Meeting Again: Reflections on Strange Encounters 20 Years on

Introduction

This special issue, which was unfortunately delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrates the 20th anniversary of Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Since its publications in 2000 the book has been cited nearly 4000 times across various disciplines and while there have been other influential texts within ethnic and racial studies, Strange Encounters has become a seminal text for those exploring the experience of difference in racialized, sexist, and heteronormative societies.

This introduction briefly contextualizes Strange Encounters within broader theories of strangers (Marotta 2017). Firstly, I explore strangeness as an intra-subjective and intersubjective condition. The intra-subjective mode conceives of strangeness in relation to an internal other, while the intersubjective usually highlights interactions with strangers who are othered because of their ethnic, racial, sexual, gender and religious identity. Secondly, I consider the recent universalization thesis that speaks to a general existential/ontological condition of otherness. Finally, I investigate the scholarship on the stranger that contends that the experience of strangeness brings with it greater insights. As demonstrated below, Ahmed critically speaks to many of these perspectives through her critique of the fetishization of the stranger.

The Intra-subjective and Intersubjective Reading

The intra-subjective account of the stranger describes a psychic, unconscious process. Kristeva (1991) is a key proponent of this perspective and has noted that we have a love/hate relationship with an internal other, which she has categorized as our ‘uncanny strangeness’ (Kristeva 1991: 192). It is through the acknowledgment of our inner strangeness that we learn to relate to the external other (neighbors, visitors, immigrants) as an ethical subject. If we do not resolve this psychic tension, then this uncanny strangeness is transferred onto alien others. We start to project our own sense of otherness onto cultural and racial strangers, thus ‘the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self’ (Kristeva, 1991: 183). From this she concludes that we become foreigners to ourselves (1991: 170) and it is only by recognizing our internal strangeness we come to realize our commonality with the embodied external stranger.

Ahmed interprets such an intra-subjective account as an example of ontologizing strangerhood because the stranger functions to define and constitute the self and thus becomes a means for self-discovery (2000: 6). Such an intra-subjective perspective implies that explananations of racism and racialized violence lie within the psychology of the individual. This, for Ahmed, minimizes the historical and political sources of this violence.

Although Kristeva addresses how the intra-subjective account has implications for an intersubjective reading of the stranger, the latter is central to a phenomenological-sociological approach. The sociological literature on the stranger usually centers on the work of Georg Simmel (1908) or Alfred Schutz (1976). Both understand the stranger as someone who comes today and stays tomorrow, but, whilst physically close, is socially and culturally distant (Marotta 2017). Such encounters produce incompatible worldviews and, as a result, the stranger feels out-of-place. Ahmed critically draws on Simmel’s paradoxical definition of the stranger as one who is near, but far (2000: 24) and refers to Schutz’s analysis of the stranger that is concerned with the ‘situation of approaching’. Yet, unlike Simmel and Schutz, Ahmed’s account unpacks how the construction of social spaces and notions of belonging are constituted through processes that differentiate between strangers and neighbors.

The problem with these classical accounts, as Ahmed shows, is that they assume strangers are those we do not know. Hence, such explanations reinforce a Eurocentric, heteronormative male perspective that decontextualizes the figure of the stranger from broader historical asymmetrical power relations that marks some strangers, stranger than others. Such an erasure of differences, Ahmed argues, leads to the fetishization of the stranger. That what the classical sociological approach disregards is how the recognition and negation of the stranger is central to the constitution of the host subject (Ahmed 2000: 24). Likewise it overlooks how processes of differentiation that determine who is strange and who is not are based on what Chávez and Hill (in this special issue) call visual and sonic registers, and I would add the olfactory register, that position particular differences hierarchically. Ahmed argues, that through a dichotomy of Us and Them, such distinctions and constructions of strangers shape how the host makes sense of their world. The hosts’ life-world is intrinsically entangled with the stranger and does not precede their encounters with them. For example, the ways in which the fetishization of the stranger precedes encounters is evident when Schutz speaks of a discrepancy between the life-world of the stranger and members of the in-group (1976: 100) as if these were ontologically separate ways of being and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, Ahmed argues strangers are not outside the subject’s cognitive map, as Schutz argues, but, instead, are essential to it. Knowledge and a ‘we’ that knows is only possible ‘through rather than against the stranger’ (2000: 55).

The Universalization Thesis

Alongside accounts of the stranger that focus on the intra and intersubjective modes, an ontological reading has emerged. Ahmed locates this perspective in the work Diken (1998). He argues everybody is a stranger as we are all displaced in some way due to globalizing processes and increasing mobilities. That the ways racial and ethnic strangers experience disconnection, disorientation, and loss of certainty can be transferred to the broader community. Such an understanding has a longer history. The work of Berger, Berger, and Kellner nearly forty years ago was one of the earliest proponents of this universalization thesis. They contended, in a meaningless global and plural modern world, individuals have become increasingly disoriented, alienated, and estranged; that a growing number of people people ‘suffer … from a deepening condition of “homelessness”’ or ‘what might be called a metaphysical loss of “home”’ (1973: 82). Similarly, Harman argues ‘strangeness is no longer a temporary condition to be overcome, but a way of life’ (1988: 44). This universalization theme continues in the work of Ulrich Beck (1996) and Chris Rumford (2013). Beck argues that, unlike previous societies where there was a clear distinction between the ‘locals and the strangers’ (1996: 386), in increasingly precarious social worlds, societies ‘generalise the category of the stranger to one whose central characteristics is universal strangeness’ (1996: 388). Rumford also notes that, unlike the classical accounts of the stranger, ‘we no longer live in societies in which it is easy to distinguish who has “come today and will stay tomorrow” and ethnicity and other markers of difference no longer necessarily signify someone who is not “of” society’ (2013: 6). The experience of being a stranger has now been extended to host members because we are no longer sure who constitutes ‘they’ or the ‘other’. Rumford – reinforcing the ontological dimension – refers to a general ‘sense of disorientation resulting from … an experience of globalization in which previously reliable reference points have been eroded and we encounter strangers where previously we encountered neighbours’ (2013: 7). He concludes that we become strangers to others – and reminiscent of Kristeva’s account – but also to ourselves. Strangeness, for those in the West, is now a common experience, and ironically difference has been erased. If we are all strangers, then no one is a stranger.

The claim of universal strangerhood makes the category of the stranger conceptually redundant, especially when it is separated from othering processes. And reminiscent of the discourse of a post-racial society, it would lead us to understand that we now live in a post-stranger world. For Ahmed, such views are theoretically suspect and politically dangerous. Not only do they ontologize, they also universalize that which ‘we’ have in common, for instance, the universality of homelessness which then becomes ‘cut off [the figure of the stranger] from the histories of its determinations’ (2000: 6). But Strange Encounters, through its critique of the figure of the stranger, demonstrates, unlike the universalization thesis, that the concept remains relevant.

The ‘Objective’ Stranger

Finally, theories of strangers associate the position of the stranger with epistemic privilege. Such a position was originally linked to a romantic view that the unconventional stranger becomes the ‘wellspring of creativity’ (Jansen 1980: 23–28). This unconventional stranger was then extended to the intellectual, objective stranger who thrives in an environment of mobility, exile and transgression. Such an educated ‘homeless’ elite was said to stand above those who are rooted and, as a consequence, confined to their narrow and local standpoint (Pel 1999). On the other hand, the non-educated and non-intellectual outsider have also been associated with greater insights. There has been a preoccupation with the ‘cognitive profits of marginality’ (Pel 2000: 191) or the idea that those socially marginalized have epistemic privilege (Bar On 2013). In other words, whether it is the intellectual stranger or the social outcast, it is their distance from the ‘center’ that fosters a different, ‘radical’ and transgressive type of knowledge which then becomes the basis for a critique of ‘conventional’, pre-existing ways of knowing.

This transformative and transgressive characteristic of the stranger is apparent in classical sociological accounts. Simmel argues strangers have a ‘bird’s-eye view’ that allow them to objectively and distantly understand particular views of opposing parties, yet not being totally immersed within them. This potential objectivity of strangers is characterized by their ability to be both remote and near; indifferent and involved (Simmel 1908). Schutz, on the other hand, argues the source of the stranger’s objectivity ‘lies in his own bitter experience of the limits of “thinking as usual”’ (1976: 104) that occurs as the stranger seeks acceptance in the new group. These accounts of the ‘objective stranger’ conflate different ways of being a stranger that conceal how knowledge is politically constructed. For example, Pel argues that the intellectual stranger’s experience and conception of the world differs to the marginal racialized, ethnicized, or classed stranger whose position as an outsider may not automatically generate a transformative, transgressive, and progressive view of the world. Rather the experience of discrimination may reinforce an essentialist politics of identity (Pel 1999: 76).

Strange Encounters explicitly contributes to this larger debate on the difference between the marginalized other and the intellectual stranger and its implication for knowledge construction. Specifically, through her interrogation of what was known in Australia as ‘the Bell debate’, Ahmed questions the claim whether it is possible to co-construct knowledge between a white ethnographer and an Indigenous woman because it ignores the asymmetrical power relations between the two. In this encounter the ethnographer reinforces the professionalization of strangeness where the stranger is not defined by what it lacks politically and economically, but by their epistemic privilege. Here the marginalized stranger becomes the object of knowledge while the ‘professional stranger’ becomes the subject of knowledge (2000: 60). Such cross-cultural collaboration, rather than promoting dialogue and an ethical relationality, acts to ‘conceal the operation of an epistemic difference and division’ (2000: 67). These observations are absent in the classical readings of the objective stranger provided by Simmel and Schutz and those that have come after them. Ahmed complements and extends the critical scholarship on the intellectual/professional stranger and its relationship to epistemic privilege. These critical contributions that Strange Encounters has made to the scholarship of the stranger, to the politics of knowledge, and on the nature of difference is brought into sharper relief by the papers in this special issue.

Contributions

This special edition begins with Sara Ahmed’s reflections on returning to Strange Encounters two decades later; ‘a rather strange encounter of its own’ she writes. In ‘Travelling with Strangers’, she considers how the book reoriented her life and work and the ways racializing encounters, for example, ‘make some of us feel “out of place” or not “at home” where we are brought up’. It was these experiences that led her to explore notions of the stranger and strange encounters. She argues, by repeatedly being treated as the stranger it has led to making precarious lives more so and thus it becomes harder and harder to raise issues, to complain. She uses the example of the disproportionate deaths of ethnic minorities in the UK to COVID-19 to illustrate her argument. The difficulty of complaining, which brings harassment and discrimination with it and means one should not complain ‘if you are brown or black' rather ‘you should be grateful just to be here’. Sacrifice is demanded for the debt and being made a stranger is a matter of life and death.

The papers by Sirma Bilge, Michele Lobo, Nilmini Fernando and Anita Mannur adopt a self-reflective mode and ponder the impact that Strange Encounters and Ahmed’s broader work has had on their work and thinking. Sirma Bilge, like Ahmed, also considers strange encounters in a global pandemic. She begins ‘Waking with Strange Encounters (in) a pandemic lockdown’ by reflecting on her engagements with Sara Ahmed’s book, which she contends was ‘visceral … [as] the pain of being made a stranger’ resonated with her. From which she considers the ways the book, twenty years on, offers help as she struggles to make sense of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, she considers Ahmed’s critical engagement with stranger danger to understand how ‘particular strangers’ have been ‘marginalised and exploited’ through the pandemic.

Michele Lobo’s Straying beyond the well-worn path, too, begins with sharing the ways Sara Ahmed’s work helped her make sense of her experiences of migration to, and being racialized in, Australia. She argues Ahmed helped her explore ‘whiteness as an embodied orientation within the context of [her …] migrant journey, but also co-occurring events such as the Black Lives Matter Movement, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic’. She links her ‘desire for racial justice, multispecies justice and planetary justice’ through Ahmed’s notion of affect. For Lobo, what we are ‘for’ reflects how close we feel to these injustices.

Nilmini Fernando’s article Getting Close to Other Others: Doing Difference Differently, also begins with the foundational role Sara Ahmed’s work has played in her activist and scholarly work. She outlines the ways in which she engaged with Strange Encounters in participatory theatre-based research with a group of African women examining their asylum and migration experiences in the Republic of Ireland. She contends how the ‘un-critical mainstreaming’ of intersectionality in state and NGO family violence and welfare organizations has led to many white feminists to ‘superficial[ly] display … “inclusiveness” to deflect rather than interrogate race’. It is this dilution she seeks to address through the development of ‘a critical intersectionality praxis model’.

Anita Mannur's paper reflects on how her reading of Strange Encounters fostered a rethink of ‘eating publics' in which strangers come together through generative and enabling intimate relations. Such relations have the potential to lead to positive social change and challenge what Mannur calls the ‘heteronormative logic of familial and familiar intimacy'. The second part of the paper considers the more disturbing issue of sexual violence, specifically how the proximity of strange bodies can harm women of colour. Mannur thus demonstrates the ambivalence of strange encounters: they can expose ‘the enabling possibility of coming into contact with strangers' while also showing the ‘latent violence of the encounter with the stranger’.

Karma R. Chávez and Annie Hill’s article, like Lobo’s and Bilge’s papers, explores Ahmed’s concept of the ‘stranger’ in relation to responses to COVID-19. They ask ‘[w]hat happens when, in the time of a dangerously contagious pandemic, neighbors recognize neighbors as strangers?’ In considering the ‘overwhelming number of police calls made during the COVID-19 pandemic – not just in the United States, but across the globe’, they examine the visual and sonic politics of how diseases and communities are policed. By employing Ahmed’s conceptualizations, they argue, through visual and sonic economies of neighborhood estrangement, ‘the pandemic provides an opportunity for neighbors to recognize their neighbors as strangers’.

The last two papers contextualize Ahmed’s work and more specifically Strange Encounters within two contemporary bodies of thought. Written in forum-style, Tseen Khoo, James Burford, Emily Henderson, Helena Liu, and Z Nicolazzo explore her influence in Critical University Studies (CUS). Burford and Henderson consider the ways Ahmed’s work helps CUS scholars look ‘askance’ at university structures and processes; ‘to query why they endure, how they came to take their current form, and whom they serve’. Khoo’s contribution employs Ahmed’s critiques of diversity and inclusion initiatives to explore her own experiences of a diversity leadership programme process. Liu similarly reflects on racializing and whitewashing processes at universities. She illustrates how Ahmed’s words, along with other ‘radical women of colour’, are ‘appropriated into quotable affirmations for white (cis-gender heterosexual middle-class able-bodied) feminism’. And Z Nicolazzo explores how colleagues confess to adhering to gender binaries and admit to ‘past gender transgressions to seek and gain absolution’. Z uses Ahmed’s work on shame to explain the ways in which such confessions to trans people ‘can still conceal how such wrongdoings shape lives in the present’.

Finally, Buys and Marotta reflect upon the complex relational enmeshments the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to. It does this through a critical engagement with contemporary social thought on what it means to be in relation, particularly that of radical relationism. Such an engagement, argue Buys and Marotta, is made possible by Strange Encounters, which enables us to reflect on power relations, the knowledge/power nexus and the role politics and ethics play in the conceptualization of the relational subject.

This special edition marks a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the contribution Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters has made, and as the articles in this volume attest, it will continue to provide a fertile theoretical ground and a point of reference for future empirical work on the experiences of difference, marginality and otherness. It has been a pleasure organizing this special issue and I would like to thank Sara for her enthusiasm for the project and Rebecca Buys for her valuable assistance at various stages of the editorial process.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vince Marotta

Vince Marotta is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Deakin University, Australia. He has written and taught in the area of cultural identities, multiculturalism, cross-cultural subjectivities and social theory. His most recent publications include Theories of the Stranger: Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Cross-cultural Encounters (Routledge, 2017) and The “migrant experience”: an analytical discussion in the European Journal of Social Theory 23 (4): 591–610, 2020.