Issue 11.2, Postcolonial Europe, Editorial more

Editorial GRAHAM HUGGAN Europe, according to Paul Gilroy, has officially entered its postcolonial moment. Not that this moment is necessarily to be welcomed. ‘Postcolonial’, like other ‘post-’ terms, registers continuity as much as break, the failed attempt to move beyond histories to which it remains painfully shackled. ‘Melancholia’ is Gilroy’s term for that failure; and there are others, equally gloomy, for postcolonial Europe – at first sight at least – seems to be a profoundly depressing place. Gilroy diagnoses the patient. Europe, he says, ‘stands militarised once again and heavily fortified against its proliferating enemies, within and without’; paralysed by its own paranoia, it also finds itself caught in a rising tide of xenophobia and intolerance, which are often couched in the pseudo-liberal language of ‘integration’ and ‘common sense’.1 Gilroy acknowledges, at the same time, that the ‘feral beauty of postcolonial culture, literature, and art of all kinds is … contributing to the making of new European cultures’.2 ‘Postcolonial’, in this sense, is about the unmaking of Europe as a space of exemplarity, exception, and privilege, but also the remaking of Europe as a convivial space of inclusiveness, transcultural ferment, and openness to the rest of the world. The essays in this volume engage with both of these aims, reflecting the doubleness already at work in the concept of ‘Europe’, which has historically remade the world to suit its own interests even as it has dedicated itself, with a consistency arguably less typical of uncertainty than of arrogance, to the more critical endeavour of remaking itself. It seems appropriate, then, that the volume begins with a short but characteristically pithy essay by one of the foremost thinkers of our times, Zygmunt Bauman, whose work has repeatedly engaged with what he calls the ‘unfinished adventure’ of Europe.3 As Bauman is well aware, Europe’s congenital restlessness has frequently served goals far better suited to the exploitation than the emancipation of humanity, but that doesn’t mean the adventure should be abandoned; on the contrary, he says, the world has never needed an adventurous Europe as much as it does now – one capable of ‘looking beyond its own frontiers [and] critical of its own narrow-mindedness … a Europe with a planetary mission to perform’.4 His essay in this volume draws attention to the nature of the challenge, which partly consists in the need to ‘restore the commensurability of power and politics’ at a global level, thereby complementing those moving worlds 11.2 1 ‘negative’ forces (capitalism, crime, terror) he sees as being institutionally hostile to politics with their ‘positive’ counterparts (political representation, jurisdiction, law). Although Bauman does not mention Europe explicitly, it is clear that he sees the European Enlightenment legacy as being crucial to this ‘planetary’ project, although he takes care – as elsewhere in his work – not to assimilate universalist objectives to the European cause. The French political philosopher, Étienne Balibar, takes this argument a step further by insisting on the need to uncouple the European from the universal: Europe, he says, is but one province of the universal in a polycentric and multiply modern world. Europe is similarly multiple, but not necessarily under conditions of its own choosing; and one notable example of this is that the idea of ‘Europe’ is increasingly being produced beyond Europe by those who may have little or no interest in becoming Europeans themselves.This idea, Balibar suggests, has always involved a complex dialectic of identity and alterity through which Europe has attempted – inevitably without success – to regulate itself by pre-emptively answering its own questions about who is to be included within it – and, by corollary, excluded from it – and by imposing arbitrary limits on its own cognitive world. Questions of cognition – how European knowledge is perceived, but also whether Europe can ‘know’ or ‘be known’ at all – are also taken up in the two essays that follow Bauman’s and Balibar’s. Here, the prominent UK-based academics, Paul Gilroy (a sociologist) and Simon Glendinning (a philosopher), challenge the notion of Europe as the ‘ideal form of a properly civilized society’ while acknowledging, as Bauman does more explicitly, the seductiveness of European exemplarity. Both agree that the history of Europe – more specifically the history of European modernity – has been indistinguishable from the imperial and colonial violence that has accompanied it. However, they disagree on whether a racial metaphysic is to be seen as underlying European political culture. For Gilroy, as for Arendt, racism is nothing less than the ‘death of humanity’, although it may still be necessary to hold on to ‘race’ as a trope in order to license a new engagement with the human that recognizes human abuses of both the present and the past.5 Racial hierarchy, Gilroy insists, has been fundamental to the making of Europe and is still integral to its idea of itself, which draws (the contemporary politics of immigration supplies an obvious example) on ‘raciological divisions of life into properly human and abjectly infrahuman forms’. Glendinning does not deny this, but sees its metaphysical background as lying less in raciology than humanist anthropology, which, in naturalizing a hierarchy of cultural differences, also 2 Postcolonial Europe shows the extent to which humanism, operating as a discourse of origins (the beginnings and the ends of ‘man’), is ideologically double-edged. For Glendinning, cosmopolitanism, which he sees as being rooted in the European ‘onto-theological’ tradition, provides a way of reframing humanism without replicating its ideological tendency to naturalize racist renderings of cultural difference, though Gilroy – who would not necessarily disagree with this – insists that racism continues, in Europe and elsewhere, to be normative rather than extreme or pathological in form. Europeans, Gilroy suggests, need greater knowledge both of themselves and of the linked histories that have formed them; the more sceptical Glendinning is unsure at what level this knowledge, which in turn marks an uncertainty around the word ‘Europe’, is accessible at all. In the next pairing in the volume, the Italian historian, Luisa Passerini, and the British literary/cultural critic, Max Silverman, articulate both of these perspectives with the increasingly influential notion of cultural memory. Both see European cultural memory as being profoundly marked, if not necessarily determined, by experiences of colonialism but, while these experiences are almost by definition negative, they see possibilities for imaginative renewal by retrieving what Passerini (after Friese) calls Europe’s ‘missed chances’ – cosmopolitanism, justice, freedom – and what Silverman (after Rothberg) calls the ‘multidimensional’ aspects of Europe’s interconnected pasts.6 Both posit the idea of Europe as a common space while rejecting the essentialism that marks concomitant views of a ‘European spirit’ or ‘European values’; indeed both also show, following Balibar, that there is no European monopoly on the idea of Europe – what Europe is, is not necessarily for Europeans, and certainly not Europeans alone, to say.7 Instead, multiple memories – operating transversally – articulate with multiple Europes in ways that demonstrate the fallacy of a continuous and uniform European cultural heritage: hence Passerini’s account of the ‘non-European’ re-invigoration of ‘European’ myths and symbols, or Silverman’s account of the layered narratives through which contemporary writers have brought together ‘knotted memories’ of the Holocaust and French-Algerian colonial pasts. Like Passerini and Silverman, the Dutch-Italian critic, Sandra Ponzanesi, is interested in the imaginative possibilities of reframing postcolonial Europe in a ‘transverse’ manner informed by the multiply intersecting processes of diasporic memory. Ponzanesi’s essay, like the two essays by Cordula Lemke and Margaret Fetzer that follow it, looks at boundaries of place and text in order to challenge those arbitrarily ‘fixed’ forms of moving worlds 11.2 3 European identity that are linked to soil and territory, and to posit in their stead a ‘liquid figuration’ with the ‘osmotic capacity to blend cultural differences and to connect to different shores’. As the metaphor implies, Ponzanesi is primarily interested in the sea, more specifically the Mediterranean, as the privileged site for a European cultural imaginary with no fixed limits. Seeing Europe from the vantage point of the Mediterranean, she suggests, requires both an imaginative adjustment from north to south and a wider appreciation that Europe’s ‘liquid frontiers’ are continually shifting. This opens the possibility of new transcultural networks in which ‘Europeans’ belatedly acknowledge their debt to the ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ they have so often excluded; but it also plays into the contemporary politics of immigration paranoia and terrorist fear, with the open sea becoming a space of anxiety over identity and belonging in which borders still exist even if they are not apparent and Europe is profoundly ‘troubled from within’. This idea of internal fracture is further explored in Cordula Lemke’s pleasingly quirky essay, which combines the ins-and-outs of Scottish regional politics with the new, but decidedly fraught, European sensibility of Daniel Craig’s James Bond films. Against a background of global terror, the new Bond films articulate anxieties around a composite European identity that is perceptibly threatened in an age of ‘permeable boundaries’; at the same time, they confront some of the power struggles surrounding contemporary globalization processes – struggles in which both national (British) and transnational (European) identities are brought to the fore. Drawing in part on Balibar’s work, Lemke looks to regionalism as a way of counteracting those forms of colonization, both external and internal, that have historically accompanied the formation and expansion of Europe as a federation of loosely connected nation states.8 However, ‘permeable boundaries’ apply here as well. Where, for example, are the borders, either historical or imagined, of the Scottish region? And what is to be made of continuing Highland/Lowland rivalries, which may have produced palatably romantic views of a regional (usually Highland) Scotland, but have in the process significantly weakened Scotland’s status as a political force? One problem – as Margaret Fetzer also shows in her essay on the writings of Walter Scott – is the attribution of ‘authentic Scottishness’ to places and/or texts that complicate such programmatic understandings. Textual borders, as Fetzer shows, are no more easily managed than spatial ones, and both are intimately tied in with the politics of identity, as can be seen in the deliberate ambiguities that surround Scott’s prolific ‘paratexts’. 4 Postcolonial Europe The last two essays in the volume return us to some of its central themes: the legacies of imperial Europe; the question of Europe’s geographical and conceptual limits; and the need to re-imagine Europe in an increasingly interconnected but incompletely decolonized world. For the Dutch-Portuguese critic, Paulo de Medeiros (as to some extent for Glendinning), Derrida’s call for ‘another Europe’ has gone unheeded; and, instead, recent events such as Europe’s political paralysis over North Africa, or the various premature obituaries heaped up on European multiculturalisms, suggest a continent whose political leaders ‘cannot think of any way out of the current crisis except turning back the clock’. Like Gilroy and Ponzanesi, de Medeiros sees contemporary Europe as being characterized by the politics of fear and a return to racist populism; and above all by a failure to imagine alternatives other than those that serve its own immediate protectionist ends. Citing the example of Portugal, which he sees as being ‘chronologically post-imperial’ but still in thrall to its ‘cruel imperial spectres’, de Medeiros echoes Passerini’s call for an honest encounter with Europe’s colonial ghosts. It is imperative, he says (also echoing Passerini), to address the ‘systematic forgetting of Europe’s negative inheritance’, but equally important to work towards new forms and functions of European memory that might yet allow for a realization of Derrida’s plea to ‘fight for what the word Europe means today’.9 But what does the word mean? If Europe’s ‘adventure’ is unfinished, then so are the deliberations, with profound political implications, over what Europe is and what it has the potential to become. Also over where it is, as John McLeod’s closing creative piece intriguingly testifies. For McLeod and his partner, Julie Adams, Europe ends, but also begins, in an entirely different hemisphere owing to the peculiarities of French postcolonial governance. As McLeod discovers, New Caledonia, to which they have both come to help prepare a photographic exhibition on Melanesia, is neither ‘France’ nor a ‘French colony’; rather, it is part of a postcolonial Europe in which Europe persists as ‘something other than historical or colonial bequest’ and is mobilized as a ‘tactic of everyday life’. Similar tactics are employed in McLeod and Adams’s at times bewildering encounters with local Kanaks.These latter turn out to be keen to deploy an affirmative version of British colonial history, for example, in the Cook-discovered Loyalty Islands, where the British colonial legacy offers an alternative way of looking at the region to the treacherous convict past imposed by colonial France. It is an alternative, as well, to the current French ‘Europeanization’ of New Caledonia, which seeks – though with only partial success – to dictate present and future patterns of its culture, moving worlds 11.2 5 language and economy. That New Caledonian peoples continue at some level to resist these forms of assimilation is testament not just to the autonomy of New Caledonia but to the ‘postcoloniality’ of a Europe that ‘does not end by the shores of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, at the Turkish border or by the Barents Sea’. Instead, as McLeod concludes, and as this volume can find no better way of concluding, Europe remains ‘at large’ in ways – both destructive and creative – that exceed geographical and legislative bounds. NOTES This special issue has been very much a collaborative exercise. I would particularly like to thank the following for their support: the ‘Postcolonial Europe’ network co-leaders,Tobias Döring and Sandra Ponzanesi, for all the hard work they put in to ensure the smooth running of the network; the AHRC and the Universities of Leeds, Munich, and Utrecht for their generous financial assistance; and Shirley Chew and the team at Moving Worlds for their thoroughly professional editorial and production work. 1. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 157. 2. Gilroy, After Empire, p. 157. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 4. Bauman, Europe, p. 34. 5. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951). 6. See Heidrun Friese, ‘L’Europa a venire’, in Europa politica. Ragioni di una necessità, eds, H. Friese, A. Negri and P. Wagner (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002), pp. 59-75; also Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009). 7. See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004). 8. See Balibar, We, the People of Europe? 9. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Enlightenment Past and to Come’, trans., G. Cragg, Le Monde Diplomatique, English edition, 6 November 2004. <http://mondediplo.com/2004/11/06> Accessed 26/3/2011. 6 Postcolonial Europe