Memories of Europe in the Art From Elsewhere

Abstract

At a time when the boundaries of European citizenship are challenged from both the inside and the outside, those boundaries cannot be equated with the imaginary boundaries of European memory. The rights to citizenship are usually defined administratively and politically. European memory cannot be. It cannot be culturally fortressed. For what is European memory if it does not include memories of Europe’s role in the world at large? It must reciprocally acknowledge the memories of Europe as they circulate elsewhere, and now even inside Europe itself. Some years ago, conference titles such as “Europe and its others” abounded—still fundamentally Eurocentric in spirit, with its possessive pronoun and the globalizing discourse of othering. Then the language changed, acknowledging the implicit problem and turning to phrases such as “Europe in other cultures.” The altered phrasing recognizes counterstrategies of writing back to Empire: Europe itself was being othered by “its” others, or as Dipesh Chakrabarty has called it, provincialized.[1] From my point of view both perspectives are inadequate today in capturing how the imaginary relationship between Europe and non-European parts of the world is structured in the work of contemporary artists. It is particularly the transnational and by now globally extant discourse of political memories of violence, state terror, and genocide that has produced artistic memory practices in which the European and the non-European are indissolubly folded into each other. Neither the discourse of othering nor that of provincializing makes much sense any longer.