogeneous sites and moments of encounter.

Citizenship without community : time, design and the city.

This article engages with the concept of design as a way of re-working the standard understanding of citizenship as what takes place within a political community. In doing so, the paper draws on recent attempts to rethink citizenship as ‘acts’ rather than status and seeks to bring that work together with attempts at re-imagining community as ‘encounters’ and ‘confrontations’ rather than that which is contained within a bounded space. Specifically, the paper argues for an approach that is attentive to ideas of time and seeks to open up an idea of community that avoids the requirement of commonality. Using a focus on citizenship as a temporal phenomenon, the article suggests that designers have engaged with ideas of time as multiple, fragmented and splintered, and that these form useful material for reworking ideas of community beyond something that can be calculated. The article offers a study of two sites of memory drawn from the city of Berlin, Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenmanns Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and an art installation by the artist Gustav Metzger called Flailing Trees exhibited at the Manchester International Festival of 2009. Gathering material offered by these designs, and a tradition of writing the city as a splintered social space, the article explores the different forms of community that circulate and are instantiated at these ‘sites of memory’ and argues for an understanding of community without unity.

Terrorism and the Politics of Response

This inter-disciplinary edited volume critically examines the dynamics of the War on Terror, focusing on the theme of the politics of response. The book explores both how responses to terrorism - by politicians, authorities and the media - legitimise particular forms of sovereign politics, and how terrorism can be understood as a response to global inequalities, colonial and imperial legacies, and the dominant idioms of modern politics. The investigation is made against the backdrop of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London and their aftermath, which have gone largely unexamined in the academic literature to date. The case offers a provocative site for analysing the diverse logics implicated in the broader context of the War on Terror, for examining how terrorist events are framed, and how such framings serve to legitimise particular policies and political practices.

Beyond Imaginative Geographies? Critique, Co-Optation, and Imagination in the Aftermath of the War on Terror

This paper considers the question of what it might mean to resist the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the War on Terror through a reading of the bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Reading this novel against the claim that we are now at the ‘end’ of the War on Terror, the paper engages with how we might move beyond what Derek Gregory described as the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that represent the violent return of the colonial past. The paper argues that critical attempts at resisting the imaginative geographies of the War on Terror, such as we find in this particular novel, often assume and reproduce an understanding of time as linear and progressive, an idea of time which Gregory points out makes these imaginative geographies possible. The paper argues that this becomes problematic when critical interventions risk reproducing the very understanding of political life that they set out to confront. Whilst it is an important political move to reveal the imaginative geographies at work in the War on Terror, the paper suggests that this approach also risks operating by confirming to a critical readership that which it already knows. We are too easily led to the conclusion that what is needed is better representations of ‘others’ in the world, as just as enlightened, cultured, reasoned as ‘us’. The contention of this paper is that such critical responses fail to do anything to disrupt or trouble the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’; rather, they keep them firmly in place and entrench them further. The paper argues that we need to revisit and unsettle the concept of imagination at work in the idea of ‘imaginative geographies’ to explore a way of thinking coexistence in world politics that cannot be understood within a unifying temporal framework. It is suggested that, despite the closures identified in this novel, postcolonial urban literatures also provide many openings for thinking the “possibility that the field of the political is constitutively not singular” [Chakrabarty, 2000, Provincializing Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) page 148].