Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Performing the State: Artistic Re-Presentations of European Community
- 2 Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe
- 3 Colonial Spectres in Europe’s Historiography
- 4 Postcolonial and Postcommunist Contact Zones in a United Europe
- 5 Epilogue: Memories of Yugoslavia and Europe to Come
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Performing the State: Artistic Re-Presentations of European Community
- 2 Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe
- 3 Colonial Spectres in Europe’s Historiography
- 4 Postcolonial and Postcommunist Contact Zones in a United Europe
- 5 Epilogue: Memories of Yugoslavia and Europe to Come
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Moisés Salama Benarroch's documentary Melillenses (2004) explores the political paradoxes of life in Melilla, which, along with Ceuta, has been a Spanish exclave in Africa since the fifteenth century. By virtue of being in Africa, Melilla explicitly participates in promoting the Spanish myth of convivencia, coexistence of multiple religions and ethnicities: its population is a thriving mix of Spaniards, Arabs, Berbers and Jews. However, Melillenses also documents the city's existence as a well-protected Spanish and European Union fortress on African soil. While its border fence and surveillance system fends off increasing numbers of migrants attempting to enter the EU, it walls are also temporarily porous to neighbouring Moroccans who pay daily visits to purchase its (cheaper) goods and make their living by selling them across the border in Morocco. The film highlights the following paradox: Melilla's diverse inhabitants speak of the necessity of hospitality to one another's cultural traditions, while the city effectively closes off its borders to non-European outsiders. And yet, while Melilla is politically controlled by Spaniards, it is economically dependent on surrounding Morocco.
This chapter will explore cultural narratives set in such exceptional spaces as Melilla, geographically and symbolically located in borderline Europe, where the boundaries between Europe and non-Europe blur and cross-hatch, resulting in crises of identity vis-à-vis ‘proper’ national and European homes. Mahi Binebine's novel Welcome to Paradise (1999; Cannibales in the French original) and Laila Lalami's collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) portray African multitudes in waiting, reflecting on the history of European colonialism, as they hope to cross the Gibraltar into Spain. Emanuele Crialese's film Terraferma (2011) and Theo Angelopoulos's film Eternity and a Day (1998) explore hospitality to African and Eastern European migrants, respectively, in the liminal spaces of Italy and Greece, while rewriting and questioning European identity.
In their insistence on the porousness of frontiers, such narratives challenge what, following Achille Mbembe, I call the necropolitics of the border: the European Union's insistence on violently protecting and fencing off its territory against any variety of ‘illegal’ migrant, including refugees and asylum seekers. According to Mbembe:
The important feature of the age of global mobility is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the ‘regular army’ is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Uncommon AlliancesCultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe, pp. 71 - 115Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018