Description
This talk deconstructs Heimat as a site of affective bordering – a practice of border-making that reinstalls national and racial hierarchies through the mobilisation and unequal distribution of affect. Long used primarily by the far right, over the last years the recuperation of Heimat as an emotional anchor for national belonging and nostalgic attachment has moved to the centre of political debate in Germany – not least through the renaming of the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Interior and Heimat in 2018. Tracing the fascists and colonial histories of the concept, I illustrate how Heimat continues to operate as a site of affective bordering that recements white heteronormative constructions of nationhood. The renewed attachment to Heimat is produced in conjunction with reproductive anxieties expressed in Great Replacement conspiracies that allege the planned replacement of white Germans with racialized migrants. The talk calls for closer attention in international studies to how practices of bordering operate through the reproduction of warm feelings of national belonging and white innocence arguing for the abolition of Heimat, and related conceptions of home and homeland, as sites of affective bordering.
