Stop the clock! Taking the nation out of linear time and bounded space

Abstract

This article focuses on the importance of linear time and bounded space to the nation, which must have a past, present and future in a way that occludes other ways of grasping time. It offers a critique of national chronological time and advances an alternative approach to national belonging based on a politics of longing. The article argues that rather than start with the nation-state as a category of analysis, as is the case with methodological nationalism, approaching a sense of belonging to the nation as part of a broader politics of longing offers a more open starting point for exploring the nation’s many manifestations. The politics of longing posits that the nation is but one among many, and by no means a necessary, frame of reference for individuals’ sense of belonging. It encompasses both restorative and reflective nostalgia as possible means of connecting individual narratives of belonging with ancestors and (national) heritage. The advantage of an approach derived from the politics of longing over methodological nationalism – which is understood as taking the nation-state for granted – is that it allows for knitting together narratives of home and belonging in many different ways, both within and outwith the national frame.

Keywords

Methodological nationalism time nation politics of longing Oceania

Methodological nationalism is understood as an approach that takes the nation-state for granted as a category of analysis, and that has both spatial and temporal dimensions. It refers to a scholarly approach rather than to nationalism as a political ideology, although both are underpinned by the same assumptions, namely that nations can be identified as bounded units that travel through time. This article explores the importance of time to the nation. It takes issue with the dominant paradigm of the nation, ‘conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (Anderson, 1991: 26). According to this paradigm, the nation must have a past, present and future in a way that occludes other ways of grasping time. The nation’s mobilising potential consists in its ability to link past and future generations of a national putative community to which people feel they belong through ancestry, cultural heritage, shared values, common citizenship or other markers of membership. The nation is replete with symbols and embodiments of shared community, such as the national heroes who are held up for exemplary leadership in advancing the nation, and martyrs who have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect it. Nationalists feed on perceived past glories and injustices to rally support for their prognosis on the nation’s future prospects, connecting the two through a sense of shared destiny and responsibility for a finite group.

Nationalism presupposes ‘groupism’ (Brubaker, 2004) and the prioritisation of the nation, however defined, as its overarching ideological aim (Freeden, 1998). The nation is bounded in space as an in-group that is defined in opposition to the out-group, and is often linked to territorial boundaries and an ethnic diaspora. This is the solid imagined community travelling, or progressing, through history, to which Benedict Anderson refers. This article sets out to trouble these fundamental premises, which serve to legitimate the nation-state construct, delimit who belongs to the nation, and thus ultimately underpin citizenship regimes and the world order (Sutherland, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017). James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) defined state spatialisation in terms of verticality and encompassment, thereby capturing the hierarchies and boundaries inherent in the nation-state construct. Parallel to this, the present analysis highlights how the idea of linear progress complements spatial encompassment and vertical hierarchy as a further dimension of the nation. The argument is premised on the fact that nationalism is around us all the time, as an inherent feature of modernity and our current world order. That, in particular, is what makes it important to uncover its colonial components, as discussed further below.

The article critiques nationalism’s exclusive focus on linear, chronological time and advances an alternative approach to a sense of national belonging based on a politics of longing. Analyses that are not predicated on methodological nationalism serve to undermine the legitimacy of the nation-state construct itself, and question its control over people’s movements, identities and allegiances. States need national histories and heroes to shore up their legitimacy, so to refuse stories told in terms of linear, national time, and question the meaning of deaths held up as heroic national sacrifice, challenges the legitimating basis of the global order. Taking issue with the national time that anachronistically projects ethnonational groups back through history is therefore a political act, which reclaims the right to determine how the future will look.

This article combines theoretical approaches from decolonial International Relations, Southeast Asian studies and human geography that step outside conventional temporalities, thereby transcending the national time that assumes ancient ethnic origins and ancestral roots to be markers of ‘authentic’ belonging. The analysis begins with mobility. In so doing, it goes against the grain of contemporary world politics and much political enquiry, which take named human populations encompassed within nation-states as their starting point. As Rogers Brubaker (2015: 132) has noted:

Mobility within nation-states is understood as normal and as something that should be facilitated (in that it contributes to the smooth functioning of labor markets and to cultural homogenization); but mobility between nation-states is understood as anomalous. Insofar as actual regimes of mobility approximate this idealized model, mobility is reciprocally linked to homogeneity within and heterogeneity between states.

This article turns that assumption on its head by positing human mobility as the norm. From a theoretical perspective, this also gestures towards ways of defining the nature of being – specifically Wet Ontologies (Steinberg and Peters, 2015) – that privilege fluidity and mobility, and will be discussed further below.

The article argues that rather than start with a bounded notion of the nation moving through linear time as a category of analysis, approaching a sense of belonging to the nation as part of a broader politics of longing offers a more open point of departure for exploring its multifaceted manifestations in today’s world. In so doing, it adds to ongoing debates across the social sciences and humanities that seek to transcend methodological nationalism and propose alternative frameworks for analysing national belonging (Taylor, 1998; Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004; Sutherland, 2016). The article proceeds as follows: It first introduces Wet Ontologies (Steinberg and Peters, 2015) as a counterpoint to conventional understandings of the nation in time and space, such as that developed in Benedict Anderson’s seminal text, Imagined Communities (1991). It then focuses on the colonial legacy which continues to inform how national belonging is defined, and how a decolonial approach to understanding belonging seeks to transcend this. The article goes on to propose an alternative to methodological nationalism, namely the politics of longing, illustrated with reference to an artwork by the Mata Aho collective entitled Kiko Moana (2017), as displayed in the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in late 2018.

The nation in time and space

If we posit mobility as the norm, we need to view this through a theoretical lens that does not reproduce the static, bounded approach of methodological nationalism. One way to grasp mobility conceptually is to think through the materiality of the oceans and seas. For example, the contributors to Siu, Tagliacozzo and Perdue (2015: 2, 3) edited collection entitled Asia Inside Out: Connected Places aim to rethink ‘conceptual divides between land and ocean systems’ rather than taking places for granted ‘as natural, pre-existing receptacles of social content’. As Edyta Roszko notes (2016), these authors’ thematic emphasis on ‘maritime connections’ serves to shift the focus towards dynamic, littoral societies and cross-cutting maritime flows, and away from territorially centred analyses. Similarly, drawing inspiration from the constantly churning materiality of seas and oceans themselves, Phil Steinberg and Kim Peters (2015: 250) define wet ontology as ‘a perspective that problematizes accepted notions of time, space, mobility and materiality’. They contrast this with the ‘politics of verticality’, which is also three-dimensional, but neatly layered in a way that merely adds depth to cartographic depictions of bounded nation-states or ‘multi-level governance’ (Sutherland, 2010: 22). Wet ontologies, by contrast, break free of these strictures, evoking instead ‘space that can be harnessed and occupied in any direction’ (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 253). This approach is useful for stepping outside a national norm conceived in terms of bounded, homogeneous community in order to think of belonging in more fluid ways.

Steinberg and Peters do not seek to conjure a ‘“Liquid Continent” that, like a real continent, embraces many peoples, cultures and economies within a space with precise edges’ (Abulafia, 2012: xxiii). They do not attempt to fetishise fluidity, or replace a bounded territory with the sea as an alternative container of identity (Sutherland, 2017: 69–70). Neither does the present analysis. Instead, it adopts wet ontology as a conceptual lens because it allows for a politics of fluidity, according to which movement is constitutive of space and time. This also allows for unanticipated formations which do not conform to the horizontal and vertical axes of spatial containment and linear progression that constitute the national norm. Wet ontology is also well adapted to capturing migrant ‘statuses that are temporary, uncertain and non-linear’, for example, and thus go beyond the crude binaries of citizen and foreigner, and legal or illegal immigrants (Gonzales and Sigona, 2017: 7; see also Hepworth, 2015). As migrants and minorities often constitute the liminal or national ‘out-group’, this is a particularly useful device for taking national belonging out of linear time and bounded space.

Applying the notion of wet ontology to national belonging helps analysts step outside taken for granted dichotomies of self and other, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, majority and minority, and to transcend the ethnonational categorisations that underpin conceptualisations of hybridity and multiculturalism. Instead, it allows for a sense of national belonging to ebb and flow in many directions, unconstrained by conventional understandings of national time and space, for individual currents to tow at different rates, and for floating and friction between them. That is, analysts can consider individuals’ sense of belonging on their own terms, rather than in relation to a dominant national frame. Wet ontology thus supports the aim of this article in operating outside methodological nationalism, precisely in order to highlight the ‘power over classifying, naming and partitioning migrants/refugees’ (De Genova, 2017: 9) that is inherent in the nation-state system. This is the first step in the argument, which has established wet ontology as an appropriate theoretical lens through which to reconsider cross-border migration as necessarily anomalous. In other words, if the solid national community moving through time is no longer the norm, then wet ontology allows us to think through the nation in much more fluid ways.

As noted above with reference to Brubaker (2015: 132), migration is conventionally deemed anomalous because it challenges the legitimating legal fiction of nation-states’ bounded territoriality, homogeneity and sovereignty. A ‘crisis of border control and migration management may therefore be seen to be a crisis of sovereignty’ (De Genova, 2017: 13), because it strikes at the heart of what it means to control territory. If the state becomes untethered from the nation, its legitimacy is undermined. By the same token, academic analyses that are not predicated on methodological nationalism serve to challenge the national construct itself, and question its control over people’s movements, identities and allegiances. The experiences of both migrants, who are active shapers of their own destiny, and refugees, who make choices highly constrained by necessity and fear, highlight the often arbitrary nature of border enforcement. Rather than single someone out for analysis as a migrant – a label that only makes sense in relation to a border – an approach premised on wet ontology would start with that individual’s experience of mobility. This is just one example of how wet ontology can be applied to politics. More generally, it offers a broader analytical perspective on the nation than one which replicates nationalism’s own assumptions of bounded space and linear time. Having established wet ontology as a conceptual lens that helps to destabilise the national norm, we now examine and unpick that national norm in more detail.

As we have seen, Benedict Anderson (1991: 26) noted that the ‘idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’. Nguyễn-võ Thu hương (2017: 63) has shown how this equates to ‘a nationalist prophetic temporality that erases the heterogeneity of time’. The legitimacy of the nation imagined in this conventional, linear and bounded way – and by extension any ethnic grouping that traces its origins back through time – rests on notions of rootedness and real or imagined ancestry, heritage and traditions. (Anderson, 1991. In the same way, ‘imagining a future allows the nation to become present […] by providing a coherence to time, giving it a unidirectional flow’ (Nguyễn-võ, 2017: 69, 70). The nation must therefore be conceived in both spatial and linear, temporal terms to be intelligible. Anderson (1991: 24) himself contrasts this understanding of nationalist prophetic temporality with medieval Christian representations of ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’, as depicted on European church frescoes of wealthy benefactors appearing in biblical scenes. Spiritual practices which place the dead among the living offer yet another alternative chronotope to nationalist time, in that they allow for ‘the multi-directional potentiality of time occupied perhaps by multiple identifiable or unidentifiable persons with multiple futures, or the multi-directional temporality of memory’ (Nguyễn-võ, 2017: 74). One example of multi-directional memory is reflective nostalgia, considered further in the next section. In contrast to Anderson, who depicted national time as simply superseding ‘simultaneous’ time within an unquestioned, underlying chronological framework, multi-directional temporality better fits within the fluidity of wet ontology. This enables us to take the second step in the argument, namely to upend assumptions of linear time.

Questioning the chronological continuity of time shakes the very foundations of the national construct. In the case of Vietnam, Nguyễn-võ (2017: 71) effectively critiques the linear time of the nation, as presided over by none other than former president Hồ Chi Minh himself:

Hồ must be present, always, to ensure the flow of prophetic time, serving the current agenda of the ruling party. Hồ is all that you can be. Hồ is the corpse mummified and entombed, defying death from the nonplace of death.

The Vietnamese Communist Party government’s carefully cultivated aura of respect and affection around ‘Uncle Hồ’ as a national father figure thus lives on as an embodiment of the nation that connects past, present and future. This is a classic example of a national hero linking and mobilising generations of nationalists across time. The cult of Hồ contributes to maintaining faith in the ‘moral grandeur’ (Anderson, 1991: 144) of lives lived and sacrificed in the service of the nation and a better, common future. Nonetheless, not all subscribe to this nationalist temporality, which coexists with other temporalities in Vietnam and elsewhere.

The disconnect between official state commemoration of heroes and martyrs in the name of the nation on the one hand, and private rituals recalling the dead on the other, has been well studied in the Vietnamese case (Kwon, 2006; Schwenkel, 2009; Sutherland, 2014). For example, many people’s connection to their dead ancestors escapes nationalist attempts to insert them into an official narrative as victors or traitors in the Vietnam–American War, also known as the second Indochinese War because of its wide scope and its connections to the first, anti-colonial Indochinese War against France. Linked to this, Nguyễn-võ also pursues a rapprochement between Vietnamese studies and Black studies by critically examining cross-cutting examples of inter-colonial and anti-colonial discourse. Nguyễn-võ’s work thus speaks to the spatial dimension of the national norm, as outlined above, in highlighting the liminality of the minority, racialised subject within the nation-state. Capable of state citizenship but not nationality – in the strict sense of cultural and ancestral belonging to the imagined nation – ethnic minorities often embody the limits of national belonging. In other words, they fill the gap between the persistent ideal of nation-state homogeneity, as highlighted in Brubaker’s quote at the beginning of this chapter, and nation-states’ actual ethnic diversity. As we have seen, it is possible to approach minorities, migrants and mobility in a way that is not premised on this national ideal. Taking the argument one step further, the next section will show that in constituting the nation’s ‘Other’, migrants and minorities can be used to perpetuate colonially inflected categories.

Colonial categories

European and U.S. colonisation of Southeast Asia, which introduced Westphalian sovereignty and thereby shaped anti-colonial nationalisms across that region, has left a pervasive legacy in the ongoing nation-building of both its colonising and colonised powers (Anderson, 1991). This pattern is repeated across the globe (Burton, 2003). For the purposes of the argument in this article, it is important to note that colonialism has not only strongly influenced immigration flows to former colonial powers, but also continues to permeate (self-)understandings of ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’ as conceptual categories constitutive of the national norm. In The Black Atlantic, for example, Paul Gilroy (1993: 3) notes how black settlers in England have long been confronted with an ‘underlying sense of England as a cohesive cultural community against which their self-conception has so often been defined’. This is a prime example of the racialised ‘Other’ invoked by Nguyễn-võ (2017), one who has the legal right to live in Britain but not to belong there. Racialised ‘Others’ live At the Edges of Citizenship (Hepworth, 2015) and within New Hierarchies of Belonging (Back and Sinha, 2012), always standing out against the backdrop of the ethnically homogeneous national ideal. To take an Asian example, the field of Critical Han Studies explores the ‘putative unity and empirical diversity’ of the Han as China’s majority group (Mullaney, 2012: 2). These critical scholars draw comparisons between Han and whiteness as largely taken for granted relational categories that only need manifest themselves in contrast to what they are not, namely a minority in size, colour or culture. Enjoying ‘a powerful and hegemonic neutrality all its own’, (Mullaney, 2012: 3) Han is at the top of a hierarchy of belonging that effectively equates Chineseness with Han identity, ensuring that other ways of identifying as Chinese continue to be defined relationally as non-Han, ethnic minorities. This demonstrates how patterns of power and domination shape the ethnic categories that in turn shape the national norm. As Benedict Anderson (1991) has shown with specific reference to Southeast Asia, many of these categories originated in the colonial census as a technology of power. This is but one lasting legacy of colonialism.

Paul Gilroy (1993: 3) points to forms of ‘cultural insiderism’ that ‘typically construct the nation as an ethnically homogeneous object and invoke ethnicity a second time in the hermeneutic procedures deployed to make sense of its distinctive cultural content’, thereby highlighting the lasting links between crude colonial racism, ethnic differentiation and Eurocentric cosmologies (cf. Burton, 2003). Gilroy’s critique (1993: 4) uses the ‘fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation’ he calls The Black Atlantic to transcend U.S. and British national boundaries and connect cultural studies across them. The enduring image of The Black Atlantic is important, therefore, in countering the methodological nationalism that takes nations as givens, and unquestioningly employs them as socio-political actors and basic units of analysis. As Robbie Shilliam (2015: 10) notes, however, the third point in the colonial Middle Passage, namely Africa, ‘sits mostly silent’ in Gilroy’s analysis. Neither does Gilroy elaborate on or employ the materiality of the Atlantic Ocean itself to model an alternative approach to the national ideal as a bounded whole moving through linear time.

In The Black Pacific, which obviously nods to Gilroy’s work, Shilliam (2015: 13) seeks to think outside Eurocentric, ethnonationalist worldviews and to treat the wounds of colonialism by ‘bind(ing) back together the manifest and spiritual domains’. The book begins with a vignette in which Māori open an encounter with black British visitors to Aotearoa-New Zealand by acknowledging the dead in a way that neither reproduces colonial frameworks nor subscribes to a linear temporal approach situating ancestors – and colonialism – in the past. Rather, Shilliam (2015: 8) uses this event to invoke an ‘ethos of living other-wise’ that is decolonial, as opposed to post- or anti-colonial, because it rejects colonially inflected knowledge frameworks altogether. Living ‘other-wise’ does not equate to being the racialised or minority ‘Other’. On the contrary, it does not know what it is to be ‘Other’ because that category of thought and existence is unknown to a conceptual framework which ‘refuse(s) the colonial conceit that European knowledge traditions hold supreme interpretive authority over the varied cosmologies and cultures of humanity’ (Shilliam, 2015: 8). This decolonial move completes the present article’s critique of the national norm as a bounded entity moving through linear time, and opens up the possibility of imagining community differently based on the conceptual fluidity of wet ontology. For example, Epeli Hau’ofa (1993: 7) contrasts ‘the myths, legends and oral traditions, and the cosmologies of the people of Oceania [whose] universe comprised not only land surfaces, but the surrounding ocean’ with the perspective of ‘Europeans and Americans, who drew imaginary lines across the sea, making the colonial boundaries that, for the first time, confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces’. This not only acknowledges the centrality of the sea to Oceania as an entity but also highlights how colonialism carved it up using demarcations derived from lines on land that were patently unsuited to material fluidity. This pertains to a spatial imaginary, but Shilliam’s decolonial approach also has a temporal dimension in that it sets out to bridge the gap between humans and ancestors or spirits, a relationship rent asunder by colonialism and slavery.

According to Shilliam (2015: 24), ‘temporalities that bind back together the material and spiritual also bind (post)colonial presents back to decolonial pasts’, thereby opening up further possibilities for rethinking relationships between people, time and place. Shilliam (2015: 21–22) shows how Māori cosmology, for example, adopts a configuration of time and space whereby the future lies behind and the past in front. It also emphasises the need to remember antecedents in order to stop war and conflict. Communicating with and pacifying wronged ancestors serves to repair breaches in the spiritual domain that bring rewards in the present. Comparable beliefs in the power of the dead to influence lives in the present are also popular across Southeast Asia, from East Timor (De Matos Viegas and Graça Feijó, 2017) to Vietnam (Kwon, 2006). Liberated from the conventional national norm in spatiotemporal terms, then, it is possible to look at other, more fluid forms of national belonging that do not conform to boundedness and linearity. The remainder of the article builds on this insight to propose and elaborate on the final step in the argument.

What does it mean in practice to untether a sense of belonging to the nation from the spatial constraints of the nation, (minority) ethnicity and territoriality, on the one hand, and the temporal limits of linear, chronological time on the other? To take one example related to space, the edited collection entitled Meanings of Bandung (Shilliam and Pham, 2016) brings together a range of perspectives on the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, to highlight ‘sideways’ solidarities and significance that cannot be captured by Eurocentric and nation-state-centric International Relations. In terms of time, The Other Cold War by the anthropologist Heonik Kwon (2010a) questions how this period is conventionally framed as a stand-off between superpowers, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using evidence of spirit commemoration in Vietnam and South Korea, Kwon not only shows how the War was anything but ‘Cold’ in many parts of Asia but also how it did not end neatly in 1989, and its legacy continues to be lived out through a lack of closure linked to unacknowledged deaths. These examples offer a glimpse into individuals’ different ways of identifying that do not necessarily conform to established spatiotemporal norms of national belonging. As already suggested above, critical analyses of migration offer yet another means of subverting ethnonational categories premised on states and stasis, as opposed to mobility (Sutherland, 2017).

In line with the literature on decolonial International Relations, Narendran Kumarakulasingam (2016: 53) proposes myth as a further alternative to historical chronology. This differs from history in being inter-subjective and embodied. Its ‘open-ended stance towards time, allows for creative reworking of the past, which in turn allows for a remaking of the present’ (Kumarakulasingam, 2016: 53). By stepping outside linear chronologies of time, myths have the power to disrupt dominant depictions of the status quo as both natural and national. As Kumarakulasingam (2016: 52) argues in the context of European colonialism, ‘Not only does the historical not exhaust our worlds, but history itself was administered to the majority of the world as a means of getting them to accept their subjugation to the White Master’. Attempts to take a sense of national belonging out of linear time acknowledge the legacy of colonialism as foundational to our current global order. The politics of longing is but one further attempt to engage with this legacy and step outside over-simplified dichotomies of belonging, in order to place the nation within a broader analytical framework premised on fluidity and mobility rather than linearity and homogeneity.

Migrant mobilities

As Gonzales and Sigona (2017: 9) have noted, in ‘an increasingly mobile world, migration muddles the distinction between insider and outsider and unsettles consolidated categories of analysis’. In order to explore the ramifications and critical implications of migration as a contemporary phenomenon, it is necessary to take the long view of migration as a state-constituted category that describes and controls human mobility. As noted above, it is also necessary to engage in theory-building that transcends state-centric methodological nationalism, for this merely replicates the same ethnonational categories of belonging that nationalists use as a point of departure, rather than making them objects of analysis and critique. A sense of belonging is not a fixed category. As Nira Yuval-Davis (2006: 199) points out, ‘belonging is always a dynamic process, not a reified fixity, which is only a naturalized construction of a particular hegemonic form of power relations’. That is, national belonging is often imposed as an organisational category that may not fit with an individual’s own sense of identity and their lived reality. Relating a sense of belonging to shifting power relations can also aid understanding of why people emphasise some aspects of their identity over others at different points in time (Winter, 2009: 136). The nation as a starting point of analysis, then, together with all its ingrained assumptions as to chronological ancestral continuity and rootedness in a ‘homeland’, is found wanting because it cannot capture this complexity. Taking wet ontology as a starting point, by contrast, allows for fluidity across time and space in constructing a sense of home and belonging. Many critical scholars have offered alternatives to an approach premised on methodological nationalism, a selection of which is surveyed below as a basis for conceptualising a politics of longing.

Cathrine Brun and Anita Fàbos (2015) propose the three analytical levels of home, Home and HOME to distinguish, respectively, everyday homemaking practices, a value-driven sense of heritage and belonging, and the global socio-political context framing origins and belonging. They do so in the context of migrants’ and refugees’ active role in shaping diverse and overlapping layers of home that do not map neatly onto where they were born or their ancestral lineage. Linked to this, Yuval-Davis’(2006) tripartite analysis of belonging in terms of social location, emotional identification and values highlights the power relations inherent in each. In turn, these analyses of ‘social power axes, not of social identities’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 201) chime with Brubaker’s (2015) discussion of difference and inequality quoted at the outset of this article. Where Brun and Fàbos highlight migrants’ agency in shaping their own sense of connection and belonging, whether in a bleak refugee camp or an adopted homeland, Brubaker (2015: 20) uses the term ‘forced immobility’ to describe the vast majority of the world’s population whose citizenship status constrains their freedom to move abroad for work, for love or for simple survival. That is, their mobility, residency and citizenship status may be controlled, but their sense of belonging cannot be policed in the same way.

As Gonzales and Sigona (2017: 8) put it in the context of legal citizenship status, ‘belonging is fragile and contradictory’. The same can be said of the linked, but distinct realm of national belonging as an emotional sense of home (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Svetlana Boym (2007: 3) points to how a real or imagined homeland can be a powerful source of nostalgia, understood as a longing for home or for a better time. It can thus be expressed in both spatial and temporal terms. Boym (2007: 3) links nostalgia to ‘the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory’. She then goes on to distinguish between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia ‘signifies a return to the original stasis’, whereas rather than recreating ‘the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster the creation of aesthetic individuality’ (Boym, 2007: 14). The creative potential of reflective nostalgia provides a powerful conceptual frame through which to view alternative narratives to national belonging, because it does not necessarily conform to the chronology and unity that underpin nationalist ideology. Reflective nostalgia sometimes even ‘thrives on the longing itself’ (Moorti, 2003: 359) without actively pursuing a return to a particular place or past. Restorative nostalgia, by contrast, is easier to politicise in national terms by stoking fears of loss, maximising the appeal of familiarity, and connecting to the basic human need for a sense of security (Walkerdine, 2010). Nostalgia for a lost homeland is often associated with members of a diaspora, but it can also be felt by self-identifying natives yearning for a putative past that was somehow better, purer or brighter. In sum, nationalism thrives on restorative nostalgia, but reflective nostalgia can break the bounds of national space and time to inform another perspective on politics, namely a politics of longing. This article argues that a politics of longing better describes the fluidity and multi-dimensional temporality of home and belonging that is encapsulated in reflective nostalgia.

Heonik Kwon (2010b) uses the term politics of longing to describe the unique circumstances following the death of the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in 1994. Adulation of the ‘Great Leader’ as an anti-colonial hero, combined with a form of Confucian filial piety that was embodied in his son Kim Jong Il but genuinely shared across much of the population, gave rise to a sort of ‘family state’ in North Korea. As Kwon notes, ‘The landscape of longing required devotion from every member of the family state, and the devotion was both spiritual and material dedication’ (Kwon, 2010b: 21). The centrality of spiritual devotion is important here. While the combination of self-sacrifice and commemoration in the North Korean case is extreme, the idea of a politics of longing usefully encompasses elements of nostalgic yearning for a better time or place (when the Great Leader was alive), together with the spiritual element that often forms part of a sense of belonging. Indeed, the words longing and belonging derive from the same Old English verb langian, the various meanings of which include to yearn and to summon, as well as to belong (with the prefix ‘be’ used as an intensifier).

Recent approaches to nationalism in human geography have rightly emphasised the importance of emotion and affect (Closs Stephens, 2016), and comparisons between religion and nationalism are longstanding (Brubaker, 2015), but there is more to be said about how nationalism’s emphasis on longevity, commemoration and ancestry relates to the spiritual element in a sense of belonging. Framing such enquiries in terms of the politics of longing, as opposed to methodological nationalism, recognises that group membership offers security, comfort and often spiritual nourishment but does not constrain or confine the terms that define belonging (Walkerdine, 2010). Individuals may share a yearning to belong, but they do so across many different parameters and at various intensities across time and space. The fluidity evoked by wet ontology captures these cross-cutting flows better than the simple, closed categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or past, present and future. The politics of longing thereby builds on wet ontology to provide a more open analytical framework than methodological nationalism, one that can encompass national belonging but is by no means encapsulated in it.

One further Vietnamese example provides an initial illustration of how the politics of longing might be applied in practice. Janet Hoskins suggests a reading of the defunct Republic of Vietnam (a.k.a. South Vietnam) flag – three horizontal red stripes on yellow – as observed outside Cao Dai temples and on ancestral altars in Vietnamese diaspora communities in the U.S., that casts doubt on its use as a political symbol of anti-communism. Rather, Hoskins interprets it as a symbol of displacement and exile; ‘Since South Vietnam as a state no longer exists, it is being commemorated as an ancestor - recognized as an earlier entity that once inspired loyalty and has now vanished’ (Hoskins, 2017: 130). This ‘lost nation’ (Hoskins, 2017: 130) can inspire patriotic feelings linked to ancestors’ sacrifice in a way that is redolent of restorative nostalgia. Alternatively, however, it could also be seen to provide the basis for a more reflective nostalgia that draws strength from past ancestors without recourse to contemporary nationalism. An analytical approach premised on the politics of longing allows for both, whereas an approach derived from methodological nationalism would make it difficult to analyse the flag as anything other than a symbol of support for South Vietnam and what it stood for, since belonging is assumed to fall along ethnic or national political lines. Elsewhere, Shilliam (2015: 2) notes how a group of Rastafarians who had travelled from their home in the United Kingdom to New Zealand explicitly ‘rerouted’ their origins to Ethiopia. In other words, they chose not to be defined as British but instead made their provenance their choice, based on a sense of belonging that fell outside standard ethnonational categories. The final section draws on another example linked to New Zealand – an artwork this time – to provide further illustration of the politics of longing as an analytical approach.

The politics of longing

This section illustrates the politics of longing using elements from the temporary exhibition entitled Oceania, held at London’s Royal Academy in late 2018. The first room of the exhibition in particular evoked the politics of longing, which transcends the analytical frame of methodological nationalism, without jettisoning the nation as a potential focus of belonging. Mounted in collaboration with the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, UK, the exhibitionbrought together around 200 historical artefacts from the 18th century onwards, interspersed with artworks by contemporary artists from the region including Lisa Reihana, John Pule and the Mata Aho collective. The exhibition was supported by New Zealand, Tonga and Papua New Guinea, among other partners, and offered free entry to all New Zealand and Pacific Island passport holders.

Wet ontology need not evoke the sea; Steinberg and Peters (2015) themselves turn to the highlands of Southeast Asia to illustrate their approach. However, as Hau’ofa (1993: 8) notes, ‘“Oceania” connotes a sea of islands’ as opposed to islands in the sea, thereby privileging a seaborne perspective over land-centred references to the Pacific Islands. This is important because seaborne mobility was an inextricable part of islanders’ life until colonialism carved up the region; ‘They played in it as soon as they could walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought on it. They developed great skills for navigating their waters’ (Hau’ofa, 1993: 8). In turn, the Oceania exhibition helps to exemplify the politics of longing because it is not entirely delimited by the nation in space or time, even though it may do no more than gesture towards the possibility of transcending national space–time.

The exhibition began conventionally enough. Dominating one wall of the first room was a wall map depicting the archipelagos of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia in two-dimensional, cartographic form, as divided by ‘European geographers’ (Oceania leaflet 2018). This map also covered one side of the leaflet handed out with the entrance tickets (Oceania leaflet 2018), the text of which unapologetically begins by framing the exhibition in starkly Anglocentric terms:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in August 1768, four months before George III founded the Royal Academy of Arts, Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook left Plymouth in command of the HMS Endeavour. The ship and its crew were embarking on a scientific expedition funded by the Royal Society to track the transit of Venus in Tahiti and to explore the Southern Hemisphere for the Admiralty.

The leaflet did not note that George III was a British king, spell out the meaning of HMS, or explain the significance of the Royal Academy of Arts or the Royal Society to visitors. Instead, it assumed that its target audience of metropolitan Londoners, and others willing and able to travel to the venue and pay the high entrance fee of £20 (notwithstanding the offer to New Zealand and Pacific Island citizens), was aware of this context. In this way, Oceania is framed from a standard Eurocentric perspective, using colonial tropes of scientific progress, exploration and discovery (see Powles, 2018). Only once the leaflet has established that the Pacific Ocean ‘was largely unknown to Europeans at the time’ is any information provided about ‘the diverse, sophisticated and vibrant societies that they encountered’ and a history of human population stretching back 30,000 years (Oceania leaflet 2018). This shows how today, an exhibition about a continent and its people is still unreflectingly presented from a European, specifically British, perspective on the foreign, unknown Other.

Visitors to the Oceania exhibition were naturally drawn to the familiar format of the map in order to situate Oceania (see Figure 1). Nevertheless, the entrance space to the exhibition was actually dominated by an alternative starting point to the map and the leaflet, namely an imposing artwork by the Mata Aho collective entitled Kiko Moana (see Figure 2). This layout effectively juxtaposed methodological nationalism as a framing device – embodied in the map – with a representation more in tune with wet ontology and the possibility of conceptualising home and belonging through a politics of longing.

Figure 1.

First room of Oceania exhibition featuring wall map. Photograph by the author, October 2018.

Figure 2.

Kiko Moana by the Mata Aho collective at the Oceania exhibition. Photograph by the author, October 2018.

Stretching to 11 metres of textured, slashed and layered blue tarpaulin, Kiko Moana rose up in a huge, tsunami-like wave to fill the space. Despite its arresting size and shimmering beauty, the work is initially difficult to interpret beyond a clear association with the ocean which – as was obvious from a glance at the adjacent map and introductory text – ‘evokes the sea that both connects and separates this vast region’ (Oceania leaflet 2018). However, as the Māori artists that make up the collective explain in a video on the exhibition website, Kiko Moana speaks to much more than that, variously evoking environmental pressures, Māori beliefs and individual life stories.¹ The Mata Aho collective also clearly and explicitly links its working practices to ancestral ways of coming together to learn, work and collaborate. It understands Kiko Moana, roughly translated as the substance of the ocean, to be a living entity connected to Taniwha, or water guardians. A website connected to the work and acquired by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa consists of a ‘multiplicity of indigenous narratives’ recording Māori people’s understandings of and personal stories about Taniwha (kikomoana.com). These 24 ‘Taniwha tales’ recount everything from legends to personal experiences and memories of encounters with Taniwha, thereby imbuing the fabric of Kiko Moana with further layers of personal significance and meaning.

The Taniwha tales effectively illustrate the spiritual element of the politics of longing, whether expressed through actual encounters with the water guardians or the symbolism associated with these creatures. They exemplify the politics of longing, not through a sentimental, restorative nostalgia, but rather through a no-nonsense engagement with natural phenomena and their meanings for individuals, families and wider communities. There are as many takes on Taniwha as there are tales, and these could no doubt be endlessly multiplied. The tales do not emphasise any single source of authority on Taniwha. Nor do they seek to define a right or wrong way to engage with Taniwha, and thereby Māori cosmology more generally. What emerges is a multifaceted whole made up of many individual perspectives and experiences that has scope to include broader cosmologies, spiritual connections and ways of belonging that simply cannot be captured by ethnonational categories, cartographic mapping or methodological nationalism.

Kiko Moana appears to be a much more fitting introduction to Oceania than a map, firstly because it evokes rather than depicts that place. The reference to the sea itself points to the fluidity of wet ontology, and this is supported by the multiplicity of indigenous narratives that shape Oceania and its people’s sense of belonging. Reading the Taniwha tales illustrates how there is no one way to interpret or experience Māori cosmology. At the same time, the acquisition of this work by New Zealand’s national museum gives it the imprimatur of national heritage, thereby placing it within the political framework of the nation-state. The national narrative is by no means absent from this work, as it operates within ongoing efforts to validate, recognise and celebrate Māori belonging within the context of the New Zealand nation-state, and ongoing indigenous struggles for recognition across the world (Coulthard, 2014). Yet it also speaks to the sea, mobility and ‘voyaging’ across the Pacific Ocean as central to the identities and histories of its indigenous peoples, not least since New Zealand was among the last Pacific islands to be settled between 800 and 1200 CE.

The second room in the Oceania exhibition, bathed in a dappled and shifting blue light that strongly suggests immersion in water, explores the importance of seafaring to Pacific island cultures. As a strong counterpoint to the wall map in the entrance, it also features a navigational chart from the Marshall Islands made of sticks and cowrie shells (see Figure 3). These charts depicted the materiality of the sea, specifically ocean swells, from the perspective of the maker, and could only be fully explained by that individual; ‘The chart is less a literal representation of the sea, but more an abstract illustration of the ways that ocean swells interact with land’ (Romm, 2015, online). Its inherent subjectivity and its aim to trace fluidity are in stark contrast to the ‘objective’ truth claims of conventional, two-dimensional cartography in clearly delineating and dividing nation-state spaces. This was born of a necessity to read or ‘feel’ the ocean using a system called wave piloting, given that the Marshall islands are so flat as to be very difficult to spot from the water. Before trying to understand the broader motion of the sea using navigational charts, ‘young men and women learning wave piloting would spend hours floating in the ocean blindfolded, memorising the minute sensations of waves, currents and swells beneath them’ (Langlois, 2016, online). Navigational charts as individualised depictions of seaborne experience contrast strongly with the neatly bordered containers represented in two-dimensional cartography. They recall wet ontology in rendering fluidity and flow rather than an ordered patchwork of places, thereby echoing Kiko Moana’s evocation of an ‘ethos of living other-wise’ (Shilliam, 2015: 8) that is not premised on colonial categories. Despite the exhibition’s bald attempt to frame Oceania from a Eurocentric perspective unchanged since colonial times, Kiko Moana and navigational charts both resist this interpretation in their focus on fluidity and multiplicity.

Figure 3.

Detail from the Oceania exhibition featuring a navigational chart. Photograph by the author, October 2018.

Conclusion

The politics of longing posits that the nation is but one among many, and by no means a necessary, frame of reference for an individual’s sense of belonging. It encompasses both restorative and reflective nostalgia as possible means of connecting individual narratives of belonging with ancestors and (national) heritage. As such, it derives from a wet ontology that does not presuppose the nation ‘is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (Anderson, 1991: 26). The advantage of this approach over methodological nationalism is that it allows narratives of home and belonging to be knitted together in many different ways, both within and outwith the national frame. What is more, its inherent indebtedness to fluidity also puts migrant mobility on a par with rootedness and ancestry, rather than relegating it to a relational category that can never measure up to an aspirational ideal of native national belonging.

Nicholas De Genova (2017: 6) notes that ‘if there were no borders, there would be no migration – only mobility’, thereby highlighting how much the very concept of immigration is imbricated with a nation-state’s sovereignty over bounded territory. De Genova also draws attention to the temporality of migration, which subjects migrants to border enforcement that can be arbitrary – especially during so-called ‘crises’ – and which is always predicated upon the ‘accident of birth’ that is nationality (Brubaker, 2015: 20). This article has sought to step outside the spatial and temporal assumptions underlying the nation and the nation-state system that turns mobility into migration and people into minorities. Instead, it has explored a more fluid and dynamic approach to a sense of national belonging using the politics of longing. This approach subverts ethnonational categorisation as a starting point of analysis. Shilliam (2015: 26) notes that ‘one of the most signal qualities of Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) is just how many diverse and sometimes conflicting stories peoples have of themselves and of their relationships’. Exemplified by the Taniwha tales that accompany Kiko Moana, this shows how links to ancestors are both manifold and malleable, and how they can be variously called upon and valorised for present day purposes. Here we see the fluidity and mobility of wet ontology applied in practice. People are not so much in thrall to their ancestors, as (nationalist) metaphors of rootedness or long, linear genealogies might suggest. Rather, they craft spiritual relationships to the past within wider cosmologies that do not necessarily conform to dominant, colonially-inflected ethnonational categories, far less nationalist narratives of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author acknowledges support from Economic and Social Research Council Grant ES/P004644/1: Reframing centuries of forced Cham displacement, and thanks the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

ORCID iD

Claire Sutherland

Note

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