European mistrust of migrant and Muslim interiorities is contrasted with the insight that the affective work of (be)longing happens sub rosa: beneath, beyond, behind scenes or that turning inward or less visible is not the same as disinvesting from the sphere of the political. Public opacities constitute a mode of resistance in that these work against European norms of transparency, interrupt the gaze of Western thought and governance, and count as a refusal to be accepted solely on the terms of the colonizer. Theorizing by way of the intimate, this chapter seeks to explore what thinness yields in political and analytical terms against enduring colonial and imperial separations/ideations of space, time, and bodies in the European contemporary. The provocation—affect is migrant—articulates foremost the will to traverse less habituated geographies and mobilizations of theory. It also gathers archives, journeys, and genealogies that are foreclosed by a Western Europe and North America centering grain of affect studies.
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