ABSTRACT
Michael Keith and Steven Pile speak of the troubling dominance, in everyday discourse of “a reactionary vocabulary of … the identity politics of place and a spatialised politics of identity grounded in … the rhetoric of origins, of exclusion, of boundary-making, of invasion and succession, of purity and contamination … the glossary of ethnic cleansing”. 1 As Zygmunt Bauman puts it “in an ever more insecure and uncertain world, the withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality is an intense temptation; and so the defence of the territory – the ‘safe home’ becomes the pass-key to all doors which one feels must be locked”. 2 In the same spirit, in her exploration of the dividing line between “home” and “hatred”, Mitzi Goldman argues that there is an inextricable link between the imagining of home and the mechanisms of exclusion (and often hatred) used to define its borders, in so far as “a unified sense of self and nation depends on the exclusion or ‘othering’ of any foreign element that disrupts that image of unity”. 3 Hatred for those who threaten its realisation is often implicit in the desire for the absolute security of home. Julia Kristeva argues that, in the regressive formulation of this desire we find
hatred of those others who do not share my origins and who affront me personally, economically and culturally: I then move back among “my own”, I stick to an archaic primitive common denominator, the one of my frailest childhood, my closest relatives, hoping they will be more trustworthy than “foreigners”. 4
