Negotiations of Migration

Reexamining the Past and Present in Contemporary Europe

Annimari Juvonen, Verena Lindemann Lino, Annimari Juvonen, Verena Lindemann Lino

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783110711950
• eBook ISBN: 9783110712094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Literature

At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of "conflict" and "crisis", it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on "peripheral" perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the "migrant crisis", and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.

1 Discourses of Communality, Belonging, and Exclusion in Postmigrant Societies in Europe

Domus Europa: A European Post-Colonial and Post-Migration Projection

Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

The House of the Ship “Europe.” The name of this house derives from an engraving of a cargo boat on the left side of the porch. It shows a ship, called “Europe,” towing a lifeboat: it is the most elegant and impressive image of a boat that has been found in the Vesuvius area. The house has a porch at the center and is surrounded on three sides by a Doric colonnade. Many amphorae have been found, probably related to the commercial business of the house. The tanks to be found on the right side of the porch served probably to clean the very same amphorae.

(Introduction to the Domus della Nave Europa in Pompeii, translation mine)¹

A mirage is an optical phenomenon that occurs on hot and luminous days. As metaphors, we associate mirages with dreams, something we strive for, even a utopia. In fact, a mirage is a trick of the eye, a form of vision in excess that makes us see things that do not exist. What we had imagined dissolves into the sunlight. In this sense, we might think of the notion of community that founded Europe after World War II as a mirage predicated on the idea of unifying many different Europes to transform a memory of war into a peaceful future.

Dissolution through war and other forms of violence permeates the Western European imagination. The twentieth century alone offers many examples: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust; European colonial activity in the Global South, particularly the now little-discussed colonial wars in Asia and Africa. These colonial wars, as in the Central European and Nordic cases, targeted neighbors deemed “wild” and in need of “civilizing.” Then we might think of the discovery of the Soviet gulags and the denouncement of Stalinist violence; the apparently peaceful and celebrated fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent break-up of the Soviet empire; the conflicts and disintegration of former Yugoslavia and the consequent redesigning of the geopolitical map of Europe. More broadly, we could cite the endless wars in which Europeans participated in the name of freedom from a religion that has long generated Europe’s most profound anxiety: Islam, homogenized in the media so as to create, in the words of the British Muslim intellectual Salman Sayyid, a “fundamental fear” (2003).

This list of conflicts, fractures, tensions, and foundational violence behind contemporary Europe reminds us that, due to its own sense of a planetary vocation – the expansionist dimension of European imperialism –, a large part of European history and the history of European states took place outside the European continent. Just as we cannot reduce the history of formerly colonized countries to a footnote in the histories of the former colonizing metropoles, so the history of Europe is not coextensive either with its territorial boundaries or with its own sense of self. The history in question here, which gave Europe purpose and a global status for five centuries, exceeds Europe. It is a history that was projected onto other territories, languages, and cultures, transforming and generating other identities and legacies that “represent” Europe in other countries, but that also call that Europe itself into question, and break away from it.

Paradoxically, Europe as a whole rarely recognizes this history as its own (Lourenço 2001: 13). When seen from the outside, this is the history of the imperialist drive that defined Europe as the West in opposition to the East, and to Islam; the history that structures Europe, endows it with meaning and has projected it on a planetary scale. This point has been made by many studies that decenter the gaze and focus of enunciation of European historical narratives. Seen from within, this was also, as Eduardo Lourenço used to say, the history of many Europes “in which its nations successively took up the European baton with their sense of universal calling: Portugal and Spain as the pioneers of the first European modernity, then France, Germany, Holland, England, and, in a different sense, even Russia” (Lourenço 2001: 13, translation mine).² Seen from the outside, however, these many protagonists blurred into one. Each represented “Europe”: a singular entity that appeared first as Venetians, Florentines, Genovese, Portuguese, and Spanish; and then as the French, British, Dutch, and Belgians.

Such a reading of European history and its contemporary afterlives requires us to emphasize the place of colonial and religious violence – sometimes public; sometimes private – in the founding of Europe. The tensions that still underpin Europe today coalesced not just at the end of World War II, but also in the aftermath of decolonizations, whose consequences struck the North as well as the South. This argument is centered around a vision of history that is ontologically based on a dissembling and extra-territorial geopolitics which silently licenses violence by means of identitarian and culturalist narratives.

1 First movement: Europe in question

The generation that witnessed the post-World War II period, which saw Europe in ruins, dreamed of a Europe for Europeans. Theirs was, as Adolfo Casais Monteiro wrote in 1946, a “future dream” of a “morning to come, when nations would smile openly at one another, without guard dogs at the borders” (1993: 127, translation mine).³ They imagined a world in which European time retained its position as universal time, notwithstanding its vulnerability to the new hegemony emerging out of the war, new calibrations of power that would be led by the United States and the Soviet Union within a Cold War framework. The Suez Crisis exposed Europe’s new weakness, and Great Britain’s diminished status in particular. Europe was no longer a world power, and Britain was powerless in the face of a dual ultimatum from the two superpowers (Lourenço 2001: 34) and the Arab dreams of emancipation Nasser articulated in his renowned 1956 Alexandria speech. Following the revolution for the total independence of Egypt (1952), these dreams condensed into the Algerian War (1954–1962), where pan-Arabist ideals converged with demands for sovereignty. In this sense, France was not the only other country involved. The Algerian conflict was not a fight pitched exclusively between one colony and one metropolis: we must understand it instead, or perhaps as well, as one of the Arab world’s most momentous interpellations to the West.⁴ In the same vein, we can understand the later Portuguese Colonial Wars (1961–1974) not only as the blind obsession of a dictator, trapped inside his own labyrinth, with retaining his colonies, but also as one of southern Africa’s great appeals for total liberation.

We are at a point today where some remember the process of European construction and reconstruction as the most successful “peace-building” operation of the post-World War II period. Yet the construction of the European Community was also a response to a loss of global hegemony, which was about more than just the ascendency to the world stage of the United States and the Soviet Union. Europe faced the loss of its century-old planetary authority. As such, I suggest, we can see two interrelated rationales at play in the post-war construction of Europe: firstly, the need to establish a defense apparatus to contain the internal bloody conflicts that periodically tear the continent apart; and secondly, the need to find a way to fill the emptiness of purpose that the beginnings of the decolonization were already provoking, even if it was not immediately visible then, nor even acknowledged by politics today. Robert Schuman, one of the great architects of Europe, makes reference to the European continent’s mission in Africa in his declaration of 9 May 1950. This document, one of the birth certificates for Europe as we know it now and correspondingly a key founding text of European construction, situates developing Africa as a structural feature of the European mission. This strikingly colonial argument is all the more remarkable for making its appearance after the independence of India and other new Asian states.

The immigrants that in the meantime started arriving literally to rebuild the shattered Europe emerging out of the wreckage of World War II came from the South, from the European colonies, or from the more generic South of the subalternizing European imagination. In the World Wars, these colonized peoples were called upon to defend imperial powers in European conflicts, whether in their own countries or after they had relocated to Europe. Then they saw for sure that Europeans were but flesh and bone like themselves, that they felt the same pain and that their blood, shed in such quantity in the trenches, also ran red. Liberty thus began to gain other subjects-in-struggle, and became a Southern dream, which informed what today we call the national consciousness of the 1920s and 1930s. The dislocation of populations from the old colonial world, whether to fight in the World Wars, or afterwards to rebuild Europe, therefore represented a break from colonial business as usual. The imperial world always required major population movements between colonies for labor supply, but in the majority of cases, had never considered the possibility of those laborers returning to their original homes. In the World Wars, by contrast, this was not the case: soldiers returned to their countries imbued with the sense of liberty that permeated Europe in those year...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Displacing Europe’s Past and Present: Reexamining Migration in Artistic and Critical Practices
• 1 Discourses of Communality, Belonging, and Exclusion in Postmigrant Societies in Europe
• 2 Responses to Frames of Conflict and Crisis
• 3 Rethinking Collective and Individual Pasts in the Context of Migration
• Index of Names