Overview

Affective Bordering is an incisive exploration of the emotional politics of migration and borders. Billy Holzberg dives into the intricate interplay between emotions and migration governance, revealing how emotions work to reinforce racial, sexual, and national hierarchies. Examining pivotal events in Germany during the aftermath of the misnamed 'refugee crisis' in Germany, the book traces the construction of different emotions during key events of this period. Challenging the assumption that positive emotions like hope and empathy necessarily work as a counter to negative emotions like anger or fear, Affective Bordering reveals the racial grammars of deservingness that shape border governance today. Bringing together queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border and migration studies, the book offers a thought-provoking perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today's world.

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9781526172303

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Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2025 A brilliant, original and indispensable book for today’s world! Focusing on Germany, Billy Holzberg convincingly directs our attention to the centrality of affect in the politics of migration and borders – not just to policy or law. He disrupts common sense by showing how both negative and positive emotions such as empathy work to reproduce the racialization of the German nation-state. As one of the new leading voices on the intersections of migration studies and queer and transnational feminism, Holzberg compellingly shows that those interested in addressing the deadly violence of borders must expand our affective and political grammars towards discomfort – only then will we be able to imagine alternatives to nationalism and violence. Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre As Angela Merkel proclaimed that ‘we can do this’, Germany stood as an exception in Europe, and she made clear that rationality and emotions were not incompatible. Billy Holzberg’s queer feminist reading, from Alan Kurdi’s death to sexual violence in Cologne, powerfully focuses on the affects mobilized. From hope and empathy to anger and fear, it incisively reveals how, paradoxically, ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ affects jointly contribute to bordering, i.e. drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, subjects and objects of affects respectively. Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris 8 -- .

A brilliant, original and indispensable book for today’s world! Focusing on Germany, Billy Holzberg convincingly directs our attention to the centrality of affect in the politics of migration and borders – not just to policy or law. He disrupts common sense by showing how both negative and positive emotions such as empathy work to reproduce the racialization of the German nation-state. As one of the new leading voices on the intersections of migration studies and queer and transnational feminism, Holzberg compellingly shows that those interested in addressing the deadly violence of borders must expand our affective and political grammars towards discomfort – only then will we be able to imagine alternatives to nationalism and violence. Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre As Angela Merkel proclaimed that ‘we can do this’, Germany stood as an exception in Europe, and she made clear that rationality and emotions were not incompatible. Billy Holzberg’s queer feminist reading, from Alan Kurdi’s death to sexual violence in Cologne, powerfully focuses on the affects mobilized. From hope and empathy to anger and fear, it incisively reveals how, paradoxically, ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ affects jointly contribute to bordering, i.e. drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, subjects and objects of affects respectively. Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris 8 -- .

Author Information

Billy Holzberg is Assistant Professor of Social Justice at King's College London.

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