National Affects

Front matter

The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political

Angharad Closs Stephens

The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction Situating affect Method, experience and the politics of knowledge Mobilizing geopolitical cartographies Engaging politics through the arts The book

1 The affective atmospheres of nationalism Towards the atmospherics of nationalism Beyond everyday nationalism Identifying affective atmospheres

Index

73 75 78 83 88

93 96 98 101 109

113 117 119 122 132

135 137 141

145 181 207

BW N Fe

Figures

The Olympic Rings near Cardiff City Hall

Swandown, directed by Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair

The cortege, Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, 17 April 2013 Dismantling the event. Baroness Margaret Thatcher's funeral, 17 April 2013

A moment of resistance. Baroness Margaret Thatcher's funeral, 17 April 2013

‘Economics are the method’ Sample material from “55 Funerals’ by Tim Etchells

A broken pencil at a temporary site of memory, Paris, 31 January 2015 #SafePassage by Ai Weiwei, Konzerthaus Berlin

Volcano Theatre, High Street, Swansea (Abertawe)

“The Populars, Volcano Theatre, April 2017

“The Populars, Volcano Theatre, April 2017

Jo Fong

Sonia Hughes

“Ways of Being Together; by Jo Fong, Cardiff Dance Festival,

19 November 2017

Neither Here Nor There, by Jo Fong and Sonia Hughes, Capel-y-Graig, Ffwrnais, 6 July 2019

The National Covid Memorial Wall, London, 30 April 2021

123 142

Preface

Moved by the world

In January 2016, I moved to Swansea (Abertawe) in South West Wales. During that winter, it rained non-stop for two months. I drove from Gateshead in North East England, where I had been living since 2007, and made the journey with my partner and young children in a borrowed car, as I had crashed my car in a road accident nine months earlier. The children were four and one years old at the time: too young to object to being moved around. We arrived and parked outside Joes Ice Cream Parlour in the Mumbles — a café that is iconic for its ice cream recipe. We looked at the café’s neon blue lights glowing in the dark as we decided which one of us would go out to get milk and something to eat.

We arrived at our temporary house and it continued to rain. I went out to buy a new pair of shoes, appreciating that my old shoes would not work in this city. How did people live with so much rain? Did it rain like this every day? In the North East, it was cold almost all year round, but rarely wet. I had got used to the dry weather: its effects on how I styled my hair and what I would wear.

We began the work of establishing new habits. It was strange and comforting being able to play Welsh language radio in the car, and hear this language spoken in work. But beyond that, England and Wales (Cymru) did not seem that different. I had not lived here for fifteen years and I was not sure what I expected from this move. When people asked big questions, such as why did you move then? I found myself ill prepared to answer. I was looking for light, landscape, creativity and a different pace, but these were not explanations that I could easily give a new colleague in the corridor. I shrugged, and probably looked a little lost.

My move to Swansea, Wales, and back to the small country where I grew up, was six months prior to the Brexit vote. I had left Wales because of my desire to see the world and to escape ideas about home, belonging and identity. But at this point, I found myself surrounded by them, louder and more certain than Id ever known them. I walked the streets wondering what I had moved into.

This marginal country remains young in terms of its history as a legitimate political unit, with its own democratic structures. The Senedd (the Welsh Parliament) was only established in 1999, and it represents the people of

Preface xi

Wales as part of a devolved government within the British state. Prior to this achievement, culture was pretty much all Wales had to define itself - music, poetry, stories and a language that some wanted to save and others wanted to leave behind, on account of its unmodern sounds and cadences. There is now a consensus around the claim that there is a ‘people of Wales, and a citizenry, where previously there were movements, organizations, desires and experiences but no official political subject.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, there were two powerful political narratives available for articulating what it meant to be Welsh. The first was romantic nationalism, and the idea that a way of life could be preserved through a state of one’s own. In this version, identity formed the resources for imagining a contrasting experience to Britishness, placing Welshness alongside other experiences of marginalization. The second was modern socialism, which said that Wales needed to organize by class rather than identity. For some in this camp, the Welsh language signalled the dangerous politics of ethnicity and threatened to divide the British class movement,' seen as the only route towards resisting domination. These two traditions - of green and red politics - represented two equally self-certain positions that made it difficult to consider a political standpoint that situated itself in between, and which had doubts about either position.

Moving back to Wales in 2016, I found that much had changed. With the establishment of a Welsh Parliament, the political parties had become conversant with working together and found on many occasions that they had common ground. They could direct their ire against a new other: the Westminster Parliament and England. There were strange new realities, such as the way the Welsh language was no longer an issue that led activists to climb up television masts and block bridges.* Since 2011, it is an official language of Wales, and therefore subject to government-set targets for the numbers that speak it and legally binding standards for public-facing institutions and organizations. Wales has become a framework for governing. Wales now also has a value: it is something to be marketed, ranked and entrepreneurialized. But whether as value, governance unit or identity, what remains marginal is a sense of Wales as a puzzle, and as an experience that none of the dominant narratives, now or back then, are quite able to capture. This is the puzzle of being in between nation and state, identity and difference, inside and outside. It is an experience that informs a critique of domination, while often remaining blind to its own patterns of exclusion. It is a shared history produced by feeling constricted, even as it also informs alternative, capacious ideas about being-with-others. What motivates xii Preface this book is the desire to develop other ways of understanding being political, formed from this in-between experience, and which bypass the language and concepts of the nation-state. National Affects names both the dominant ideas about identity and belonging that circulate around us, and the affective connections to place, people and culture that remind us of other experiences of being together.

*

Starting in Swansea, Wales, this book travels to London, Paris, New York, to ideas about Europe as well as global politics. While parts of Swansea are among the most deprived in Wales, in the eighteenth century, it formed Wales’s first industrial town, and a global centre for copper and brass production. This means it has connections to colonialism, empire and the slave trade.’ In the twentieth century, it suffered from the heavy bombing of the German Luftwaffe, which in 1941 destroyed many parts of the city and killed 230 people. It has also been subjected to the modernization dreams of urban planners. This city has known great achievements and great destruction. While Wales (Cymru) has become more established and confident in its role as a devolved nation, this city remains without a clear sense of where it fits in. It lies in between Wales and Britain, Europe and the world, the sea and the mountains. But this is also its strength: its sense of self is uncertain, marginal and multiple. The peoples sense of identity often comes from no more than a shared love of how the light warms the streets and flickers on the sea. At different points in this book, I turn to this city’s ‘affective atmospheres’ - its gathering spaces, collective memories and creative acts - to explore how forms of togetherness exceed ideas about ‘us and them.

Overall, this book presents a way in to studying the global politics of nations and nationalism that sidesteps efforts at measuring and comparing the attitudes and perceptions of identities presumed to pre-exist politics and analysis. Instead, I follow the role of moods, ambiance, affects and feelings in political life to generate starting points that allow for hesitation. While my aim is to consider what can be done to resist intensified nationalism, I refuse to explain this as a set of ideas that some set of people subscribe to and define the political task as that of changing their minds. For me, such an approach risks allowing theory to become a tool of domination. I am more interested in theories that begin from the streets, and from listening to what is going on in all its inconsistency and tension. This allows us to see how - even when the atmospheres around us appear so stifling and heavy - they can also be loosened, shifted and retuned. The

Preface xiii critique, of course, is that I am too patient in my pursuit of change. This may be so, but it comes in part from a refusal to adopt the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. The chapters that follow are led by a desire to develop new forms of theorizing the contemporary world. They are focused on the possibilities for intervening in the present and opening possibilities for living otherwise.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to all the people who have supported me in writing this book: Pete Adey, Ash Amin, Louise Amoore, Ben Anderson, Catherine Bennett, David Bissell, Dan Bulley, Dave Clarke, Beckie Coleman, Rachel Colls, Claudine Conway, Mike Crang, Paul Davies, Siwan Davies, Marcus Doel, Leila Dawney, Tim Edensor, Jenny Edkins, Madeleine Fagan, Jo Fong, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Sonia Hughes, Jef Huysmans, Caroline Lane, Eugene McCann, Derek McCormack, Joe Painter, Anna Pigott, Sarah Pink, Joao Pontes Nogueira, Dorota Poreba, Michal Poreba, Ben Rogaly, Mike Shapiro, Wil Stephens, Rob Walker, Ben Wellings and Maja Zehfuss. I am very grateful to them.

Parts of this work have been presented at the following universities: the Association for the Studies of Ethnicities and Nationalism seminar series, London School of Economics (2016), seminar on “The Emotional Life of the City; at LSE Cities (2018), seminar on ‘Public Sentiments’ at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France (2018), seminar at the Geography Department, Sussex University, UK (2018), Geography Department, Melbourne University, Australia (2019), Geography Department, Plymouth University, UK (2020), and Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society, Oxford Brookes University, UK (2020).

My sincere thanks to all the people at these events for their great comments and to those that organized them. This book also benefited enormously from teaching fantastic students at the International Political Sociology Winter School, International Relations Institute, Pontificia Universidad Católica, Rio de Janeiro (2018) and at the Gregynog Ideas Lab IX, Gregynog Hall, Drenewydd/ Newtown, Cymru/Wales (2019).

Thank you to Martin Coward, Debbie Lisle, Amanda Rogers, Nisha Shah, Shanti Sumartojo and Martina Tazzioli for playing a significant part in ensuring I completed the book, for their hospitality and encouragement. Thanks to Carolyn Pedwell for her love and friendship and sending regular WhatsApp messages that kept me going, and to Naeem Inayatullah and Vicki Squire for their brilliant editorial comments which improved the work in the final stages. I am grateful to my mum, Elan Closs Stephens, for supporting me always.

Acknowledgements xv

I could not have managed without the excellent editorial assistance of Franz Bernhardt. Thanks also to all the PhD and postgraduate students that have worked with me in Swansea during this period. Many of the ideas in this book have developed through conversations with them.

My thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this book with a research fellowship that funded fieldwork and valuable time to complete several chapters, and to Swansea University Geography Department for funding research support. A Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol small grant supported an early pilot project, and many of the ideas in this book began with the intellectual communities at Durham University Geography Department and Durham's Institute of Advanced Studies. Finally, my sincere thanks to Nayiri Kendir, and all the team at Bloomsbury, for guiding this project.

Chapters 1 and 5 and the interlude ‘A Hot Afternoon form revised versions of articles previously published: “The Affective Atmospheres of Nationalism, Cultural Geographies, 23(2) 2016: 181-98; ‘Feeling ‘Brexit: Nationalism and the Affective Politics of Movement, GeoHumanities, 5(2), 2019: 405-23; and part of a forum on “The Spaces and Politics of Affective Nationalism’ convened by Marco Antonsich and Michael Skey, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(4), 2020: 586-9.

Xvi