The other neighbour paradox: Fantasies and frustrations of 'living together' in Antwerp
Source
Patterns of Prejudice, 50, 2, (2016), pp. 129-149ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
SW OZ RSCR CAOS
Journal title
Patterns of Prejudice
Volume
vol. 50
Issue
iss. 2
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 129
Page end
p. 149
Subject
Anthropology and Development StudiesAbstract
In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by so-called 'active' white Flemish residents in Antwerp, and their perpetual disappointment with the responses of their neighbours of orthodox Jewish and Moroccan backgrounds. Instead of viewing these relationships either as a product of culturalist social cohesion policies, or as a vernacular ethical achievement that escapes culturalist politics, she argues that we should understand them through the figure of the Neighbour. Combining the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, she suggests that the neighbourly relation is a paradox in which the Neighbour as a nearby Other induces both an ethical desire for total openness in the engagement with this Other, as well as the uncanny sense that his/her Otherness haunts and makes impossible such an engagement. When viewed in this way, vernacular intercultural relationships, and the fantasies and frustrations surrounding them, emerge as the site where residents of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in postcolonial Europe engage and struggle with existential and ethical questions of human interconnection and, especially, the effects of the culturalist inflection that these questions have gained.
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- Academic publications [246625]
- Electronic publications [134196]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [30504]
- Open Access publications [107719]
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