Book Review Tracking Europe Mobility Diaspora and the Politics of Location Duke Up

Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location, past Ginette Verstraete

Reviewed by Alex Lambrow

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Ginette Verstraete. Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location. Durham: Knuckles Academy Printing, 2010. 220 Pages.

Ginette Verstraete'due south Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location provides a succinct analysis of a cross-department of the debate concerning the emergent "new European" identity and this identity's interplay with mobility both internal and external to Europe. Taking Derrida'south The Other Heading as the footing of much of her theory, Verstraete argues that "the idea of Europe every bit a identify of unlimited liberty and material progress is not just a powerful, pop conceptual effigy simply besides a disruptive, proliferating advent that is as promising every bit worrisome, and that gives u.s.a. no indication where it is going."^[1] Tracking Europe attempts to "track"—that is, to delineate—as well every bit deconstruct these "promising," "worrisome" debates concerning the "new Europe" in light of the mobilities inscribed in the history of the idea of cosmopolitan Europe, practices of European tourism, and European Union policies apropos civilization and border security. In the book'southward latter essays, Verstraete turns her focus to digital spaces and the multimedial art of Keith Piper, Angela Melitopolous, and Ursula Biemann concerning diaspora in lodge to suggest new means past which to apprehend her deconstructed concept of European identity.

In chapter 1, Verstraete begins her analysis of European identity by returning to Kant'south "Idea for a Universal History" (1784) and "Perpetual Peace" (1795), in which Kant argues that the road to European cosmopolitanism lies in the peaceful desire of European subjects to travel to and interchange with other places in Europe, generally in search of "civilization." Verstraete challenges this notion of cosmopolitanism past noting how the aware thought of European identity centers effectually the norm of a wealthy, white and male person subject, the bailiwick who would have had the means to travel in the 18th and 19th centuries and is inextricably linked with the logic of capitalist interchange and, thereby, exploitation.

Similarly, Verstraete criticizes the contemporary scholar Edgar Morin's statement that an historicized sense of European "unity-in-diversity" realized through international tourism and conferences would provide the cardinal to a "new Europe" (from his Penser fifty'Europe (1988)) for its insistence on the transformative nature of the practice of capitalism. Taking Derrida equally her interlocutor, Verstraete notes the paradoxical nature of the "exemplarity" of the European identity, a process by which one national culture comes to exist understood equally a primary example of a universalized identity, which Derrida referred to as "capitalization" or "heading" (The Other Heading). What is more than, the process of "capitalization" is too linked to the expansion of power and uppercase (likewise as with "de-capitation" in Derrida'due south mind), such that the act of placing anything under the heading of "Europe" as well implies displacement and decentering. It is this deconstructed notion of European identity that Verstraete makes the guiding theoretical insight of the remainder of her study.

In chapters 2 through four of her study, Verstraete examines three discourses in which European identity and mobilities both internal and external to Europe interact, suggesting the conflicting nature of European identity. In affiliate 2, Verstraete criticizes the development of the "European Thousand Bout" in the 19th century and the continuing discourse on tourism in Europe for capitalizing on the idea of "unity-in-diversity" and thereby tacitly reinforcing the capitalist-colonialist exploitation of local culture. Verstraete writes, "[…] pretending that the recognition of differences is equally empowering to everybody, maintains the status quo in the terminate: it offers a stable mooring for what is historically synthetic and substitutes culture, and ultimately ideology, for irreducible divisions. Paradoxically, philosophies and policies oriented toward the promotion of a general European culture in the sense of European unity-in-diversity take a chance falling into the trap of naturalizing what is historically and differentially constituted, fifty-fifty full of conflicts."^[ii]

In chapter 3, Verstraete expands her analysis of tourism and identity construction to the EU's European Capitals of Culture event in 2000 (the original impetus for Verstraete's study), with a particular focus on the means in which digital spaces play into the representation of a "new Europe." With some reservation, Verstraete sees the potential in digital technology to advise a new formulation of Europe based on the notions of "decentralization and diversion."^[3] Although she seems to support digitally based exhibitions near European identity such as the European Capitals of Culture events held in Santiago de Compostela in 2000, Verstraete besides warns that digital spaces concerned with European identity often inadvertently fall victim to other hegemonic discourses (apropos class, gender, faith, etc.) that harm the process of European integration.

In her fourth affiliate, Verstraete turns her attending to the borders of Europe, where she sees ane of the key contradictions in the logic of the EU played out: namely, although the project of the "new Europe" (following the Schengen Agreement) is supposed to entail the erasure of borders and the opening of infinite within Europe, those people who are not European citizens are being increasingly excluded from the territory of the European union by surveillance and edge control practices, such that the 'unlimited' mobility of the new European denizen implies limiting the mobilities of non-European subjects. However, Verstraete also notes how European nations benefit economically from the influx of immigrants, creating a arrangement in which Europe's borders get contradictory and negotiable, "[passing] for containment and identification, merely [giving] manner to alterities and unpredictable transnational intermingling."^[4]

In the final chapter of her book, Verstraete expands her theoretical word of the problematics of European identity formation to the works of Arjun Appadurai and John Durham Peters concerning the role of the imaginary—particularly that born of digital media—in the process of integration, before she goes on to explore the effect that the multimedial fine art projects of three artists working on diaspora tin have on this imaginary. Borrowing from Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996), Verstraete agrees with Appadurai's diagnosis of a shift to an imagined world of eminent doubt and displacement in the transition from early to late capitalism with its digital technology. However, as she notes, this shift can at times result in the recoding of doubtfulness every bit racialized violence. In Peters's "Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon" (1999), Verstraete similarly embraces the development of a new imaginary defined by displacement likewise as the linkage Peters sees betwixt the diasporas of people and the "diasporas" of images through telecommunications (in addition to digital media), which "[rethinks] belonging through displacement as a way of socialibilty at a altitude through telecommunication."^[5]

Using this metaphorical linkage betwixt diasporas of people and the "diasporic" nature of informational organization in digital media, Verstraete analyzes how the multimedial artists Keith Piper, Angela Melitopolous, and Ursula Biemann "open up and give access to a meandering gild in which every move is entangled with other moves far away, in which every incident points to a string of local histories […] full of coincidences, encounters, resonance, and divergence."^[6] Inspired by the work of these artists, Verstraete takes as her ultimate ideal the Derridean concept of "capillarity," a realization of the hidden intersections of power that, on the one paw, construction European identity and that, on the other, open up it up to redefinition through the recognition of the displacement inherent in this identity.

Verstraete's Tracking Europe presents a theoretical analysis of the issues underlying the gimmicky debate on the emergent "new Europe" by submitting the construct of "Europe" to post-structuralist criticism. For Verstraete, Europe is not anchored in whatever fourth dimension or place, but rather is lengthened; the concept of "Europe" exists in the interplay betwixt the concepts of singular identity and universal identity, every bit well as privileged and limited mobilities, with the result that "[Europe] implies the space to bring about an interaction between, if non a critical alteration of, the different stories and images produced at diverse times and places in order to allow those uneasy and surprising linkages generate a multiple viewpoint, a multiple atlas, of this affair called Europe."^[vii] In this questioning of the limits of European identity, Verstraete is participating in a discourse with writers such every bit Étienne Balibar, Demetris Papadopolous, Sabine Hess, Vassilis Tsianos, and Serhat Karakayali, who take been working to redefine Europe as a "borderland" (Balibar'southward term) marked by "porosity" in order to problematize and deconstruct the emergent idea of a "new Europe." Verstraete'due south contributions to this discourse are her clear theoretical explanation of the aporia of a "European" identity and her exploration of the significance digital media tin can take in the restructuring of this identity. In all, Verstraete's study is not an exhaustive wait at the issues of identity and mobility in Europe; rather, Tracking Europe presents essayistic analyses of contemporary debates surrounding the "new Europe," while suggesting possibilities for overcoming the inconsistencies in this identity.

—Alex Lambrow (Academy of California, Berkeley)

1. ^[i] Ginette Verstraete, Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location, (Durham: Duke University Printing, 2010), 15.↩
2. ^[2] Verstraete, 58.↩
3. ^[iii] Verstraete, 79.↩
4. ^[4] Verstraete, 109.↩
5. ^[5] Verstraete, 118.↩
6. ^[half-dozen] Verstraete, 148.↩
7. ^[7] Verstraete, 153.↩

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Source: https://transit.berkeley.edu/2012/lambrow/

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