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- Convenors:
-
Paweł Lewicki
(University of Pittsburgh)
Ana Ivasiuc
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- Chair:
-
Rafal Smoczynski
(Polish Academy of Sciences)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel aims at exploring how postcolonial theory may articulate with anthropological theories to understand the intersection of race, class, and gender through which "Europeanness" is constructed discursively both in the "East" and in the "West" of the continent.
Long Abstract:
Europeanness may be defined as the unstable and relational articulation of racialized identity markers and as unmarked whiteness, now often present in populist and right-wing discourses targeting various minorities. These markers are rarely seen as a consequence of persistent coloniality, neither in the "West" nor in the "East" of the continent.
In current debates we see both in the "East" and in the "West" the tendencies to target immigrants together with anti-elitist discourses against "leftist" elites imposing "dangerous" ideologies of liberalism and tolerance. In the West, these discourses are accompanied by pledges for sexual rights and freedoms against allegedly "constrained" European others. The instrumentalization of minority rights is seen also in the "Europeanization" process in the East, understood as civilizing mission towards more "freedom" and "rationality". These discourses on minority rights, "progressive" sexualities and gender attitudes are intermeshed with racist and racializing discourses. The aim of the panel is to look into different meanings Europe and Europeanness is given in the East and West from a postcolonial perspective. We invite contributions that highlight different cultural dynamics of the intersecting categories of race, class, and gender that reproduce or challenge the division into "East" and "West" or show the overlapping and blurring dynamics of reproduction of such division. How do these categories work and intersect, contributing to different visions of "Europe"? How can postcolonial theory articulate with anthropology to contribute to the discussion on the intersection of race, class, and gender in "Europe"?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses frictions in the negotiation of subjectivities and belongings of people from "Eastern Europe" engaged in sex work in Berlin as they navigate living and working as an "Eastern European sex worker" in "the West", and their implications for a postcolonial reading of "Europe".
Paper long abstract:
In debates about sex work and migration in Germany, the "Eastern European prostitute" features prominently as a stereotype for the poor and naïve victim of human trafficking. These debates gained in popularity amidst growing anxieties about migration and disputes over sexual rights and freedoms in recent years, as they also conveniently combine racialized, gendered, sexualized and classist ideas of "Eastern Europe" (in contrast to a more progressive "West") in Germany. While the realities of people from "the East" who are engaged in sex work in Germany are, unsurprisingly, more complex than these stereotypes make them out to be, they are also influenced by these hegemonic discourses about and understandings of sex work and "Eastern-Europeanness". For many of my interlocutors in an ethnographic study on the lived realities of sex workers from "Eastern Europe" in Berlin, experiences of othering, racialization and discrimination in work contexts and everyday life often came in conflict with their own ideas about mobility and belonging in "Europe", which created frictions in their negotiation of subjectivities and identities that both challenged and reinforced a division between "the East" and "the West". In this paper I want to discuss some of these frictions and their implications for the conceptualizations of race, class, sexuality and gender between and beyond "Eastern" and "Western Europe" as well as their significance for an analysis of "Europeanness" through postcolonial theory.
Paper short abstract:
This paper applies the notion of affordance to explore differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration in Europe. I draw on memory work and autoethnographic vignettes detailing encounters with two white, single, elderly Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014.
Paper long abstract:
This paper applies the notion of affordance to explore affective, intersectional emergence of differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. I draw on autoethnography and memory work, detailing encounters with two elderly, white, single and physically impaired Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014. Cleaning Ole's apartment in 2004, I was invited to provide sexual services, passing as a sexualized, too young, unemployable Eastern European love migrant of limited social value. In contrast, interviewing Carsten for my PhD in 2014, I came across as able-bodied, middle-class researcher, progressively feminine and fluent in, perhaps even, Danish. I heard no sexual undertones in Carsten's invitation to 'visit again', instead perceiving it as a suggestion to become a voluntary visitor. Analyzing the affective flows in these encounters, I trace how markers of difference intersect to denote different whitenesses. I discuss how whiteness functions as an affordance, accumulated over time, emerging in situated, affective encounters and constraining bodies' possibilities for movement and becoming. The article contributes to research on racialisation and whiteness and to scholarship that explores emergence of 'Europe' by examining relations between centre/periphery and racial formations.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation examines navigation of different futures prospects and care (those of two states and of kinship networks) in Polish-populated parts of Belarus, where choice-making of the youth is vastly shaped by the idioms of geopolitical and civilisational rivalries between the West and the East.
Paper long abstract:
In mostly Polish-populated rural areas of north-western Belarus, the growing discrepancy between living standards of Belarus (a stagnating semi-authoritarian state) and Poland (the economically advancing EU member), puts various local actors – parents, children finishing school and choosing their future, and school officials, – in need of problematic coordination of mutually exclusive visions of the future prospects and care, differently allocated to different actors of national and local level. Local educational agencies that openly try to coerce the youth to stay in the country, are often seen as profoundly ineffective and 'stealing our children's future' for ideological reasons, while Polish state-actors foster ‘kin-immigration’ from ‘the East’, which only instigates the tension on the ground.
In my presentation I demonstrate how uneven power relations of institutionally arranged moralities of local, ethnic, national and ‘civilisational’ belonging affect the action of local actors, critically engaging with literature on the state, kinship and Europeanness. I draw on 12-month long ethnographic research conducted in the region.
Moral contours of parental care are shaped by mobilisation against the malevolent agencies of their 'own' yet civilisationally alien (‘Bolshevik’, ‘Russian’) state, underpinned by the 80 years-long tensions between the state and local community. Such antagonism is also fuelled by vastly uneven infrastructural promises of the two countries and their respective civilizational projects (the ‘European’ one of Poland and the quasi-Soviet one of Belarus). Competing visions of welfare, dignified subjectivity and modernity, embedded in conflictual geopolitical trajectories, only aggravate the burden of navigation of problematically exclusive personal potentialities. Various tactics of subversive action emerge, causing further moral ambiguities (i.e. emigration, saving the future generations while debilitating local community).
Paper short abstract:
Almost half of the Somali refugees who came to the Netherlands, moved on to the UK after they had obtained Dutch citizenship. I show how Somali-Dutch women and men in the UK construct "Europeanness" through race, gender, and class experiences in the UK and in relation with the "Dutch homeland".
Paper long abstract:
The UK has a large (postcolonial) Somali diaspora. Less known are the European-Somali communities in the UK. From 2000 onwards, almost half of the Somali migrants who came to the Netherlands as refugees, moved on to the UK after they had obtained Dutch citizenship, because they experienced exclusion, isolation, and racism in the Netherlands. An estimated 20,000 Somali-Dutch people are living now in the Midlands, especially in Birmingham and Leicester. Having Dutch passports, Somali heritages, and English education and jobs, this group has become a vulnerable community in Brexit times and they increasingly need to rely on their Dutch citizenship and on the Dutch embassy for consular issues. This presentation, based on preliminary fieldwork research with the Somali-Dutch grassroots organisation Eurosom/Ducom, explores how Somali-Dutch women and men construct "Europeanness" between Brexit and racialized citizenship in both the Netherlands and the UK. Using insights from studies on postcolonial Europe and whiteness (Essed and Hoving 2015; Ponzanesi and Colpani 2016; Wekker 2016), the presentation first shows how in the Netherlands, a racialized and culturalised construction of citizenship is at the basis of the reasons of many Somali-Dutch to move on to the UK. Second, I discuss how a "European" and "Dutch" identity is still of main importance in the UK for many Somali-Dutch, especially in Brexit times. I show how such a "European" identity is constructed and negotiated through race, gender, and class experiences in the UK and in the relations with the Dutch embassy and with the "Dutch homeland".
Paper short abstract:
The remittances of East European migrants working in the Western EU finance construction booms in the marginalised countryside locations in Eastern Europe. The ‘’Western style’’ houses are important actors by means of which the identity of their owners undergoes a transformation which is characteristic of numerous contradictions.
Paper long abstract:
In Eastern Europe we can see not only individually scattered remittance houses but also entire remittance landscapes (Lopez 2010, 2015). Since 2009 I have been conducting field work and research on remittance houses in typical source locations for migration into the EU in the marginalized areas of the the former Yugoslavia, Albania, the Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania.
Reflected in the remittance houses is not just the flow of capital, new construction technologies, materials and furnishings but also transnational flows of new cultural patterns, lifestyle as well as social and class aspirations (Cairns, 2004). Owning an opulent house shapes the owner’s sense of self-worth, their position in local community, and sometimes also affects how they are perceived by their western friends and employers. Visual representations of the house have a long social life on Facebook or Youtube.
In this paper, I attempt to show that ‘’a house as those in Germany’’, ‘’a Swiss-style house’’ is a reflection as well as means of both the owner’s social aspirations and changes to their identity. The thesis I am advocating here is that the remittance house is not just a representation and a proclamation of the owners’ class aspirations but it also implicitly conveys values of modernity, Westernality and Europeanness as well as values of individuation and freedom. But as house owners try to combine the newly acquired values with the values of local tradition, family, community and national heritage in an often syncretic and highly contrasting way, otherwise invisible tensions and contradictions in this trend get revealed.
Paper short abstract:
In our contribution, we focus on two educational initiatives targeting at privileged groups and offer elite knowledge linked to two different cultural spheres 'West' versus 'East'. Our aim is to show how participation in the activities of two educational initiatives translates into the construction of Europeanism and the sense of belonging of specific young people, usually descendants of migrants.
Paper long abstract:
Some migrants’ descendants in the Czech Republic are exposed to a specific experience; their enculturation takes place at the intersection of belonging to different ethnic, racial, cultural and social classes, their migration networks create institutions that correspond to their position in social space, transnational space. These institutions offer the transmission of knowledge and identities that can enhance but also weaken their feelings of belonging.
We focus on two educational initiatives that are linked to practices related to the country of origin (namely the Youth Theater - The United Kingdom and the Youth Diplomats - Russian Federation). Both focus on strengthening the elite knowledge tied to the socio-cultural circle of the country of origin. Although these institutions are defined as open, non-selective, their profile focuses on children and young people from privileged cultural and social classes.
We want to show how the aspect of privilege entres into the negotiations of Europeanism, and how is potentially ethnic or racial identity treated here. We ask how young people understand their experience of specific transnational knowledge educational activity, how it is situated in Europe or the world and how it does/does not contribute to overcoming the idea of dividing the world into West and East.