Day 230, Year of #Mygration: Mapping the Margins of Europe: Race, Migration and Belonging

This article offers a critical introduction to a special issue of the journal philoSOPHIA. The issue asks feminist philosophers and theorists to grapple with the complex and contested margins of Europe. It seeks to interrogate where those margins are, how they have been constituted, and how and where they are being challenged and disputed. It asks how feminist, anti-racist, queer, postcolonial, and/or de-colonial approaches can render or reframe the margins of Europe, and whether critical cartographies of Europe's historical and contemporary margins can be used to navigate and counter racism, exclusion and economic dispossession. In short, it asks if critical, feminist interpretations of European pasts and presents can enable us to envision a more hospitable, and hopeful future for Europe? 

The introductory article frames the special issue by attending to Jacques Derrida’s work on Europe. It focuses on Derrida’s insistence that if there is to be hope for, and in Europe, Europe must not only take responsibility for its historical and contemporary violence but must also engage in self-deconstruction. A deconstructed Europe of hope; insists Derrida, would welcome foreigners and accept their alterity; would respect minorities and singularities; would oppose racism and xenophobia; would have ‘no given borders'.   

Framed by this discussion, the contributors to the special issue interrogate where and how the margins of Europe are constituted; how they materialise on institutional, psychic, ethical, and performative registers; whether and how Europe’s limits are transgressed; and what futures such transgressions can open up.  

In The Abject Atlantic: The Coloniality of the Concept of "Europe" in Its Maritime Meridian Ashley Bohrer argues the content of ‘Europe' as an idea, an aspiration, and an imaginary was furnished through the violent conquest and exploitation of the lands and peoples of the Atlantic. The entanglement between slavery, the Atlantic, and the eastern boundaries of Europe is explored in Annie Hill's essay, The Rhetoric of Modern-Day Slavery: Analogical Links and Historical Kinks in the United Kingdom's Anti-trafficking Plan. As Hill's essay suggests, the racialised borders of Europe are articulated, among others, through a discourse of antislavery. 

Although Bohrer's and Hill's essays interrogate these processes at the level of discourse, the borders of Europe are also corporeally performed. In The Migrant Is Dead, Long Live the Citizen!, Pro-migrant Activism and EU Borders, Jennifer M. Gully and Lynn Mie Itagaki, push critical border studies to more seriously consider performance art as part of the performativity of the border itself. They do so by focusing on the controversial performance piece of Berlin-based activist group Centre for Political Beauty, titled ‘The Dead Are Coming'. In Not Refugees but Rapists and Colonizers: The ‘European Migration Crisis' through Object-Relation Theory Karolina Kulicka offers another compelling approach to the relationship between bodies and borders, interrogating the European encounter with non-Europeans through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. 

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