Session 1: The Meaning of Crossing Borders and Frontiers

1st Global Conference

Tuesday 22nd September – Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Crossing Borders, a Citizenship Expertise Perspective
Franc Rottiers
Centre for Intercultural Communication and Interaction, University of Ghent, Belgium

This paper will address the way people in have-not situations redesign and emancipate the borders of legal and traditional citizenship in a world that is designed to defend these borders (i) physically by implementing control mechanisms and (ii) imaginary by subscribing to an ideational unified model of what it is to be a citizen. However, in such a world all that is to be ‘had’ is in fact some kind of inert loyalty to ‘the border’. This paper will therefore examine what ‘crossing borders’ can be about and focus on what people do as they adopt to changing contexts, reshape and overcome gender stereotypes and restructure internal boundaries. We will not so much tackle legal and traditional citizenship per se but explore the dimensions of citizenship that are formed on a local level where citizenship is (sometimes ‘illegally’) practised rather than at scales such as the State, where citizenship is (always ‘legally’) theorized. We will not so much focus on what it means to be in a have-not – e.g. undocumented migrant – situation but on what can become possible by either ‘being in’ or ‘taking on’ a have-not situation or perspective. We will explore this have-not way by (i) extrapolating from ethnographic data in which citizenship is practiced and evidenced by the interactions of have’s and have’s-not enlarging the possibilities of what it means to be a citizen.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Choosing to be a Stranger: Romanian Intellectuals in Exile
Oana-Elena Strugaru
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava , Romania

The exiled used to be a sine-qua-non status for the Romanian intellectuals who had the courage to speak their minds during the Romanian Socialist regime. Though living among their own, they did not belong to that contemporary society where thoughts were banned and fear was the tool of control. They were exiled in their own country, unable and unwilling to integrate. Being assimilated by such a society would have meant to sacrifice the most valuable form of freedom, so dear to intellectuals, the freedom of thought.

Such people, considered a threat to the stability of the regime were ultimately expelled from the Romanian land, without any possibility of return. Even more, the sole pronunciation of their name was turned into an act against the socialist regime. Thus, the notion of the stranger is taken to its extremes, and exile means a social death. But strange enough, instead of considering exile as the final form of punishment, these intellectuals viewed it as a chance of cultural rebirth. They changed the status of the exiled in their native country for that of the stranger on foreign lands, because, through exile they gained something of immense value: freedom of opinion and freedom of thought.

The present paper will focus on analyzing the condition of the exiled as stranger, both inside and outside the country ruled by the totalitarian regime. We will demonstrate that one needs not to be a foreigner in order to be alienated, nor needs he to be exiled in order to be a stranger. In our analysis we will focus on the works of two of the most impressive American contemporary writers of Romanian origin: Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea. Both of them share common features as they are both Jews and subsequently victims of the communism regime. They experienced exile in all forms and described their experiences in autobiographical writings. Obliged to a permanent reconstruction of identity and looking for diverse mechanisms of integration, they are the embodiment of the permanent stranger, the one never fully integrated and that always has his existential center elsewhere, in an imaginary country built from an ardent need of belonging.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Imre Kertesz’s Fateless as Problematisation of the Alien
Catalina Botez
University of Konstanz, Germany

In a novel called Fateless (1975), Nobel prize winner and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz explores the concept of the racial ‘stranger’ or ‘alien’ through a Hungarian Jewish boy’s lens, confronted at an early age with crucial questions regarding the role of an unaccounted for collective fate in the survival and development of one’s own individual self. At the end of his traumatic journey from native Budapest to the German camps and back, George Koves experiences a fundamental mutation of identity by becoming aware of the fact that neither his Hungarianness, nor his Jewishness are accountable for his fate, but that hazard alone (or those “given situations, and concomitant givens within them”) led to his fundamental estrangement and alienation.

As member of an assimilated Jewish family, totally foreign to the Jewish heritage, young George is forced by the anti-semitic brutality and dehumanising experience of the camps to acknowledge his affiliation to a stigmatised race, a fact that distances him from himself even more. His confused sense of self-awareness increases upon his return to Budapest after the war: clad in his (alienating) striped prison clothes, he witnesses in disbelief his fellow citizens’ (including his family’s) indifference and hostility, an attitude that brings about a deeper identity crisis and a further estrangement from the community and from himself.

Not an isolated case in the history of the Holocaust, George Koves’s type of alienation is nonetheless unique through the ontology of survival that it aims to convey: horror can be lived through if one understands it as a step by step event (i.e. by the second, minute and hour) and if it can, subsequently, be incorporated in the victim’s life as an undeniable fact. Paradoxically, as George’s character suggests, it’s in giving meaning to these steps that the possibility of future and personal freedom is contained. Even more intriguing is the fact that, by communicating this simple truth based on personal experience to the remaining members of his family (who cannot comprehend the Holocaust in these terms), he estranges himself from them irrevocably and seals his own self-alienation.