In times of heightened global displacement and intensified nationalisms, the question of borders has moved to the centre of social and political analysis. What often remains unacknowledged in their study, however, is that bordering is not merely a political, economic or symbolic practice; it is also an affective one that operates at the level of emotion and attachment. In this talk, I propose the concept of Affective Bordering as a lens to examine how dominant structures of feeling that sustain the deadly violence of border regimes are reproduced and contested. Drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial theories of affect, I develop a cultural methodology of affect that traces affect’s circulation across different scenes of the border spectacle of the ongoing (and misnamed) ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. This method deciphers the dominant discourses that reinstall national, racial and sexual hierarchies while highlighting forms of affective solidarity and resistance that are enacted in the cracks of the European border regime.

Billy Holzberg is Lecturer of Social Justice at King’s College London.