Skip to main content
View expanded cover

Everyday Nationhood pp 177–195Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

On Affect, Dancing and National Bodies

Abstract

The chapter proposes to look at the connection between dance performances, the identification of these movements as national and feelings of comfort and discomfort through a conceptual lens of affect. Through an analysis of female dancing in Azerbaijan that unpacks the ways in which feelings of national belonging and alienation emerge in moments of bodily encounters, the chapter makes the affective dimensions of banal nationalism explicit. Following feminist accounts of Spinozist-Deleuzian affect and informed by an autoethnographic research methodology, Militz focuses on how bodily movements and sensations activate national categorisations. Through a vignette from her field research the author accounts for the ways in which her own positionality and bodily experiences produce national categorisations and constitute her experiences of national belonging and alienation. She concludes that disclosing the affective dimensions of banal nationalism helps to understand how feelings of national belonging emerge and persist even if national representations remain absent.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57098-7_9
  • Chapter length: 19 pages
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
eBook
USD   139.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • ISBN: 978-1-137-57098-7
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
Hardcover Book
USD   179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    All names have been changed.

References

  • Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. London; New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Antonsich, M. (2016). The “everyday” of Banal Nationalism – Ordinary People’s Views on Italy and Italian. Political Geography, 54(Special Issue: Banal Nationalism 20 years), 32–42. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.07.006.

  • Askew, K. M. (2002). Performing the nation: Swahili music and cultural politics in Tanzania. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barbour, K., & Hitchmough, A. (2014). Experiencing affect through site-specific dance. Emotion, Space and Society, 12, 63–72.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Beissinger, M. R. (2002). Nationalist mobilization and the collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Berlant, L. (2008). The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Billig, M. (2009). Reflecting on a critical engagement with banal nationalism—A reply to Skey. The Sociological Review, 57(2), 347–352.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Blackman, L. (2012). Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. Theory, culture & society. Los Angeles: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects (2nd ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bratsis, P. (2006). Everyday life and the State. Boulder, London: Paradigm Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (2011). Nationalizing states revisited: Projects and processes of nationalization in Post-Soviet States. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(11), 1785–1814.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Closs Stephens, A. (2016). The affective atmospheres of nationalism. Cultural Geographies, 23(2), 181–198. doi:10.1177/1474474015569994.

  • Crang, M., & Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2010). Nation, race, and affect: senses and sensibilities at national heritage sites. Environment and Planning A, 42(10), 2315–2331.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Cresswell, T. (2006). ‘You cannot shake that shimmie here’: Producing mobility on the dance floor. Cultural Geographies, 13(1), 55–77.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • De Waal, T. (2003). Black garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war. New York, London: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Faria, C. (2013). Staging a new South Sudan in the USA: Men, masculinities and nationalist performance at a diasporic beauty pageant. Gender, Place & Culture, 20(1), 87–106.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Gökariksel, B., & Mitchell, K. (2005). Veiling, secularism, and the neoliberal subject: National narratives and supranational desires in Turkey and France. Global Networks, 5(2), 147–165.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Heyat, F. (2002). Azeri women in transition: Women in Soviet and post-Soviet azerbaijan. Central Asia Research Forum. London, New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koch, N. (2013). Sport and soft authoritarian nation-building. Political Geography, 32, 42–51.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’. Progress in Human Geography, 29(1), 83–94.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Luscombe, L. D., & Kazdal, V. (2014). Language and identity in a post-Soviet world: Language of education and linguistic identity among azerbaijani students. Nationalities Papers, 42(6), 1015–1033. doi:10.1080/00905992.2014.938034.

  • Mayer, T. (2004). Embodied nationalisms. In L. A. Staeheli, E. Kofman, & L. J. Peake (Eds.), Mapping women, making politics: Feminist perspectives on political geography (pp. 153–167). New York, London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCormack, D. P. (2003). An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), 488–507.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Megoran, N. (2005). The critical geopolitics of danger in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 555–580.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Militz, E., & Schurr, C. (2016). Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in azerbaijan. Political Geography, 54(Special Issue: Banal Nationalism 20 years), 54–63. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.11.002.

  • Naroditskaya, I. (2005). Azerbaijani Mugham and Carpet: Cross-domain mapping. Ethnomusicology Forum, 14(1), 25–55.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Nast, H. J. (1998). Unsexy geographies. Gender, Place & Culture, 5(2), 191–206.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012). The make-believe space: Affective geography in a postwar polity. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Persson, E., & Petersson, B. (2014). Political mythmaking and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi: Olympism and the Russian great power myth. East European Politics, 30(2), 192–209.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(1), 5–20.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Pitard, J. (2016). Using vignettes within autoethnography to explore layers of cross-cultural awareness as a teacher. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 17(1).

    Google Scholar 

  • Reed, S. A. (1998). The politics and poetics of dance. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27(1), 503–532.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Sattarov, R. (2009). Islam, state, and society in independent Azerbaijan: Between historical legacy and Post-Soviet reality. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of Shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, London: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skey, M. (2010). “A sense of where you belong in the world”: National belonging, ontological security and the status of the ethnic majority in england. Nations and Nationalism, 16(4), 715–733. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2009.00428.x.

  • Smith, S. H. (2012). Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), 1511–1528.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, S.H., Swanson, N.W., & Gökarıksel, B. (2016). Territory, bodies and borders. Area Early View. Retrieved January 6, 2016, from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/area.12247/abstract.

  • Taber, N. (2010). Institutional ethnography, autoethnography, and narrative: an argument for incorporating multiple methodologies. Qualitative Research, 10(1), 5–25.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Tohidi, N. (1996). Soviet in public, Azeri in private: Gender, Islam, and nationality in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Women’s Studies International Forum, 19(1–2), 111–123.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Tokluoglu, C. (2012). Perceptions of State and Leadership in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (1991–2009). Middle Eastern Studies, 48(3), 319–343.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2006). Affect—An ethnocentric encounter? Exploring the ‘universalist’ imperative of emotional/affectual geographies. Area, 38(2), 213–217.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Wetherell, M. (2014). Affect and banal nationalism: A practical dialogic approach to emotion. In C. Antaki & S. Condor (Eds.), Rhetoric, ideology and social psychology: Essays in honour of Michael Billig (pp. 137–150). London, New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, K., & Lea, J. (2010). Geographies of affect. In S. Smith, R. Pain, S. Marston, et al. (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies (pp. 154–175). London: Sage.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Yalçın-Heckmann, L. (2008). The political economy of an Azerbaijani wedding. In Azerbaijan Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Germany, Aserbaidschan - Land des Feuers. Geschichte und Kultur im Kaukasus (pp. 125–146), Berlin: Reimer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yessayan, M. T. (2015). Monarchical nation branding: Queen Rania’s performance of modernity on YouTube. Celebrity Studies, 6(4), 430–442.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Young, C., & Light, D. (2001). Place, national identity and post-socialist transformations: An introduction. Political Geography, 20(8), 941–955.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Yuval-Davis, N. (1996). Women and the biological reproduction of ‘the nation’. Women’s Studies International Forum, Links Across Differences: Gender, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, 19(1–2), 17–24.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Zhemukhov, S., & King, C. (2013). Dancing the nation in the North Caucasus. Slavic Review, 72(2), 287–305.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Elisabeth Militz

Authors
  1. Elisabeth Militz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elisabeth Militz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Loughborough, United Kingdom

    Michael Skey

  2. Loughborough, United Kingdom

    Marco Antonsich

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Militz, E. (2017). On Affect, Dancing and National Bodies. In: Skey, M., Antonsich, M. (eds) Everyday Nationhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57098-7_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57098-7_9

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57097-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57098-7

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)