Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes

From Crisis to Critique

Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, Liesbeth Minnaard, Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, Liesbeth Minnaard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030364151
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared 'crises' in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives.

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Part ICritique and Crisis of Representation

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Boletsi et al. (eds.)Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-ScapesPalgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_2

Begin Abstract

Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016

Karen Emmerich¹

(1)

Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Karen Emmerich

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

RefugeesTransmigrant protestMobile commonsActivist research

End Abstract

The present volume takes the oversaturation of the terrain of crisis discourse in popular and academic spheres as a starting point: the pieces it contains respond to a call to move beyond crisis as currently construed, to offer conceptual interventions, motivated historiographies of “crisis” and its cognates (including “critique”),¹ or new vocabularies that might help us think differently about the political and social realities of the current moment. As Janet Roitman writes, the term “crisis” is frequently “mobilized in narrative constructions to mark out or to designate ‘moments of truth’ … when decisions are taken or events are decided, thus establishing a particular teleology” (2014, 3). Yet the term also “no longer clearly signifies a singular moment of decisive judgment … Today, crisis is posited as a protracted and potentially persistent state of ailment and demise” (16). “Crisis” has thus become a term that only “allegedly allow[s] one to think the ‘otherwise’” (9); in fact, it is often coopted not to enable change but rather to support a further reconsolidation of the status quo, as the putative state of emergency created by this or that threat is invoked to support the rapid expansion of state or institutional powers in non-democratic directions.²

Academic volumes such as this one are responding, then, to a perceived “crisis” in “crisis” itself, one marked among other things by the use of the term to support policies that deepen and lengthen this “state of ailment and demise.” Yet calls for urgent scholarly action to reconceptualize or reimagine “crisis” ironically continue to engage the trajectory it used to have: crisis as an exceptional moment that engenders critique, which in turn engenders radical change. How, then, are we to think beyond or outside of crisis, if even the urge to do so is often shaped by crisis-thinking?

Roitman’s central project is to investigate the constitution of “crisis” as a subject of knowledge—but she also offers glimpses of another path, that of “noncrisis narration.” What kind of possibilities are generated, she asks, “by suspending crisis as the foundation of narration and critique?” (2014, 71). Rather than trying to resuscitate an earlier incarnation of “crisis” as a productive (if not always positive) formation, as the opportunity for transformation via the practice of critique, Roitman invites experiments in thinking that disrupt the teleology of “crisis”—and therefore also disrupt the notion that critique is necessary to engender an otherwise that will follow. If crisis is no longer a decisive moment, an occasion for judgment and action, if it has become a persistent historical and affective state (as operative also in Lauren Berlant’s formulation of “crisis ordinariness”; 2011, 10), the time-boundedness of the forms of narration and critique that might arise out of it can also be suspended. Which is to say that the otherwise, the beyond, the genres that reflect modes of existence concerned less with teleology than tenacity, might already be with us, in forms we simply need to learn to see.

I want to draw our attention to a few minor moments in the expansive crisis-scape of the contemporary Mediterranean that help train our eyes and activity in that direction. I briefly explore two collective actions undertaken by transmigrants in northern Greece in 2016, which I see as emblematic of what I will call (after Emily Dickinson) a dwelling in (im)possibility that responds to Roitman’s invitation for a proliferation of (or attention to) forms of noncrisis narration. While these actions have the putative “refugee crisis ” or the “crisis at Europe’s borders” as their backdrop, I follow scholars who view human mobility as an autonomous, often collective undertaking that precedes control, and tactics of bordering as reaction formations that strategically deploy rhetorics of crisis in order to reconfigure the role of the state vis-à-vis people on the move.³ I draw on Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos’ exploration of the “mobile commons”—a non-hierarchical, non-institutionalized set of behaviors by which people on the move share “knowledge and infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care” (2013, 2)—to present examples of “migrant protest” that challenge the conventional understanding of protest as itself a reaction formation. These collaborative, creative projects both inhabit and supersede spaces of forced immobility created by European tactics of bordering; they are manifestations of the mobile commons turning outward to self-represent in times of stymied forward movement. Both of these projects fill the space of an enforced lack of activity with an acting out of the very impossibility of acting, one that mines impossibility itself according to what Arjun Appadurai might call an “ethics of possibility,” engaging ways of “thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in […] the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of informed, creative, and critical citizenship” (2013, 295). My use of the term (im)possibility therefore contests the idea that there is “nothing happening” in these moments. Rather, the performance of nothing happening lays bare a “chink in the wall”⁴ of “crisis,” highlighting uneven patterns of access to the means by which traditional forms of narration and critique are promoted, shared, and circulated, while also reminding us of the powerful possibilities of alternate forms of narration and critique. As such, these instances of collective, largely anonymous or anonymized action may also help us reconsider our own intellectual and scholarly practices, particularly as manifested in the institutional humanities, themselves currently mired in another kind of crisis discourse.

I initially experienced these actions in a context distant from academic research, and turn to them now with great ambivalence. While I do not want to instrumentalize them, or to become complicit in academic structures of knowledge extraction, I can conceive of no way of writing or talking about them that will not inevitably instrumentalize and extract; silence, meanwhile, solves one ethical problem but raises myriad others. My discomfort therefore signals a further “crisis” that accompanies this crisis in crisis discourse: the question of how to negotiate our relationship to the often collective, not easily attributable knowledge produced by others elsewhere, as well as the troubled gap between discourse and action in our lives as “engaged” or “activist” academics—or even as “engaged” or “activist” individuals who happen to be academics. Dwelling in shared spaces of noncrisis (im)possibility, where urgency meets daily routine, where non-teleological forms of narrative are engaged, may help us counter the instrumentalist modalities of a highly hierarchical, extraction-oriented, quantification-obsessed academic environment. It may help us learn not only to speak and write but to act differently, to incorporate our own intellectual practice into modes of collective thought and action already unfolding in the extra-academic realm.⁵

In spring 2016, I spent time near the Greek-Macedonian border, at a few of the informal refugee camps that had grown with astonishing rapidity over the previous winter as one European nation after another started closing its borders, putting an end to the “humanitarian corridor” that had been in effect since Germany temporarily suspended the Dublin Protocol by pledging to accept refugees whose first port of entry into the European Union lay elsewhere. The successive border closures, including partial closures that allowed only individuals of certain nationalities to pass,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: From Crisis to Critique
• Part I. Critique and Crisis of Representation
• Part II. Intersecting Crises
• Part III. Alternative Languages and Visions of Futurity
• Back Matter