Page 58 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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Identity, Citizenship and

Contemporary, Secure,

Gendered Politics of

Belonging

Nira Yuval-Davis

INTRODUCTION attempt to reconstruct what they often call
‘social cohesion’, in which such naturalized
Nationalist ideologies and practices have belongings can prosper. At the same time,
sought to appropriate and to reconstruct human rights activists are trying, with some-
notions of belonging. Various historians and what contradictory results, to nurture a sense
theoreticians of nationalism have shown how of global human belonging.
nationalist discourses have come to replace The chapter aims to deconstruct some con-
other forms of belonging, whether local, reli- temporary notions of belonging as they relate
gious, or associated with explicit lines of loy- to ethnic and national processes. Its main
alties to specific political hierarchies. Under focus will be the contrasting multi-layered
hegemonic discourses of nationalist politics of and paradoxical narratives of the ‘authentic
belonging the ‘nation-state’has come to be the indigenes’, on the one hand, who, with their
Andersonian (1991 [1983]) ‘imagined com- multi-faceted social, political, and spatial
munity’in which people, territories, and states dimensions, consider themselves to be the
are constructed as immutably connected and rightful ‘owners’ of their nations; and, on the
the nation is a ‘natural’ extension of one’s other, those of the ‘diasporic strangers’. The
family to which one should be prepared, if claims of the latter for such ownership might
necessary, to sacrifice oneself. Or is it? be challenged by the indigenes in the territo-
Recently, under the onslaught of globaliza- ries in which both live together, while the
tion, very different constructions of belonging claims of the diasporic strangers to national
are gaining momentum and various state ownership might relate to far away, imagined
agencies are investing a lot of resources in an homelands. The chapter will also examine