Practising Fear: Encountering O/other Bodies

This chapter presents the discussion of fear that has penetrated academic and popular discourses post-2001. It illustrates the way in which practical orientalism emerges in bodily encounters and the sociality of everyday life, through drawing on a few examples from Denmark. The chapter argues that constructions of otherness used to legitimate discrimination, neonationalism and even pure racism are not only scaled down from global media discourse, but enabled through such mooded and embodied geographies of difference. While fear of the other has always been a prominent element in regulating the daily practices of people in modern Nation-States, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a profound re-working and re-scaling of such fears. Fears have been globalised along new lines of conflict, for example, the global US-led war on terror. The current production of a generalised geopolitical fear of the Muslim other is not entirely new but draws in important ways on a long historical colonial legacy.