Unsteady belongings: Rethinking the experience of nation through movement
The new mobilities paradigm identified by Mimi Sheller and John Urry in 2006 was in part a descriptive response to a contemporary world 'on the move' but it was also a critique of what the authors saw as a 'sedentarist' social science that posed stasis as normal and 'treats as abnormal distance, change and placelessness' This interest in mobile or fluid ways of conceptualising place and subject formation follows the postcolonial revision of our understanding of culture itself in the 1990s, in which contested and unstable identities and attachments to place and people were under examination. However, these discussions posed the concept of movement as largely abstract, as a hermeneutic for dismantling prevailing structures of thinking. In this article, I take the idea of a world 'on the move' and fluid concepts of culture, and put them up against the resistantly fixed and stable ways in which nation is employed. Following previous work in 2012, in which I sought to extend our understanding about the mobility of culture in embodied terms (i.e. as experienced or enacted) this article turns its attention to the key term 'movement' to focus on the kinaesthetics of national and transnational belonging. Performance, I argue, proposes a fundamental concern with the material body in movement and in space; it therefore allows for particular theoretical and methodological insights into the study of the embodied experience of belonging. It is perhaps the very disciplinary tincture needed to counter the 'sedentarist' social science that Urry and Sheller critique.