- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
Mobility and Post-Socialism: Cross-Border Shaming and Un-Belonging in a White Europe
Abstract
In today’s Europe, mechanisms of controlling and disciplining bodies presumably transcend the logic and costs of the painful infliction of violence. State-sanctioned practices and bureaucratic categorization offer EU citizens the chance to live as “Europeans” wherever they choose to live in the territory of a member state. However, within the framework of the neo-colonial structuring of power, Eastern European states inhabit not only a geographic border zone, but recreate the periphery of modernity on the continent. In this article I aim to problematize the violence applied to people from Eastern Europe, who are border-crossers, and to reveal the meaning of intra-European bordering practices. I bring to the fore (personal) memories of border-crossing and data from my fieldwork, exposing collective similar experiences. Today, as in the last few decades, EU citizens whose mobility is controlled or forced across Europe, are submitted to forms of displacement, eviction, and deportation, producing the un-belonging of the border-crossers. These experiences are accompanied and accounted for by numerous emotions that reveal ways in which state institutions act upon the bodies and minds of non-citizens, a way in which the state is felt, becoming present in people’s lives. One of the emotions induced through state institutions and their practices is shame, an essential tool of control and a producer of un-belonging. Thus, within the nation-state, following a racist-patriarchal logic, the unaccounted dehumanization and dignity violation of “some” citizens is accommodated, rationalized, and encouraged.
Content
Author and article information
References
S. Ahmed (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Routledge.
J. Allina-Pissano (2009) “From Iron Curtain to Golden Curtain. Remaking Identity in the European Union Borderlands,” East European Politics and Societies, 23(2): 266–290.
B. AndersonV. Hughes (2015) Citizenship and Its Others. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
I. Barbero (2016) “Citizenship, Identity and Otherness: The Orientalisation of Immigrants in the Contemporary Spanish Legal Regime,” International Journal of Law in Context, 12: 361–376.
R. Bărbulescu (2019) Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe Immigrants, European Citizens, and Co-ethnics in Italy and Spain. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
R. BărbulescuA. Favell (2020) “Commentary: A Citizenship without Social Rights? EU Freedom of Movement and Changing Access to Welfare Rights,” International Migration, 58(1): 151–165.
S. K. N. Bendixsen (2020) “Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway,” Culture Medicine Psychiatry, 44: 479–500.
A. Bloch (2011) “Emotion Work, Shame, and Post-Soviet Women Entrepreneurs: Negotiating Ideals of Gender and Labor in a Global Economy,” Identities, 18(4): 317–351.
M. Boatcă (2013) “Multiple Europes and the Politics of Difference Within,” initially published in English in H. BrunkhorstG. Grözinger (eds.) The Study of Europe. Nomos, Germany: Baden-Baden.
M. Boatcă (2015) Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism. London: Ashgate Publishing.
T. Borchgrevink (2004) Dishonourable Integration: Between Honour and Shame. AMID, Institut for Historie, Internationale Studier og Samfundsforhold, Aalborg Universitet.
J. BöröczM. Kovács (2001) Empire’s New Clothes, Unveiling EU Enlargment. Telford: Central Europe Review.
J. Böröcz (2006) “Goodness is Elsewhere: The Rule of European Difference,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48(1): 110–137.
J. BrekkeS. R. BirkvadM. B. Erdal (2019) “Losing the Right to Stay: Revocation of Refugee Permits,” Journal of Refugees Studies, 34(2): 1637–1656.
M. Carman (2020) “Moving between Frustration and Anger,” Global Discourse, 10(2): 215–231.
K. Cassidy (2017) “Border Crossings, Shame and (Re-) Narrating the Past in the Ukrainian–Romanian Borderlands,” in H. DonnanM. HurdC. Leutloff-Grandits (eds.) Migrating Borders and Moving Times. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
R. O. Ciobanu (2015) “Multiple Migration Flows of Romanians,” Mobilities, 10: 466–485, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.863498
R. Cover (2013) “Temporary Migration, Corporeality and Conditional Multiculturalism: Body Odours, Stereotyping and Shame,” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 9(2): 1–18.
K. DavisL. Nencel (2011) “Border Skirmishes and the Question of Belonging: An Autho-Ethnographic Account of Everyday Exclusion in Multicultural Society,” Ethnicities, 11(4): 467–488.
D. Dzenovska (2016) “Eastern Europe, the Moral Subject of the Migration/Refugee Crisis, and Political Futures,” Near Futures Online, 1: 1–13.
T. ElrickO. Ciobanu (2009) “Migration Networks and Policy Impacts: Insights from Romanian–Spanish Migrations,” Global Networks, 9(1): 100–116.
Á. GagyiG. Pulay (2012) “An Incapacity to See Ourselves as Part of the Whole World, and the Efforts to See Ourselves as Part of Europe. An Interview with Jozef Böröcz on Post-Socialist ‘transition’, EU-Accession, and a Potential Left Perspective in East-Central Europe.” Available online at: https://media.wix.com/ugd/87303d_0bf752d9957a48f38f26231c42e705e5.pdf (accessed 15 August 2021).
S. L. Goluboff (2002) “Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 44 (3/4): 344.
A. Ivasiuc (2015) “Watching over the Neighbourhood: Vigilante Discourses and Practices in the Suburbs of Rome,” Etnofoor, 27(2): 53–72.
A. Ivasiuc (2017) “Securitizations of Identities and Racial Eastern-Europeanization,” Europe Now. Available online at: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2017/12/05/securitizations-of-identities-and-racial-eastern-europeanization/ (accessed 23 November 2021).
B. Kalir (2019) “Repressive Compassion: Deportation Caseworkers Furnishing an Emotional Comfort Zone in Encounters with Illegalized Migrants,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 42(1): 68–84.
D. Kaneff (2020) “The Shame and Pride of Market Activity: Morality, Identity and Trading in Postsocialist Rural Bulgaria,” in R. MandelC. Humphrey (eds.) Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
N. KanevaD. Popescu (2014) “‘We Are Romanian, Not Roma’: Nation Branding and Postsocialist Discourses of Alterity,” Communication Culture and Critique, 7(4): 1–18.
Ó. López Catalán (2012) “The Genesis of a ‘Romanian Roma Issue’ in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona: Urban Public Spaces, Neighbourhood Conflicts and Local Politics,” URBS, Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 2(1): 95–117.
T. MagazziniS. Piemontese (2019) Constructing Roma Migrants: European Narratives and Local Governance (IMISCOE Research Series). New York: Springer International Publishing.
S. Marcu (2015) “From the Marginal Immigrant to the Mobile Citizen: Reconstruction of Identity of Romanian Migrants in Spain,” Population, Space and Place, 21: 506–517.
I. D. Mădroane (2021) “Shame, (Dis) empowerment and Resistance in Diasporic Media: Romanian Transnational Migrants’ Reclassification Struggles,” in I. ReifováM. Hájek (eds.) Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty across Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
M. Nussbaum (2004) Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, Shame and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
J. M. Pajares Alonso (2006) Procesos migratorios e integración socio-laboral de los inmigrantes rumanos en Cataluña (Migratory and Socio-Occupational Processes of Romanian Immigrants in Catalonia). Barcelona: University of Barcelona.
M. Pardy (2009) “The Shame of Waiting,” in G. Hage (ed.) Waiting. Melbourne, Vic: Melbourne University Press.
G. Popescu (2008) “The Conflicting Logics of Cross-Border Reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe,” Political Geography, 27: 418–438.
D. Reed Danahay (ed.) (1977) Auto-ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
I. Reifová (2020) “Shaming the Working Class in Post-Socialist Reality Television,” European Journal of Cultural Studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420902790.
I. ReifováM. Hájek (2021) Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty across Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
S. RugolottoA. LarotondaS. van der Geest (2017) “How Migrants Keep Italian Families Italian,” International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, 13(2): 185–197.
R. Salecl (2020) A Passion for Ignorance. What We Choose Not to Know and Why? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
J. C. Scott (1998) Seeing Like the State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
A. D. Timmer (2010) “Constructing the ‘Needy Subject’: NGO Discourses of Roma Need,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2): 264–281.
O. Ţichindeleanu (2011) “Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique,” in B. Ghiu (ed.) Performing History, Idea Arts + Society. Catalogue and Supplement to the Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennial.
O. Ţichindeleanu (2020) “Answering to the Call of the ‘Global Easts’: Organic Culture and Trans-peripheral Orientation,” Russian Sociological Review, 19(3): 113–199
C. Tulbure (2007) Fieldnotes.
H. Van BaarA. IvasiucR. Kreide (2019) The Securitization of the Roma in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
I. Vrăbiescu (2017) “Roma Migrant Children in Catalonia: Between the Politics of Benevolence and the Normalization of Violence,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(10): 1663–1680.
I. Vrăbiescu (2018) “Creating Solidarity: Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Politics of Emotions in a Multi-Ethnic Neighbourhood in Romania,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 26(2): 150–164.
E. WinterI. Previsic (2017) “Citizenship Revocation in the Mainstream Press: A Case of Re-ethnicization?” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 42(1): 55–82
N. Yuval-Davis (2011) The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage Publications.
T. Zahra (2016) The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.