Love as Practice of Solidarity: Of Peripheral Bodies, Embodied Justice and Associated Labor

Abstract

The essay is a feminist auto-ethnographic exercise in which I reflect upon my activist and academic life in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and migrant life in Germany as situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), aiming to provide a basis for solidarity among various, power-differentiated communities. BiH has become Europe´s ´dumping ground´ for non-European migrants but also a ´waiting room´ for its own citizens who are leaving as workforce to the EU. I juxtapose social protests and the post-2015 migrations from the Western Balkans to Germany by which I was affected and now direct my research with the Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian migrations to the EU via BiH analyzing exclusion across the board from racial profiling in the US to the EU securitization practice of pushbacks, and Bosnian authorities racism towards ´migrants´ as well as clientelism towards its own population leading to their migration.Reshuffling the chronotopes of here/there and now/then destabilizes the center/periphery and individual/collective dichotomies as does affective vocabulary of bodies hurt or denied justice through wars, policing, privatizations, isolation, and violence. While going beyond identity politics as a mere counting and classification insistent on difference, I understand love as a fusion of a migrant s affect, as a particular, translatable consciousness about bodies, and justice as ´the form in which and through which love performs its work´ (Tillich 1954: 71). While Black Lives Matter slogan ´no justice, no peace´ or BiH protesters´ shout justice for David and D enan´ signal an acute lack of justice globally, I conjoin these disparate struggles metaphorically through associated labor (Kardelj 1978) urging for love as a practice of solidarity in the post -Corona world.