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Notes on the Nation: A Conversation with Sara

Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
Post-Coloniality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion and
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Eddie Ombagi

To cite this article: Eddie Ombagi (2016) Notes on the Nation: A Conversation with Sara
Ahmed’s Strange�Encounters:�Embodied�Others�in�Post-Coloniality,�The�Cultural�Politics�of
Emotion and Queer�Phenomenology:�Orientations,�Objects,�Others, Agenda, 30:2, 147-152, DOI:
10.1080/10130950.2016.1218124

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 review
Notes on the Nation: A Conversation with
Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters:
Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, The
Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer
Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects,
Others
Eddie Ombagi

abstract
In this special issue of Agenda which calls for an engagement on the question of xenophobia, national belonging
and the techniques of difference within the context of South Africa, I position and locate these discourses with and
through a reading of the works of Sara Ahmed.
Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar working in the intersections of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race
theory and postcolonial theory. Ahmed has authored several books that include Differences that Matter:
Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000);
The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006); The
Promise of Happiness (2010); On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) and Willful
Subjects (2014). These works straddle several concerns that lie beside and with many of the questions that this
special issue aims to grapple with.
In this review essay I specifically read Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, The Cultural
Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. This review offers an interaction
between myself and the work of Sara Ahmed through the various figurations of the stranger, foreigner, other
and queer.

keywords
xenophobia, national belonging, difference, stranger, other, queer

Strange Encounters (2000) creatively utilises
the seminal thesis of Benedict Anderson. In
the 1983 book, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, Anderson defines the nation
as social constructs sustained by the
imagination of the people who believe in it.
He argues that those who belong to the
nation may not know each other or even
meet in their lifetime, but live and exist
within the nation in a shared sense of com-
munity and commonality. This belief of

Agenda 108/30.2 2016

ISSN 1013-0950 print/ISSN 2158-978X online
© 2016 E. Ombagi and S. Ahmed
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2016.1218124 pp. 147–152
review
Sara Ahmed
togetherness is what marshals the distinc-
tion of the figure of the stranger as other.
Anderson’s view is that the nation is ima-
gined in three main ways: the nation is
limited; the nation is sovereign; and finally
the nation is a community. The emergence
of print capitalism became an important his-
torical rupture that makes the nation into
such an imagined political community.
Ahmed (2000) complicates Anderson’s
(1983) argument. For Anderson, these ima-
gined communities mobilise the geopolitical
with the geographical; that is, that a territory
that is geographically demarcated as a nation
becomes a site upon which potentially very
different people come to imagine that they
share something in common with others
within that nation. Ahmed disrupts this con-
nection by arguing that nations are not only
“geographical or geopolitical” but also, and
more importantly, “discursive” (2000:98).
For Ahmed (2000:97) nations “are pro-
duced and constructed as places and com-
munities” in which forms of belonging and
bands of sociability occur. Ahmed continues
to argue that nations “are invented as fam-
iliar spaces” against that which is unfamiliar.
So the unfamiliar figure embodied in the
stranger, or the queer body is constructed
“as a way of containing that which the
nation is not, and hence as a way of allowing
the nation to be” (97). So the nation, the
nation state and thus the nationals recognise
themselves through the discursive construc-
tion of the stranger as out of place, as an alien
and therefore potentially dangerous.
148 AGENDA 108/30.2 2016
To mark the distinction that Ahmed
makes in her departure from Anderson, for
Anderson the nation is imagined so that
people who are often different from each
other can imagine that they share something
in common through their belonging to the
nation; for Ahmed, this imagined commu-
nity relies on the production of a boundary
between those who do and those who do
not belong. These strangers or queers who
do not belong are not necessarily outside
of the geographical or geopolitical container
that the nation is imagined in, yet their differ-
ence rather than their sameness seals the
constitution of the nation and a political
community.
The queer body is a figure of the stran-
ger, or the alien for and in the nation state.
The nation is imagined as a heterosexual
family, so those who are queer threaten the
coherence and stability of the nation as a
community. The queer is alien and poten-
tially dangerous. In South Africa, for
instance, there are legal provisions for
queer people to be included as citizens in
theory, but this does not necessarily mean
that queer people experience inclusion in
everyday practice. The queer body
becomes an alien only in relation to the
nation and its nationals who are constructed
and imagined as not queer. The nationals
can only recognise their nationality in so
far as they recognise – and name – the
queer’s non-nationality. In so far as the
stranger is recognised as alien and named
as such, only then does the non-stranger
recognise itself: “I am suggesting,” writes
Ahmed, “that it is the recognition of others
that is central to the constitution of the
subject … the subject is not, then, simply dif-
ferentiated from the (its) other, but comes
into being by learning how to differentiate
between others” (2000:22). One can there-
fore say, “I am”, because “You are not”.
The emotions evoked through such tech-
nologies of naming and the affective feelings
that generate (fear, love, hate, disgust) in
such encounters provide powerful and rich
sites for problematising questions of nation-
ality and nationhood and the systems of
exclusion that adhere and cohere.
Strange Encounters carefully unpacks
the delicate relationship between ‘stranger’,
‘embodiment’ and ‘community’ and proble-
matises the notion that the stranger is a
figure that is unrecognisable and
unknowable to us. Ahmed takes away the
assumption that we should be ‘surprised’
when some people get marked as strangers,
as the stranger is necessarily constitutive of
the nation itself. Using feminist and postco-
lonial theories, Ahmed carefully unpacks
the metaphor of the stranger, strangeness
and strangerness as the supposed “origin
of danger” or “origin of difference” to
make a passionate case against what she
calls “stranger fetishism”.
Borrowing from Marx’s (1867) concept of
commodity fetishism, Ahmed (2000:3)
reveals how the stranger gets recognised:
To be an alien in a particular nation, is to
hesitate at a different border: the alien
here is the one who does not belong in a
nation space … The technique for differ-
entiating between citizens and aliens … ,
allows the familiar to be established as
the familial.
However, Ahmed argues against assum-
ing or theorising the figure of the stranger as
one who simply does not belong. As she
puts it, “strangers are not simply those
who are not known in the dwelling, but
those who are, in their very proximity,
already recognised as not belonging, as
being out of place” (20). So the figure of
the stranger becomes as such only in its
proximity or nearness to spaces and places
that are imagined without its existence.
Ahmed’s contribution can be summar-
ised as an antagonism to ontologising the
stranger in ways that mark the stranger as
having a life of their own. She departs from
Diken’s (1998) arguments that the stranger
is one “who is excluded from forms of
belonging and identity, particularly within
the context of discourses of nationhood’. If
viewed this way, she argues, it “works to
conceal differences” (2000:5) within particu-
lar communities of familiar and familial
spaces where “others are designated as
stranger than other others” (6), which
makes it impossible to deal with political
processes in lived embodiment. Instead,
she calls for a different approach. She does
this by re-inscribing Levinas’ thesis of
feeling the “otherness of the other”
(2000:140) in ways that should meaningfully
position the figure of the stranger at the
centre of discourses on integration and
multiculturalism.
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
review
Ahmed expands her call for the need to ‘feel’
that she had presented in Strange Encoun-
ters. In great detail, Ahmed demonstrates
how emotions function and how they work
on bodies. Rather than ask what emotions
are, she asks what emotions do. So here
she tracks “how emotions circulate
between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’
as well as move” (2004:4). As she argues,
the emotion of fear, danger, disgust and
hate as expressed in the figure of the other
is intentional because it involves a stand-
point. The figure of the stranger becomes a
fearsome creature, to be feared and
loathed. Its presence is threatening to the
survival of the national and thus the nation.
This departure shifts the discourse to lay
emphasis on what affective feelings are ima-
gined, theorised or articulated in the figure
of the other.
For Ahmed, feelings such as hate and
fear are usually couched in terms of love to
the ‘nation’, ‘community’ and ‘self’:
Hate is not simply present as the emotion
that explains the story (it is not a question
of hate being at its root), but as that which
is affected by the story, and as that which
enables the story to be affective (2004:43).
Affective narratives manufacture “a
subject that is endangered by imagined
others” and therefore necessitate a feeling
of fear, hate, and disgust and the “presence
of the other is imagined as a threat to the
object of love” (2004:43) that is transferred
as hate. The figure of the other is feared
and hated precisely because the nationals
supposedly love the nation.
Ahmed’s postulation of hate as an “affec-
tive economy” is crucial because it demands
an understanding that hate does not simply
stick on bodies but circulates within and
around bodies socially and materially.
Ahmed refers to words as “sticky” to
describe how those words repeat narratives
of difference and “create impressions of
others as those who have invaded the
space of the nation, threatening its exist-
ence” (46). She continues:
The impossibility of reducing hate to a
particular body allows hate to circulate in
an economic sense, working to differen-
tiate others from other others, a
Notes on the nation 149
 differentiation that is never ‘over’, as it
review
awaits others who have not yet arrived.
Such a discourse of ‘waiting for the
bogus’ is what justifies the repetition of
violence against the bodies of others in
the name of protecting the nation (47;
emphasis mine)
So here the emotions are “bound up with
the sticky relation between signs and
bodies” in an intricate way that works
“through signs and on bodies to materialize
the surfaces and boundaries that are lived as
worlds” (191). Using this concept of affective
economy, It is simplistic to read and there-
fore explain the figure of the other using
the neoliberal arguments of economic exclu-
sion and dwindling capital reproduction.
The term ‘makwerekwere’ used in South
Africa to refer to black and/or African
foreigners is a good example of a ‘sticky
word’ in Ahmed’s terms. Ahmed draws
from a Derriddian perspective to demon-
strate that there is a distinction to be made
between the word that ‘sticks’, say makwer-
eknere that comes to stick on to the body
of the foreigner, and the context from
which that word is derived. The word mak-
werekwere gets directed at the body of
someone marked as other, and as it is
repeated it transports the emotional affects
from its original context and sticks onto the
body of the other.
Following The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, Ahmed discusses sexual orien-
tation and heteronormativity and the
various discourses that align bodies to nor-
mative practices in Queer Phenomenology
(2006). In this book she further develops
the concept of orientation. The introduction,
titled ‘Find Your Way’, asks, “what does it
mean to be orientated”? She goes further
to answer: “to be orientated is also to be
turned toward certain objects, those that
help us to find our way” (1). I appropriate
this notion of being ‘turned toward certain
objects’ in relation to the figure of the
queer and the stranger. What does it mean
to be turned towards a space that is not
your own? Relationally, and more impor-
tantly, what does it mean to be turned
against a space that is your own? What
affects materially or otherwise coalesce,
mingle, intermingle and rupture as a result
of turning both towards and against spaces?
150 AGENDA 108/30.2 2016
Ahmed (2006) uses the metaphor of the
table borrowed from Edmund Husserl to
explain orientation and how particular con-
texts are accessible to us through proximity.
The principle of perceiving objects has been
a longstanding engagement by several
scholars, among them Bibi Bakare Yusuf
(2003). In this article Bibi Bakare argues
that ‘objects’ are not perceivable outside
those who perceive them. In other words,
“the seer is always seen, the toucher
always touched”. This weaves beautifully
into Ahmed’s (2006) metaphor of the table.
Be it a dinner table, where family sits
around it, or a writing table where one
faces a book with a pen in hand, such
spaces introduce “certain things, not others
available” (14). The table orients us to par-
ticular scenarios while at the same time
orients us against other scenarios.
Let’s consider then this metaphor and
how it reads the figure of the stranger that
is at once a queer body. Around a table a
community sits. Consider the table, in this
case as the nation. The community around
the table share an attachment: nationalism,
which demands a particular narrative of
loyalty, camaraderie and allegiance for the
community to recognise itself. It’s an inti-
mate, close and affective community – or
so it’s imagined. The figure of the stranger,
by arriving at the table, disrupts that narra-
tive. The queer body unseats, so to speak,
the community around the table. It makes
the inhabitants of the table uncomfortable
and therefore unhappy. The community at
the table is both disappointed and angry.
Disappointment is attributed to its inability
to be happy as a result of the presence of
the strange figure while rage could be
directed to the object that prevents it from
being happy. Both emotions are frustrating
and lead further into a sentimental feeling
of hate, disgust and fear. Therefore, at this
very site of the social production of such
emotions potential avenues for action
against violence can occur.
Ahmed’s concept of the killjoy (2010) is a
kin-figure to that of the stranger and the
affect the stranger brings to the table of
the nation. Ahmed describes the killjoy as
the figure that feels out of place in the
table. The killjoy is one who seats apart
from the rest of its community; a dissident.
In Ahmedian sense, the killjoy is one who
belongs in the table in the first place but
feels apart by the structure, sentimental
attachment and the demands of the table –
here is the queer, the feminist. To begin
with, the stranger, within the understanding
of the nation through boundaries, does not
belong to the table. It belongs outside the
table, perhaps even outside the room. So
the stranger intrudes on the table. It
imposes its figure on the community that
gathers around the table. It takes up a seat
in the table. So to invert Ahmed’s (2006)
argument, the stranger queer body does
not lose a chair, it gains one.
The very act of gaining a chair is what
makes the figure of the stranger dangerous
and in that danger lies potential for repara-
tive political engagement. Lets unpack this:
the stranger can only gain a chair if it either
makes one who is already on the table lose
its chair; or if it makes up space around the
table for another chair (perhaps it could
even stand, but around the table). Both scen-
arios make those who are seated around the
table uncomfortable. But the stranger queer
figure does not only threaten those seated
around the table – it threatens the table as
well. The nation becomes threatened. It is
in this threat that serious political work
happens. In threatening the table, the
meaning of the table gets threatened as
well. In other words, the configuration of
what is the table, who seats around it, why
do we sit around it gets questioned.
Of course in that moment of tension, the
stranger becomes a killjoy. The queer figure
gets in the way of the imagined community
around the table. It is the source of the
table’s unhappiness. Happiness understood
as a wish and not a promise becomes
crucial therefore in unpacking what the
nation implies in relation to the other and
what it portends to knowledge making and
production. In South Africa, for instance,
the immigrant, the queer, the other, in
imposing their presence, politics and
desires to the nation, invert the very prism
of the supposed imagined community.
Even in legislated citizenship, say for
example skilled workforce or sexual citizen-
ship, the inversion at the table of the nation
gestures powerfully at the moments of
rupture of the nation.
In this very intrusion on the table, and in
the subsequent tensions and intensities that
accrue, I liken the stranger queer figure as a
wilful subject (2014). I draw on Sara
review
Ahmed’s concept of wilful subject to
imagine the productive potential of strange-
ness and strangerness. According to
Ahmed, a willful subject is one that goes
against the flow, perhaps in the opposite
direction. It is the figure that goes astray
from the standard, and in going astray it
stands in the way of those in the right direc-
tion. A wilful subject is a queer body, that
which goes against the straight line. The
figure of the other is a queer body. In the
psyche of the nation, the stranger stands in
the way of nationalism in so far as the
nation is imagined within boundaries. So
the figure in its arrival disrupts that bound-
ary. The body is out of line, in its very act
of arrival in the table. So in the demand
that it ‘returns back home’, in the narrative
that it has ‘taken our jobs’ and sometimes
‘our women’ lies a desire to return this
body back in line. Going back, returning the
jobs and giving up the women are ‘straigh-
tening devices’ of the nation state to align
back bodies into line.
Building on Judith Butler’s (1993)
concept of ‘repetitive performativity’,
Ahmed argues that the devices tend to
direct/align bodies towards certain direc-
tions. Within the nation therefore, the
various naming devices, the recognition of
the stranger, the naming of the stranger
and the emotions evoked at the recognition
and naming of the stranger are read as per-
formances of orientating bodies that are
not part of the nation. She says:
Through repeating some gestures and not
others, or through being orientated in
some directions and not others, bodies
become contorted: they get twisted into
shapes that enable some action only
insofar as they restrict the capacity of
other kinds of action (91).
So as the table pulls particular kinds of
gestures and actions, so does the under-
standing of the stranger vis-à-vis the nation
direct bodies to particular actions and
activities.
Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of the
‘Orient’ (1978), and the politics of racism that
distinctly marks bodies as ‘same/white’ or
‘not the same/non-white’, she brilliantly
shows how the same structural foundation
has been applied on the binaries of insider/
outsider, local/foreigner, queer/non-queer
Notes on the nation 151
review
in relation to the nation. However, as a politi-
cal project that can be reparative, Ahmed
gives us a glimpse on how this binarised
ontology can offer ways to cure the nation.
Using her own family – her mother was
English while her father was Pakistani – she
acknowledges the impossibility of following
whichever origin and realises the productive
potential of queering the straight insofar as
the line cannot be followed and therefore
“opening up new kinds of connections”
(155).
From Strange Encounters, where she
delves into concepts of mobility, migration
and globalisation, to Cultural Politics of
Emotion in which she makes an argument
on the real productive value of the various
kinds of emotions to heal the fractured
nation, Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology
focuses on what orientation means to
bodies in space and time and what affects
accrue when bodies are directed to particu-
lar spaces.
Sarah Ahmed’s oeuvre of work feeds into
each other brilliantly and offers a genealogy
of understanding how contexts offer sites of
and for social change. Her body of work
makes an intervention to theorise and under-
stand how social phenomena come about
and also offer opportunity to critique it. In
theorising xenophobia, national belonging
and the techniques of difference, Ahmed
brilliantly elucidates how the nation gets to
be articulated through a technique and tech-
nology of insider and outsider and how such
techniques have an effect on the surface of
bodies. Further, she elucidates how such
techniques of difference can be harnessed
in order to repair and offer restitution to the
bodies that have been violated.
References
Ahmed S (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied
Others in Post-Coloniality, London: Routledge.
Ahmed S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations,
Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press.
Ahmed S (2010) The Promise of Happiness, Durham:
Duke University Press.
Ahmed S (2014) Willful Subjects, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Anderson B (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London:
Verso.
Butler J (1993) Bodies that matter: on the discursive
limits of ‘sex’, New York: Routledge.
Diken B (1998) Strangers, Ambivalence and Social
Theory, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Marx K (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
Vol 1: The Production of Capital, Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
Said A (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon
Books.

EDDIE OMBAGI is a PhD candidate at the Department of African Litera-

ture at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research
can be located at the intersection of gender, queer and literary studies,
with a focus on imagining a different epistemological framework with
which to articulate queer studies and politics in Africa. Email:
edombagi@gmail.com

152 AGENDA 108/30.2 2016