The ‘affective liminality’ of young immigrants in Belgium: from ruly to unruly feelings on the path towards formal citizenship

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on affective citizenship amongst young immigrants without formal citizenship. Citizenship studies use the ‘affective turn’ to address the central role of affect in current integration and citizenship policies of many Western nation-states, but the lived affective experiences of new immigrants without formal citizenship status concerning these policies remain poorly understood. We advance an analytical framework of ‘affective liminality’ for examining differences in the collectively patterned affects of young immigrants, according to their specific situations of liminal legality and in relation to governmental ‘feeling rules’. An ethnographic study in Belgium reveals that, in general, fear, frustration and hope are key features in the lives of these young people, reflecting the insecurities and ambiguities of their ‘in-between’ legal statuses. Different situations of liminal legality are entangled with different affective outcomes. Counter-intuitively, as young people progress along the path towards formal citizenship, their feelings become more ‘unruly’, and thus less likely to comply with the feeling rules of the state. In addition to being paralyzing or disciplining, their affective experiences might thus be emancipatory as well, inciting them to fight exclusion.