“Europe Is No Longer Europe”: Montaging Borderlands of Help for a Radical Politics of Place

Abstract

In this paper, we position the societal expectation of the 'grateful refugee' in the larger European script of placing migrant help and integration. We ask how might we re-imagine geographies of migrant 'help' so as to break with the dominant ontologies of places as sites embedded within the nation-state and the accompanying relations of power which displace the migrant in a perpetual penumbra of gratefulness? By montaging a series of contrapuntal vignettes of borderlands producing Europe, we examine the moral geographies of help and debt and how geographical imaginations of place and place-identities of practices of refugeehelp today are entangled with mid-20th century wartime aid. Drawing inspiration from the negritude movement, we argue that such 'untimely articulations' produce 'sites of décalage' where Europe (as manifesting in such entangled moral geohistories of help) is no longer Europe, suggesting an initial vocabulary for a radical politics of place.

Exhibiting Solidarity Work: Temporary Displays and Their Potential To Trouble and Push Museums Representing European Mobilities

“…In the context of migration and solidarity work, space is effective as it is produced through nation state and EU agendas and policies, on the one hand, and migrant practices on the other, and while these spatial practices (Schatzki 2015) take place on different levels, they are very much in conflict with each other (comp. Aparna et al 2020).…”

“…7 They will have to acknowledge and reflect that sedentarianism is a historical exception to the rule of mobility (Schlögel 2006(Schlögel , 2007, while sedentarianism is still powerfully inscribed into museal objects already through collection systematics that require a place of belonging (comp. discussions of spatiality and territorialities in Aparna et al 2020). 8 While museums have since their inception been considered as (bourgeois) places of education, a setting where master narratives of e.g.…”