Feeling grounded. Race, affect, and the soil in the Netherlands.

Race has been identified as a social relationship of affect. As Paul Gilroy (2005) has argued, the social efficacy of race in Britain is experienced as nostalgia, or, as Sara Ahmed (2004) has argued, racial exclusion can be understood in terms of affective economies producing the very surfaces of bodies. Moreover, experiences of black diaspora have been understood in terms of passion (Wekker 2006), desire (Nassy Brown 2009), and emotion.

I argue that in the Netherlands, race is made and experienced eminently through an affective relationship to the soil. As one foundational Dutch saying goes: 'God has created Earth, but the Dutch have created the Netherlands.' Such creationisms are not neutral; they posit a sense of industriousness, self-reliance, and capability that is linked to a certain kind of people in a seemingly natural and self-evident way, thus excluding other kinds of people who supposedly lack such characteristics. Notions of autochthony and nativism that have come to dominate the politics of belonging in the Netherlands in the two decades need to be understood in this light. Dutchness is understood not just in terms of a bond with the land, but precisely in terms of the sense of having made one's own land.

I show how affective relations to and renderings of the self-made soil are mobilized in exclusionary discourses of autochthony and nativism, but also in critical interventions into nativist discourse, as well as ways of experiencing black diaspora.