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INTRODUCTION

INTERN ATIO N AL
journal of
CULTURAL studies

Co pyrig h t 2003 SA GE Pu blicatio ns


Lo n d o n, Th o usan d O aks, CA an d Ne w Delhi
w w w.sagep u blicatio ns.com
Volume 6(3): 251259
[1367-8779(200309)6:3; 251259; 035417]

Re-imagining communities

Sara A hmed and A nne-M arie Fortier


Lancaster University, England

To what do we appeal when we appeal to community? When is


community appealing? Who appeals to community and who doesnt?
How else can we appeal for or to others if we do not do so in the name
of community? To ask such questions at this present moment is to make
clear that the word community does not itself secure a common ground,
for such questions suggest, by their very nature as questions, that
community itself is in question, as a question mark, as well as a mark
of questioning. It is uncertain what the word community does, or what
it might do, in the different contexts in which it is named. For some,
community might be a word that embodies the promise of a universal
togetherness that resists either liberal individualism or defensive national-
ism as a we that remains open to others who are not of my kind
(Agamben, 1993; Nussbaum, 1996) or who have nothing in common
with me (Lingis, 1994). For others, community might remain premised on
ideas of commonality either expressed in the language of kinship and
blood relations or in a shared allegiance to systems of belief (Anderson,
1991; Parekh, 2000; Rorty, 1994). Or community might be the promise
of living together without being as one, as a community in which other-
ness or difference can be a bond rather than a division (Blanchot, 1988;
Diprose, 2002; Nancy, 1991). And, for others still, community might
represent a failed promise insofar as the appeal to community assumes a
way of relating to others that violates rather than supports the ethical
principle of alterity (Bauman, 2000; Young, 1990); that is others matter
only if they are either with me or like me. Community enters into the
debate about how to live with others and seems to be crucial as a name

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252 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(3)

for what we already do (or do not do); what we must do (or not do); or
what we must retain (or give up).
The articles collected in this Special Issue are primarily concerned with
interrogating community by posing community as a question rather than
a solution. How are some communities imagined as more desirable than
others? Which communities survive and which do not? How are communi-
ties an effect of power or of the claiming of spaces by some bodies and not
others? The articles were all first presented at a conference on Re-Imagin-
ing Communities, held at the Institute for Womens Studies, Lancaster
University, in May 2002. The conference was characterized by a critical and
generous debate one that was inspired both by a shared recognition that
the question of community does matter, but also by a lack of consensus
about what it is that is promised by community. Clearly, the question of
community has cropped up in many different disciplines: in philosophical
debates about ethics, in political debates about citizenship and rights, in
anthropological debates about new forms of kinship and in sociological
debates about the impact of social changes on experiences of community
life. The question of community has also been crucial to diverse political
movements and theoretical frameworks: feminist, queer, black, postcolonial
and indigenous practices and theories have critically reanimated what it is
that community might mean for those who are already recognized as
others. In this issue, we aim to create a space in which the different kinds
of work that are being done on the question of communities can be brought
together. This is not to say that there are distinct areas of work that should
now speak to each other, as if they hadnt before; rather, the question of
communities has cropped up in different places, but not in the same way,
and to track the unevenness of its appearance may be an instructive way of
thinking about the work that the word communities does, as well as what
it could do, in the work that we do.
The contexts that have affected the editing of this Special Issue are not
simply academic, but also worldly; the questions raised at the conference
and in this issue respond to the times and are timely. Recent appeals to
community, although not new, are deeply implicated in political projects
that may reshape the very world in which we live. In Britain, for example,
much emphasis is put on the promise of community within public policies
and popular debates about the forging of a new Britain for the 21st
century. The narrative of community cohesion that is exercised here is a
familiar one; the community promises to deliver modes of being together
and having together that are grounded in sameness, reciprocity, mutual
responsibility and a form of mutual connectedness and attachment. We
might note that such a narrative is not specific to the UK. The promise of
dialogue its good to talk functions as a guarantee to produce
community, which in turn is represented as the solution to dispersal, disaf-
fection and marginalization. This community is a moral community, a

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A hmed and Fortier Introduction 253

community of care and responsibility, where members readily acknowledge


the social obligations and willingness to assist others (Home Office, 2001:
13). This is a community of people who care about their community.
Community, here, is teleological the point of departure and the end point.
Strong communities produce caring citizens who in turn ensure the future
of good caring communities. This version of community, with its entangled
principles of caring and responsibility, is above all a national one, as Paul
Gilroy (this issue) points out. It is one that presumes a citizen whose affili-
ation with those who are like them comes with exerting social control over,
and maintaining strong borders against, outsiders. Similarly, we can
consider George Bushs powerful utterance you are either with us or against
us as an appeal to community that resonates strongly at the international
level. In this narrative, those who are not with us are automatically
constructed as against us, whereby againstness is aligned with a form of
terror or terrorism; that is, anyone who is not with us is a terrorist, a friend
of terrorists or might as well be.
We must ask, what does it mean to be with? To be with in Bushs
discourse is not only to support the so-called war on terrorism, but also
to support the world that the war is identified as defending. In many state-
ments by the US government, as well as by governments that have aligned
themselves with the US, such a world is represented in terms of the values
of freedom, democracy and even love, whereby these values become delim-
ited as the foundations of an international civil community. This community
requires the self-evident distinction between terrorism and legitimate
violence and relies on the repetition of our injury to justify this distinction
as a moral as well as a natural one. Other claims of injury (by, for example,
Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans) can only be excluded from legitimate grounds
for self-defence if others are assumed to have lives that are not innocent.
The foreclosure of grief for the loss of other lives is a necessary condition
of the justification of the war on terrorism, as Judith Butler (2002) argues
(see also Gilroy in this issue).
Such a foreclosure also defines who can and cannot belong to this new
community. The utterance you are either with us or against us works
precisely to define who has lives that are worth defending and the moral
legitimacy of that defence. To be with, one must both give ones allegiance
to the community, but also become loveable to that community, which
means recognizable as a form of civil life. We would therefore argue that
the utterance you are either with us or against us may work not as a
constative or even as a performative, but as an imperative. To be with us
is an imperative to be like us: if others are not to be identified as terror-
ists or rogue states (an identification that involves the threat of violence as
well as actual violence), they must mimic the forms of civility and
supposedly democratic governance that constitute the foundations of this
community. In other words, the appeal to community to justify the war on

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terrorism is more than simply an appeal; it actually requires others to enter


the community by becoming more like us if they are to survive. Likeness
is not the grounds of this community, but its effect. Such a community
functions more as a threat than a promise a threat of annihilation of those
who dont align themselves with the community.
Our aim in Re-Imagining Communities is to interrogate the promise
or threat of community, and the kinds of subjects and relations it manu-
factures, and to investigate the forms of attachment that allow subjects to
relate to each other, within and without a community. How is community
figured in bodies, but also in relations? What is the assumed relation of
subjects to the community? What is it that binds communities together?
Against assumptions of community life as love, we want to think about the
role of negative as well as positive emotions in producing the very
communities they seek to erase. Debra Ferredays article addresses this
question in relation to the response to pro-anorexic websites, where the
viewer is moved not by concern or sympathy, but by disgust. This very
physical response sustains the distinction between the anorexic and the
healthy body, both of which are fixed in their im/proper place. At the same
time, the boundaries between healthy and sick are blurred in the very
physical sensation of revulsion produced by the anorexic body on the non-
anorexic onlooker. As Ferreday writes, [b]y causing the onlooker to retch,
to want to vomit, pro-ana brings about a final ironic assault on the
boundary between anorexic and healthy subjects in which the onlooker is
forced into a parodic repetition of anorexic praxis. Ferredays article forces
the question about the very motivations of community and the refusal to
connect within the desirable narcissistic terms of love for those who are
like oneself. Her account complicates the relationship between self and
abject other by revealing the role of revulsion in affecting affinity (however
momentary) between different bodies.
A form of connection can occur in the very act of refusing to connect. In
Re-Imagining Communities, we are interested in moments or sites of
connection between people that have no necessary connection. In communi-
ties, subjects may come together without presumptions of being in
common or even being uncommon. Thus, several articles in this issue
remind us of the need to consider the we as an effect of a complex set of
social practices that reinvigorate the we as a site of collective politics, but
not as a foundation. Judith Halberstam offers a reflection of multiple modes
of participation in subcultures, thus critiquing theories of subcultures as
normative in the sense of assuming certain bodies as their norms. Indeed,
her analysis of queer subcultures reminds us that there are power relations
between communities as well as within them. Powerful forms of national
community may depend on ideologies of kinship, the family and reproduc-
tion that work to exclude queers from the very form of community. It does
not then follow that community does not matter for those that are excluded

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A hmed and Fortier Introduction 255

from some of its dominant forms; rather, as Halberstam shows, queer


bodies may remake the very form of community, finding ways of getting
together that resist the linear narratives that govern the temporality of
heteronormative existence (the forward-moving narratives of birth,
marriage, reproduction, death). We could also reflect on how alternative
communities can provide safe spaces for queers, subalterns and other
others who live with the threat of violence in their everyday lives. This is
not to posit any simple opposition between dominant and alternative
communities; rather, it is to suggest that the shapes of community may take
the shape of the different bodies that inhabit them and move around within
them. As such, communities are affected by relations of power in the very
way in which they involve some bodies and not others.
This issue demonstrates that there is not a given form to community and
that communities are an effect of the very relations of proximity and
distance between bodies. As such, questions of space are crucial to
communities. It might be assumed that the present global context of flows,
fluidity and transnational connections disturbs, if not forever dissolves, the
temporal, spatial and emotive certainties of communities, whether
national, regional or local. Some of the articles in this issue examine the
impact of such flows on community without assuming either the dissolu-
tion or reproduction of community. These articles respond directly to the
question of how the movement of bodies, images, objects and others across
national borders has affected the re-imagining of the nation as an
imagined community (Anderson, 1991). For example, Sujata Moorti
examines the ways in which diasporic communities are made through affec-
tive ties rather than the brand of patriotism traditionally associated with
nationalism. She introduces the idea of the diasporic optic to explore the
spaces of belonging negotiated in the very visualization of multiple cultural
affiliations. Such a visual grammar is articulated through disaffiliation,
displacement and affiliation. While Moorti examines the impact of who
leaves the national community on how the nation is imagined, Tamara
Vukov analyses the effects of who arrives at the borders of the nation.
Specifically, Vukov discusses the impact of migration patterns on national
identity by reflecting on the intensification of security regimes in the
Canadian context. Examining how immigration becomes associated with
questions of fertility and sexuality as well as security, Vukov explores the
distinction between desirable and undesirable others on the imaging of
national and postnational communities. As Vukov shows, the movement of
bodies across national borders is itself differentiated: the differentiation
between others who are welcome and those who are not is crucial to the
demarcation of the boundaries of communities.
The question of whose community and where opens up the very issue of
the relevance of community for those whose (sexual, racial, class) identity is
not lived as a secure or stable ground of existence. Perhaps an ethics

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256 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(3)

of indifference, as discussed by Fran Tonkiss in this issue, opens up certain


rights to, and freedoms in, the city, thanks to the anonymization of
bodies and the opportunities offered by the capacity to be unseen, to be unex-
ceptional, to be impersonal in a social field where differences remain unas-
similated (Young, 1990: 241). Although indifference might not be
desirable for all bodies, Tonkiss stresses the need to consider indifference as
an ethical relation between subjects premised on side-by-side relations of
anonymity. Tonkisss intervention stresses the fruitful contradictions that
reside within urban ideals of the city and explores how community and
identity, indifference and solitude, are intimately connected rather than
mutually exclusive. Indeed, the question of community might be rephrased as
a question of how to live with difference. Paul Gilroy, in this respect, argues
against ideas of community as identity, as sameness and as shallow consent.
In contrast, he proposes a counter-history of state formation that places race
and racial hierarchy as integral to the process of state formation. He suggests
that such an approach can yield rich and productive redefinitions of what
liberalism was and what cosmopolitan democracy will be. Living with differ-
ence is therefore radically different from the bland accolade to diversity that
state and corporate multiculturalists like to utter the rich mix that makes
us who we are. Rather, living with difference is about disentangling
community from identity in both senses of self (individual and collec-
tive) and sameness. Living with difference is not necessarily another name
for community (although it could be), but another way of thinking how it is
that the more than oneness of sociality requires new ways of living.
Thus, the refusal of community can also be the refusal of community as
resolution. Rather than seeing the refusal of narratives of unity and togeth-
erness as a symptom of the failure to achieve community a failure that is
taken up as a signal to call for the urgency of community we can consider
it a cogent critique of the violent modes of ascription, conscription and
erasure perpetrated in the name of community. Outside belongings, to use
Elspeth Probyns (1996) phrase, are not always products of practices of
exclusion by community forces. They can also be part of wider struggles:
struggles against the ascription of community onto groups or areas,
struggles against the violence of exclusion, silencing, killing, the policing of
boundaries and the very definition of what the legitimate or consumable
community should be. Thus, we begin to unravel the sentimentalized
promising community. The articles in this issue all focus on the historical
and locational specificity of community; by considering a range of different
forms of community, readers are invited to think about community as an
effect of power and to consider the historical specificity of community
formations in their modes of organization and articulation as well as some
of the (new) grammars of collective belonging: the trans(national/gender);
the post(national/modern); the multi(cultural); the queer; the diasporic; the
virtual; the cosmopolitan.

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A hmed and Fortier Introduction 257

A further step in challenging how communities become fetish objects


would be a critique of the concealment of the labour involved in creating
and maintaining communities. At the state level, as suggested by Vukovs
article, the regimes of security and population management of protective
states require immense amounts of capital, labour, time and resources to
control borders against unwanted intruders (see also Andrijasevic, 2003;
Verstraete, 2000). On a smaller scale, for those seeking to create communi-
ties as sites of comfort or refuge, the establishment and maintenance of
communities real or virtual require quiet but demanding physical and
emotional labour, without which communities would cease to exist. In this
respect, we might think about communities as never fully achieved, never
fully arrived at, even when we already inhabit them. We can therefore
think of community as a site lived through the desire for community rather
than a site that fulfils and resolves that desire.
Re-Imagining Communities encourages an interrogation of the relation-
ship between the re-imagining of communities and the materiality of
everyday life. For, as Anne McClintock reminds us, imagined communities
are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind but are historical practices
through which social differences are both invented and performed (1995:
353). This Special Issue seeks to offer a critical intervention into our under-
standings of community, conceived not as a resolution, nor as a seamless,
conflict-free zone shaped along the familial models of intimacy and love.
Nor do we want to lose sight of the fact that community is not always a
desirable project for all. In this respect, we need to distinguish between
different sets of complex social relationships, many of which cannot be
folded into community. When are relationships and encounters,
exchanges, dialogues, forms of co-presence and coexistence, about
community and when are they about family, the re-enactment of
tradition, remembrances, dreams, sites of momentary connections or
disconnections, political mobilization, intimations of past lives and
imagined futures?
For us, to be unsettled by the very word community is to remind
ourselves that the word community might not name all it is that we can
do and can be when we get together. If we can return in conclusion to the
idea of community as common ground rather than commonality, we might
think of communities as effects of how we meet on the ground, as a ground
that is material, but also virtual, real and imaginary. This ground that is
common is an effect of the meetings we have with others and the tread of
feet that are weary across the land a treading that shapes the land to come
and allows it to surface differently. As we meet, we might in some sense
(re)make the ground for a different kind of community, one that might not
even be named by the word community, in which the passing by of others
allows something else to give.

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A hmed and Fortier Introduction 259

SARA AHMED is reader in w omens st u dies at Lancaster University


an d w as direct or o f t he Instit u te f or Womens St u dies bet w een 2000 an d
2003. Her p u blicatio ns inclu de Differences that M atter: Feminist Theory
and Postmodernism (Cambrid ge University Press, 1998), Strange
Encounters: Embodied O thers in Post-Coloniality (Ro u tled ge, 2000),
Transformations: Thinking through Feminism (Ro u tled ge, 2000) an d
Thinking through the Skin (Ro u tled ge, 2001). She is curren tly w orkin g
o n a b o ok en titled The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edin b urg h University
Press, f ort hcomin g). A ddress: Instit u te f or Womens St u dies, Cartmel
College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. [email:
s.ahmed@lancaster.ac.uk]

ANNE-MARIE FORTIER is lect urer in t he sociolo gy departmen t at


Lancaster University. She is t he au t h or o f M igrant Belongings: M emory,
Space, Identity (Berg, 2000). Her w ork o n migran t belo n gin gs, h ome an d
t he in tersectio ns o f gen der/sexuality/et h nicity has ap peared in several
an t h olo gies an d jo urnals, inclu din g Theory, Culture & Society , Diaspora
an d t he European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her curren t project is
called M ulticult ural Horiz o ns: Commu nity, Diversity an d t he Ne w
Britain . A ddress: Departmen t o f Sociolo gy, Cartmel College, Lancaster
University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. [email: a.f ortier@lancaster.ac.uk]

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