This article takes steps from the birth and consolidation of “homeland” as the central discursive engine of the US national security enterprise; and takes issue with the dominant scholarly interpretation of the geographical and spatial implications of its emergence in terms of the dissolution of space and spatialization in security policy (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007: 416). We adopt a multi-scalar approach to exploring security discourse/practice, comparing the performativity of national and global security with the local practice/discourse of public safety—with empirical focus on the case of Memphis (TN). Our main arguments are that the homeland builds on the same performative elements of the emergence and consolidation of a certain conception of “community”, as it has become dominant in public safety policymaking at the local scale; and that the homeland/community performativity is the expression of a never-ending movement of production of multi-scalar geographies of the “good” and “evil”, made of the coexistence of centrifugal (pushing problems away) and centripetal (incorporating any given outside) dimensions.

本文从“国土”的诞生和巩固作为美国国家安全企业的主要话语引擎采取步骤；并就安全政策中空间的消散和空间化方面关于其出现的地理和空间含义的主流学术解释提出了质疑（Bialasiewicz等人，2007：416）。我们采用一种多尺度方法来探索安全话语/实践，将国家和全球安全的执行力与当地的公共安全实践/话语进行比较，并以孟菲斯（TN）为例进行实证研究。我们的主要论点是，祖国建立在某些“社区”概念的出现和巩固的相同执行要素之上，因为它已在地方规模的公共安全政策制定中占主导地位；