The Politics of Pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and Beachgoing

Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today

The cachet dilemma: ritual and agency in new Dutch nationalism

In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers’ explicit criticism or ridicule. Using the concept of "cultural intimacy," I show how nationalism builds on a shared embarrassment among local bureaucrats, from which the new citizens are excluded by way of the ceremony