Belonging to a Different Landscape: Repurposing Nationalist Affects

Abstract

This is an article about the embodied, sensual experience of rural landscape as a site where racialized feelings of national belonging get produced. Largely impervious to criticism and reformation by 'thin' legal-political versions of multicultural or cosmopolitan citizenship, it is my suggestion that this racialized belonging is best confronted through the recognition and appreciation of precisely what makes it so compelling. Through an engagement with the theorization of affect in the work of Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly, I consider the resources immanent to the perception of landscapes of national belonging that might be repurposed to unravel that belonging from within. I suggest that forms of environmental consciousness can unpick the mutually reinforcing relationships between nature and nation, opening up opportunities for thinking identity and belonging in different ways, and allowing rural landscapes to become more hospitable places.

‘Queen of Scots’: The monarch’s body and national identities in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum

“…Moreover, when placed in historical context, the Queen’s presence in the landscape stems from the political terror of the Highland Clearances. As Ben Pitcher (2016) argues, ‘nationalized landscapes have an astonishing capacity to absorb ongoing histories of conflict and struggle over access and ownership’, where these struggles are gradually erased from historical imaginaries. In the 18th century, the Highlands were inhabited mostly by crofters: communities where each crofter (farmer) tenured small, individual arable crofts for small-scale food production, while poorer quality hill ground was shared as common grazing land for animals (Devine, 1994).…”

The uses and abuses of class: Left nationalism and the denial of working class multiculture

“…This discrepant relationship of nationalism to capitalism, one made widely apparent in much of the Brexit and Trump vote, underscores how nationalist politics become contoured by so many different ideological vocabularies and sense-making schemas. These multiple traditions which constitute the contemporary nationalist cacophony include: classical values-liberalism and its particular ethnoracially coded assertion of civic nationalism (Kundnani, 2012); neoliberal individualism and the distinctive racial pathologization of poverty and undesirable immigration which sits within its moral and symbolic economy (Davies, 2017); some ostensibly feminist rhetorics regarding sexuality and gender freedoms, rhetorics which become noticeably acute vis-a-vis the by now ritual demonization of the Muslim (Farris, 2017; Rashid, 2016); even some strands of a bucolic environmentalism (Pitcher, 2016); and of course, the much more familiar conservative nostalgia for the putative public morality, stability and unity of pre-war colonial whiteness (Gilroy, 2004).…”