Alternative hospitalities on the margins of Europe

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2020

Department/School

English Language and Literature

Publication Title

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes

Abstract

This chapter develops a critique of the necropolitical regime of border policing (following Mbembe) immanent to the existence of the European Union as a political and cultural space. It places the attempts to control “illegal” Mediterranean crossings—and the “migrant crisis”—in the context of the EU’s neocolonial and transnational connections among former colonizers and the colonized. Specifically, Nataša Kovačević turns to recent literature, whose preoccupation with the impossibility of a “good life” (to borrow Agamben’s term) in borderland states of exception suggests that an invisible war on migrancy has become immanent to the EU construction of sovereignty. These texts treat the borders as a threshold into Europe rather than any specific country, portraying migrants as new communities taking shape in the process of crossing, their solidarity based on a shared economic predicament despite diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Mahi Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise and Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits imagine spontaneous communities arising among African migrants crossing the Mediterranean, juxtaposed to phantasmatic narratives of death and cannibalism that subvert the idealization of Europe. Their ethics of mutual aid, compassion, and hospitality call into question dominant representations of political community in Europe and help expand its cognitive possibilities.

Comments

N. Kovačević is a faculty member in EMU's Department of English Language and Literature.

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