ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to suggest an analytically useful and theoretically innovative way to configure the relation between belonging and visibility. It explores the concept of politics of belonging, some key theoretical influences and issues at stake in the literature, are investigated. The chapter suggest that researchers on politics of belonging should move beyond the stories told and the discursive spaces in which they are told, and explore the organization of appearance itself, the regulations and contestations of visibility and invisibility. It focuses on speech and silences, and investigates how belonging relates to visibility, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. For Yuval-Davis, projects of belonging are specific political efforts aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectives, which are themselves constituted and renegotiated through these projects. The basis on which belonging is constructed is complex, and cannot be reduced to one single marker such as formal citizenship or ethnocultural affinity.
