Home
Theme
Programme
Panels and paper abstracts
Call for papers
Important
dates
Conference details
How to get there
Sponsors
Contact
AEGIS European Conference on African Studies

11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands


Show panel list

Finding Europe's Trans-Spaces in African Diasporas and its Literatures

Panel 41. The Art of Wor(l)d Markets: Development, Diaspora, and Narratives of Africa in Europe
Paper ID74
Author(s) Arndt, Susan
Paper No paper submitted
AbstractIn my paper I wish to discuss the complex interrelationship between Africa and Europe. I proceed from the axiom that the meaning of these two terms, 'Africa' and 'Europe', has tended to imply different things at different times and places, thus having become blurred through the ages. They are metaphors of a symbolical order that has continuously reacted to various societal changes, religious identities and political interests and thus, conversely, contributed to the shaping of political and cultural processes in the formation of Africa and Europe on both a structural and a discursive level. Part and parcel of this discursive formation of 'Africa' and 'Europe' was the 'Narration of Difference' that builds upon a manichaeist positioning of 'Africa' and 'Europe' on the basis of symbolical orders of and identities based upon 'race', nation, and religion, among others. With an emphasis on African-diasporic writing, firstly, I wish to identify and challenge European narrations about "What is Africa?" and "What is Europe?", focussing particularly on the trans-spaces that emerge from the many-layered 'encounters''. My aim is to deconstruct dichotomies which are discursively rooted in Orientalism (Said) and Africanism (Morrison) and reproduce European hegemonies as well as to reread and resituate the terms of 'Africa' and 'Europe' in a postcolonial perspective. In the last part of my paper I will discuss and compare two novels by Black British women writers – Bernadette Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. In approaching this (historical) development I rely on the concepts of the 'racial turn' and 'occidental turn' which refer to a double movement of thought which challenge the biologistic and/or hegemonial constructions of 'race' and 'Occident' and resituate them, thus developing them as critical categories for analysis, too. Following the approaches of Critical Occidentalism and Critical Whiteness Studies, I will deconstruct processes of demarcation and exclusion resulting from racism, occidentalism and colonialism in order to identify and analyse their structural and discursive effects while focussing on the subject of these constructions – whiteness and the occident. In doing so, I will rely on both colonialism as a new transnational meta-category (Charles Maier, 2000) and the concept of diasporas. In accordance with Ètienne Balibar (2003) I wish to question the European citizenship model as incorporating the decisive criteria for what is considered "European" and rather discuss African and European cultural identities as crossing borderlines of nation states and being independent from national and continental identities.