The other neighbour paradox: fantasies and frustrations of ‘living together’ in Antwerp

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.

Against ‘immigrant integration’: for an end to neocolonial knowledge production

“…In a variety of disciplines, and in fact often interdisciplinary in scope, researchers have scrutinized migration and its consequences in ways that move beyond ‘integration research’. Vollebergh analyzed living together in Antwerp based on a fine-grained, in-depth ethnographic study (Vollebergh, 2016 ). Van Houdt ( 2014 ) has changed the conversation about ‘immigrant integration’ by subjecting it, for the first time, to an analysis in the Foucaultian framework of technologies of government.…”

Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

“…White middle‐class residents who identified as “new Belgians” perceived Borgerhout through a wholly different plotline and a different urban sensibility. These residents would talk to Vollebergh about living together in Borgerhout as an ethical project in and of itself (Vollebergh ). “Such a neighborhood needs people who are willing to look beyond an image, and who also want to invest in a neighborhood that has such a negative reputation,” said Yvonne, referring to other “new” families like hers.…”

‘Problem Spaces’ and Struggles Over the Right to the City: Challenges of Living Differentially in a Gentrifying Istanbul Neighborhood

“…But it can also reproduce macro‐level cultural and economic tensions and fail to generate a new politics based on inclusion and social relatedness, as is the case in Tophane, where the influx of artists and gallery and hotel owners directly challenged the social and normative order and triggered mutual fears of displacement. As Vollebergh () emphasizes, not all neighborly encounters are the same, and the concept ‘neighbor’ itself is highly contested. Politics of contestation without inclusion can, in fact, lead to quite explosive, and perhaps unsustainable politics that can even undermine prospects of living together.…”