For this text, I kept
thinking about the proximity of the emotions I personally experienced while reading the texts by Ulrich Beck on the
Risk Society a few weeks ago. I’m thinking specifically about questions of
citizenship and belonging for refugees of places that have been affected by the
high accumulation of risks and irresponsibility by First World countries and
its corporate magnates. There is a sense
that responsibility is not shared equally, and while people in developed
countries reap the rewards of lower food and gas prices or gourmet coffee,
people in less developed countries are affected by the environmental hazards of
these processes. They often become displaced persons and sometimes end up the
developed world as migrants or as refugees. The ways that Ahmed characterized
the reception of these people in their new homes by groups that sponsor finite
definitions of citizenship comprises both the emotions of love and hate.
Interestingly enough, Ahmed has the unique perspective of a theorist interested
in not only how emotions are felt inside of the mind, but also how our body
reacts and shapes them, and how they move among us while becoming “sticky.”
In
regards to my musings about citizenship and movement, I thought that Ahmed
effectively employs the double notion of movement operating when it comes to
both the circulation of refugee bodies (as entering and becoming active in the
nation) and the circulation of negative
affects about them . Adopting a Marxist approach to understanding
emotion, she writes that: “Emotions work as a form of capital: Affect does not
positively reside in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an affect of its
circulation…objects of emotion circulate and are distributed across a social
and psychic field” (Ahmed 43). Thus,
fear and hate do not stand still residing in the refugees themselves because in
their immobile state, they can be considered invisible, nonexistent, outside of
the national body. When they begin to circulate, to become visible, when their
cultural practices cease to exist in the theoretical just as their experiences
of risk become actualized, this is the
moment in which those laying claims to citizenship must be controlled, by
whatever means society can avail itself of.
I found it fascinating that after speaking of
hate and fear in regards to asylum seekers in the UK, Ahmed then turns to love
(‘Multicultural Love’ section in Chapter 6).
And thus rhetoric of fear and hate (reflected in “We hate your
differences and fear how you are changing the national body by your presence”)
becomes a rhetoric of security and love (“Here,
the nation and national subject can only love the incoming other—embrace them—if
the conditions that enable security are already met” [135]). Ironically enough,
to be welcomed and embraced in the very place that is the locus of your own displacement
and risk means giving up the same differences that evoke fear and hatred in the oppressor, making this intrinsic and
persecuted “Otherness” the last weapon to be wielded at all.
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