Professor Meyda Yeğenoğlu
Professor Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Tampere University, Finland, Institute for Advanced Social Research. Professor Yeğenoğlu is currently visiting Professor at Duke University’s Programme on Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is the author of Islam, Migrancy, and Hospitality in Europe (2012) and Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (1998).
Contesting Islamophobic Hostility with Ethical Hospitality
Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive approach, my paper focuses on the renewed Islamophobic and Orientalist response to the presence of Muslims in Europe, who are regarded to be invading Europe. How can we re-think a democratic Europe that does not depart from its traditions and yet remains heterogeneous to those traditions and histories? My paper explores whether this ‘new Europe-to-come’ can be re-thought and re-envisioned with the notion of unconditional hospitality in the wake of growing Islamophobic reaction against Muslim refugees. I suggest that ethical hospitality can become the ground of a renewed political imagination. Such a new ethical and political imagination entails thinking Europe’s relation to its past, memory, and traditions. To attend the heterogeneity of European traditions, a deconstructive gesture requires an engagement with the history of colonialism and its convoluted relationship with racism and Orientalism.
Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam
Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths (University of London). Her publications include, Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017), Death and the Migrant (2013), and Researching Race and Ethnicity (2003).
Weathering immigration politics: Hostile Environments and Hospitable Locales
This talk is centred on Britain’s ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policies and draws from on-going research with volunteers who house destitute migrants and refugees in their homes. Engaging with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) theorization of ‘weathering’, I will discuss how under hostile environment policies, migrant and displaced bodies bear—and sometimes are worn away by—the weight of living in climates of racialised hostility and debilitation. Weathering as a black feminist analytic disperses attention from the ‘border as spectacle’, marked by a focus on border crossings by large numbers of mobile people and/or and the performance politics of walls, fences and mobile borders. Weathering is also attentive to mundane, slow moving schemes of violence. Within the broader context of hostility, I will examine, how volunteer hosts frame their ‘small’ acts of hospitality as having the potential to join up and enlarge, so that they register, or at least resonate, in a meaningful way within a system that is overwhelmingly dehumanising. A hope for those who offer hospitality is that what they are doing will open up an alternative municipality of welcome, even if this space is cobbled together and improvised. So hospitality, even when co-ordinated and supported by funded civil society organisations or faith groups, is contingent and a space of becoming. In drawing these different facets of British immigration politics together, I will also advocate for a multi-scalar analysis that includes bringing together different genres and materials such as empirical research and the arts to trace the effects of hostility.
Dr Ioana Szeman
Dr Ioana Szeman is a performance studies scholar and an ethnographer at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Roehampton, London. Her book Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania (2018) is based on ethnographic fieldwork with urban Roma.
Roma Performance, from Exoticism to Cultural Citizenship: Reimagining Hospitality through Roma Counterpublics
Based on over a decade of fieldwork with urban Roma in Romania, this talk will discuss how Roma artists and activists claim cultural citizenship and belonging in dance, media and in the reception of commercial television programmes, including the so-called “Gypsy soaps,” purportedly about Roma and acted by non-Roma. Mainstream media and politicians in Romania (and beyond) construct Roma as “outsiders” and “foreigners,” and commercially driven performance and media productions present Roma as consumable exotics; I argue that for Roma counterpublics, Roma cultural production at the grassroots and the reception of commercial performances, including television soaps, subvert dichotomies of self-other (Romanian-Roma) and instead propose a plural, alternative view of citizenship and belonging, one that could be called hospitable, as opposed to the hostility underlying the exoticisation of Roma.
