Abstract
This paper explores the affective economy of (un)belonging, revealed by the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU). Emerging social science research on so-called ‘Brexit’ focuses on the anticipated effects of a stricter UK immigration regime on the lives of EU citizens and families. Against the background of the country’s postcolonial melancholia, and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in England (2018–2019), this paper discusses how British and mixed-migration status, mixed (race) couples narrate the impact of the poll’s outcome on their affective orientations towards the UK and the EU. It shows how race inflects partners’ different perception of Brexit as a historical rupture or as an event in a continuum; as a loss of entitlement to mobility in space, or of the legitimacy of permanence in place; as a lingering danger, or a magnifier of existing patterns of violence. By putting Black and mixed-race partners’ narratives center stage, this paper traces three scenes of expression of their perceived contested and precarious belonging: the ordinariness of racism in the UK, the mistrust in the durability of the boundaries of inclusion drawn by the British state, and a heightened alertness for fear of escalating racist and homophobic violence.
Highlights
This paper explores the racialized ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed 2004)1 ofbelonging revealed by the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU)
Against the background of escalating violence against Black people, People of Color (POC) and immigrants (Home Office 2018; Paterson et al 2018), the whiteness ostensibly shared by the social group most scapegoated for the ‘excesses’ of the EU freedom of movement regime (i.e., Eastern European nationals) and Leave voters was invoked to disavow racism
I have discussed the racialized affective economy ofbelonging which Brexit revealed by exploring how British and mixed-migration status, mixed couples narrated its impact on their lives
Summary
This paper explores the racialized ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed 2004) of (un)belonging revealed by the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU). This paper brings critical race theory, migration studies and legal anthropology into conversation with each other It contends that the perceptions of mistrust and heightened alertness emerging from the narratives of subjects (i.e., partners) who were, until recently, lawfully discriminated on the basis of race and/or sexuality convey their awareness of the fickle nature of the boundaries of belonging, which the state draws, redraws, and withdraws. I acknowledge and share their critique, in this paper I maintain the terms ‘interraciality’ and ‘interracial’ for their wider use both in the scholarship I refer to, and among the subjects of my research Such prevalence of heterosexual couples partly reflects the belated legalization of same-sex marriage in the US, Europe and most parts of the globe. Researchers’ focus on married couples (see for example Benson 1981; Osuji 2014; Roberts 2018), could not but exclude from purview unions which were denied access to this rite
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