Contested Multiplicities and Mobile Monologues: The Poetics and Politics of Conviviality in the Plural

ABSTRACT

In Antwerp, everyday interactions in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods have become the object of polarized debate and policy interventions that posit ‘living together’ as an ideal. Residents routinely use living together as a frame to assess themselves and their neighbourhood. They also bring divergent vernacular moral practices and sensory experiences to everyday interactions across difference. This complicates understandings of conviviality as a singular, demarcatable dimension of urban life. This paper delineates, instead, theoretical, methodological and textual manoeuvres for approaching conviviality in the plural. Methodologically, biographical interviewing and go-alongs are combined to explore diverging vernacular modes of engagement, and their intersections. Textually, the stylistic device of a collage of ‘mobile monologues’ – first-person, situated stream-of-consciousness narrations – works to recreate in writing a polyphony of embodied and moral modes of being, and their unfolding across myriad interactions. Finally, mobile monologues bring-out understudied dimensions of conviviality: (1) the situated performance of local narratives, (2) the circulation of moral economies of neighbourliness, (3) the contested political resignification of vernacular notions and practices in relation to discourses of living together. Conviviality emerges as heterogeneously assembled from a multiplicity of intersecting vernacular universes, whose political relevance in relation to living together is actively made and contested.

KEYWORDS:

• Conviviality
• everyday racism
• moral economy
• neighbourliness
• ethnographic methods
• urban governance
• social cohesion
• go-along
• writing otherwise

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Bob White and Annick Germain for including me in the conversations that spun out of the Cohabitation workshop in Montreal in 2018. I am indebted to Thomas Blom Hansen for stimulating me to write beyond conventions; to Anouk de Koning for providing the incentive to focus on my previously written monologues; and to Naomi van Stapele and Lieke van der Veer for helping me embrace that I cannot think methods separately from theory and writing. The two anonymous reviewers as well as my colleagues Martijn Koster and Paul Mutsaers provided gracious and useful feedback. Most of all, I am indebted to my interlocutors in Antwerp. They allowed me to partake in their multiple universes, but also taught me in their reflections and actions that our lives always sprawl into the universes of others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2011, there has been an important shift in Antwerp and Flemish politics, as the Flemish-nationalist party N-VA won the municipal and regional elections. My material does not speak to this shift. Significantly, many of the municipal governance programmes aimed at neighbourliness and cohesion have remained, albeit under new names and financial constructions.

2 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork described in this paper was made possible by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam.

Notes on contributors

Anick Vollebergh

Anick Vollebergh is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University. Her work focuses on the discontents of new preoccupations and imaginations of sociality, the (welfare) state, and authority as these are enacted and negotiated in the urban margins of postcolonial Europe. She has written on the racialising effects and populist underpinnings of initiatives seeking to foster ‘living together’ in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods in Antwerp, and on the unruly affects of participative and ‘intimate’ forms of governance and welfare provision in Paris. Her work has been published, amongst others, in American Anthropologist and Current Anthropology.