Claiming Home

Abstract

2 Throughout this study I use the term 'West' to refer to dominant discourses around 'culture' and development that cut the globe in half, sometimes horizontally into North and South, sometimes vertically into West and Orient (I use 'Orient' rather than 'East' as a tribute to Edward Said's work (1978)), and sometimes conflating the two, resulting in a 'West'-and-'Rest' logic. All of these discursive divisions work to maintain the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of Northern America, Western Europe, and Australia/New Zealand over the South and Orient. Queer postcolonial scholars are increasingly discussing discourses juxtaposing in opposition to each other a gayfriendly 'West' and a homophobic 'Rest' under the term 'homonationalism' (see Chapter 3.4.3). Jasbir Puar (2006), who coined the term, chiefly refers to state-related actors deploying such discourses to justify imperialist moves and a politics of exclusion against certain countries and their (migrant) people. Paola Bacchetta and Jin Haritaworn (2011:134) have distinguished three types of homonationalist discourses: (1) Homonationalism as performed by state-related actors;(2) homonationalism as performed by non-state actors (as under discussion here); and (3) homotransnationalist discourses, which the authors understand as transnationally produced and globally circulating neocolonial, orientalist, sexist, and queerphobic discourses.7 Note, for instance, that in Switzerland the German term for 'race' (Rasse) was widely used until the 1970s (Germann 2016), in contrast to other European countries, where the term was tabooed in the post-war era. 8Noémi Michel (2015) provides a powerful example for the avoidance of the term 'racism' in Switzerland. She argues that in the wake of the vehement debates around the infamous poster by the 10 Alana Lentin (2014) directs her critique explicitly at sociological migration research, juxtaposing it with anthropological inquiries into migration. The latter she assumes to have been forced to redress its role as the "handmaiden of colonialism" (ibid:70) and hence to be more aware of colonial persistencies today. I am doubtful about this clear demarcation but understand it as an analytical move by the author.50 For examples in the Swiss media see e.g. Bär 2014b, Schindler 2014.2 Massey insists that her propositions are not about finally having found the truth about space but rather seek to "stress just how genuinely difficult it is not to resort to an a priori politics of topographies" (Massey 2005:172).