Beschreibung
This book unpacks the ways in which
nationalisms – understood as feelings between national
belonging and alienation – unfold in moments of affective
encounter between different bodies, objects and places in
Azerbaijan. In times of a global trend to fight for the
persistence of singular nations instead of dissolving
national boundaries, the book suggests focusing on the
development of attachments and detachments to nationalising
beliefs, corporeal experiences and everyday routines, in
order to understand the ways in which bodies’ different
capacities to affect and to be affected are of central
importance for the emergence and the persistence of
nationalisms.
Based on eight months of ethnographic field work, consisting
of observant participation within families, field notes from
attendance at public holidays and commemoration ceremonies
and qualitative interviews conducted between 2012 and 2014
in Azerbaijan, the book develops the concept of affective
nationalism as the banal affirmation of the national
emerging in moments of encounter between different bodies
and objects.
The book advances scholarship on nationalism and affect by
suggesting to study nationalisms not as given, but as
potential and emergent experiences of differently positioned
bodies in a world divided into nations.
Elisabeth Militz holds a PhD in Geography
(University of Zurich, Switzerland). She is a postdoctoral
researcher of Social and Cultural Geography at the Institute
of Geography at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She
studies bodies and affect in the global intimate.
Here you will find an instructive review:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14608944.2022.2025566
