Stop the clock! Taking the nation out of linear time and bounded space

Abstract

This article focuses on the importance of linear time and bounded space to the nation, which must have a past, present and future in a way that occludes other ways of grasping time. It offers a critique of national chronological time and advances an alternative approach to national belonging based on a politics of longing. The article argues that rather than start with the nation-state as a category of analysis, as is the case with methodological nationalism, approaching a sense of belonging to the nation as part of a broader politics of longing offers a more open starting point for exploring the nation’s many manifestations. The politics of longing posits that the nation is but one among many, and by no means a necessary, frame of reference for individuals’ sense of belonging. It encompasses both restorative and reflective nostalgia as possible means of connecting individual narratives of belonging with ancestors and (national) heritage. The advantage of an approach derived from the politics of longing over methodological nationalism – which is understood as taking the nation-state for granted – is that it allows for knitting together narratives of home and belonging in many different ways, both within and outwith the national frame.

All at sea? Using seaborne mobilities to decolonialise national narratives in maritime museums

“…It contributes to mobilities debates by also taking watery mobilities as a starting point for critiquing national narratives in UK maritime museums. These, as elsewhere, are often premised on rootedness in space and chronological longevity across time (Sutherland 2020). This article argues that maritime museums should take a lead from the work that maritime historians and mobilities scholars have been doing for some time, in which the 'spatial framework, rather than being an unselfconscious analytic tool, becomes an object of research' (Wigen 2006, 720).…”

“…Thus, the Hypersea serves to capture both mobility across space and time and the motility of human and other bodies through the multidimensional materiality of the sea. This is a liberating, seaborne perspective from which to view the construction of national identity (Sutherland 2020). Peters and Steinberg (2019) point to how the sea is not only, but also a metaphor.…”

“…A perspective derived from maritime mobilities can escape a linear chronology of past, present and future to show how the past is part of the present and that the dead are all around us, an obvious premise of many non-Western cosmologies and a lived reality for black people across the world (Sutherland 2020). For example, Christina Sharpe (2016, 8) uses the meanings of wake, including a ship's wake, 'to mourn and to illustrate the ways our individual [Black] lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery' in the United States.…”

“…In turn, studies of the nationstate that start from its bounded territorial and ideological parameters as an 'imagined community' are not well-placed to critique nativist assumptions of rootedness and national belonging (Anderson 1991). On the contrary, flipping that assumption to make human mobility the norm allows for a more fluid analytical approach to the politics of identity and belonging (Anderson 2019;Sutherland 2020). As Edward Saïd (1999, online) put it; 'I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents.…”