Thinking Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean

Abstract

The article makes a case for Europe as a creolized space, or Europe Otherwise. It argues that, in order to account for both the transregional entanglements and the internal hierarchies that European colonialism and imperialism have produced since at least the sixteenth century, we need to unlearn received notions of Europe as an unmarked category; and that theoretical and empirical lessons from the Caribbean are central to relearning Europe differently. To conceive of Europe as a creolized space thus means to draw attention to the decisive shifts that its colonial possessions operate in both its historical legacies and its present borders when consistently taken into account. Such reconceptualization entails a simultaneous creolization of theory so as to reinscribe into sociological thought the experiences of peoples and regions racialized as non-European, non-Western, and non-White alongside the multiple entanglements between Europe and its colonies. Drawing on Caribbean perspectives on creolization, I first discuss how creolizing Europe contributes to countering the definition power of ahistorical and unmarked categories. Subsequently, I propose to rethink Europe as a political, cultural, economic, and discursive formation from its current colonial borders in South America and the Caribbean Sea. Finally, I argue that focusing on Europe’s colonial possessions in the Caribbean today and their corresponding geographical referent, Caribbean Europe, is one way to effectively creolize established understandings of Europe’s colonial history as a thing of the past, of a white Western European identity as the norm, and of the European Union as confined to continental Europe. Recent crises in the Caribbean – from the 2017 hurricanes to Brexit – are used as a magnifying glass in order to make Europe’s ongoing colonial entanglements theoretically and politically visible.

Uncanny Europe and Protective Europeanness: When European Identity Becomes a Queerly Viable Option

“…5 When talking about their European identifications, my participants emphasised their own appreciation for diversity and openness, and their close proximity to westernness, which was most evident in a quote by Kamil who ‘mentally’ identified as European and defined Europe as ‘a system created by Western Europeans’. Europe’s capacity to protect LGBTQs becomes conditional on reproducing the image of Western Europe as Rainbow Europe, an allegedly exceptional ‘standard of civilization, modernity, development, capitalism, or human rights’ (Boatcă, 2020: 2), including gender and sexual liberation. Future research on European imaginations and identifications could further investigate that, if Europeanness can work as a protective identificatory alternative, who is it protecting, from what and under what conditions?…”

“…Europe is ‘a political, cultural, economic, and discursive formation’ (Boatcă, 2020: 2), a place which includes a set of imaginations about its essence, territory and history. In line with Rao’s (2020: 47) theorisation of place as temporal, processual and relational, Europe should not be considered as a discrete, bounded entity but rather as a dynamic project, which can take on different meanings for different people at different times (e.g.…”

“…Scholars point out, for example, that Europe has been persistently imagined as White and Christian, at least at its foundation (e.g. El-Tayeb, 2011; Sayyid, 2018), and ‘hailed as a standard of civilization, modernity, development, capitalism, or human rights’ (Boatcă, 2020: 2).…”

“…Michał, in turn, did not mention the so-called ‘Islamisation of Europe’ but admitted he preferred to date ‘Europeans’, or at least people who grew up in Europe, to ‘Muslims’ and ‘Asians’, considering the former as ‘more modern’ and ‘more open’ than the latter. Michał invoked allegedly uniquely European qualities of modernity and openness (Boatcă, 2020), while simultaneously denying such attributes to Europe’s external Others, specifically Muslims and Asians (El-Tayeb, 2011; Sayyid, 2018).…”

North and South: Naming practices and the hidden dimension of global disparities in knowledge production

“…We propose that, at a global level, these center-periphery relations stem from the widespread view of the global North's superiority, which translates into an implicit belief that knowledge produced by authors in the global North about societies and individuals in the global North is more generalizable than knowledge produced by, in, and about peoples in the global South. A similar argument has been made about social theory, whereby theory produced outside of Europe is considered ethno-theory (e.g., Latin American dependency theory), whereas European social theory is simply labeled social theory (Alvares 2011;Boatcă 2020;Grosfoguel 2013). This is in line with rising concerns about the lack of diversity in the so-called WEIRD samples in psychology studies (Arnett 2008).…”