"I hvert fald ikke i Danmark" - Skam som nationalt orienteringsredskab i danske migrationspolitiske diskurser

Abstract

This article investigates how the affect shame orients the national subject and the nation towards one another in Danish debates on asylum politics. Taking its starting point in Silvan Tomkin’s studies of shame as well as in Sara Ahmed’s writing on the relation between emotion and the nation, the article analyses the way in which shame creates a continuum between the nation and the national subject in asylum discourses – negative as well as positive. Specifically it is shown how shame functions as a temporal indicator that sustains narratives that idealise the nation. Reading Eve K. Sedgwick’s analysis of shaming performatives the article considers how a shaming graffiti situated in Copenhagen’s so-called “immigrant quarter” may be seen as a way of sidestepping national idealisations. More specifically it may point to the nation as what Achille Mbembe refers to as “a necropolitical state”. Albeit in ways that sustain the image of Denmark as a nation free of racism.