Abstract: 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 Žižek, 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.
Abstract: This book offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], investigating its historical emergence and role in ‘culturalist’ and secularist politics in Flanders, as well as how it shapes everyday life in diverse urban neighborhoods. The term culturalism was coined to denote the exclusionary discourses that have emerged in postcolonial Europe positing migrants as cultural ‘strangers’ from which the nation and the perceived original, ‘autochthonous’ population need to be safeguarded. This book reveals how culturalism resulted in a new political project to ‘heal’ an assumed deficit of fellow feeling in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods and a new political-ethical injunction for denizens to ‘live together’ with their ‘strange’ neighbors.
The book focuses on two Antwerpean neighborhoods - Oud-Borgerhout and the ‘Jewish Neighborhood’ – and follows the neighborhood engagements of white Belgian, Moroccan-Belgian, and Jewish Belgian denizens. Due to the politics of ‘living together’, everyday neighborhood life has become a stage, on which denizens are confronted with ethical and philosophical questions to which secure or comfortable answers are never found: about the nature and ethics of ‘objective’ perception; the diagnostics of strangeness; and the nature of fulfilled subject-hood and ‘true’ sociability. Denizens try to position themselves in relation to these questions through largely internal performative contestations - between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new Belgians’, ‘modern’ and ‘pious Jews’, ‘decent’ and ‘bad Moroccans’. Tracing these negotiations, this book pushes for an understanding of lived culturalism in contemporary Europe that attends to the complexities and ambivalences in, and beyond, the imbrication of the allochthon-autochthon divide in denizens’ (self)understandings.
