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Abstract
Themes of loss, grief, and vulnerability have come to occupy an increasingly central position in contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory. Thinkers such as Judith Butler and Stephen White have argued that grief has the capacity to access or stage a commonality that eludes politics and on which a new cosmopolitan ethics can be built. Focusing on the role of grief in recent pro-refugee activism in Europe, this article argues that these ethical perspectives contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and that turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. The result is a veil of ignorance which, while not precisely Rawlsian, allows the European subject to re-constitute itself as ‘ethical’ and ‘good’, innocent of its imperialist histories and present complicities.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tarak Barkawi, Robbie Shilliam, Halit Tagma, and Evelyn Pauls for their comments and encouragement. Many thanks also to the convenors and participants of the BISA Ethics and World Politics Working Group who gave helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1. James Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 2.
2. Yohanna’s story is recounted in Stonor Saunders, “Where on Earth Are You?”; and Schwartz, “Letter from Lampedusa.”
3. CNN, “Ai Weiwei Covers Berlin Venue.”
4. “Pope Francis: Migrants’ Deaths Are Shameful.”
5. “Angela Merkel Defends.”
6. raisa2, “The Dead Are Coming.”
7. “Opening: Minute’s Silence for Migrants.”
9. See, indicatively, Gregory, “Potential Lives, Impossible Deaths”; Holmqvist, “War, ‘Strategic Communication’”; Marhia, “Some Humans Are More Human”; Wilcox, Bodies of Violence.
10. For two classical formulations, see Fanon’s discussion of the zone of nonbeing in Black Skin, White Masks; and Wynter’s critique of the exclusionary category of ‘Man’ in “Unsettling the Coloniality.”
11. Alonso and Nienass, “Introduction: Borders and the Politics of Mourning.”
12. Evans and Bauman, “Refugee Crisis Is Humanity’s Crisis.”
13. See Butler, Precarious Life; Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Campbell, National Deconstruction; Campbell and Shapiro, Moral Spaces; Raffoul, Origins of Responsibility; White, Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen; Ziarek, Ethics of Dissensus.
14. Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, 17.
15. Butler, Frames of War, 13–4.
16. Butler, Undoing Gender, 24.
17. Butler’s argument thus stands in contrast to the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud which understands mourning as a private project. See Butler, Precarious Life, 22.
18. Ibid., 30.
19. Butler, Frames of War, 9.
20. For a selection, see Gregory, “Potential Lives, Impossible Deaths”; Masters and Dauphinee, Logics of Biopower; Wilcox, Bodies of Violence; Zehfuss, “Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War.”
21. For example, see Myers, Wordly Ethics; Reid, “Vulnerable Subject of Liberal War”; Vázquez-Arroyo, “Responsibility, Violence, and Catastrophe”; Watson, “Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community.”
22. Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, 41.
23. Ibid., 14.
24. See Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony.”
25. Mouffe, “Which Ethics for Democracy?,” 85.
26. See Kramer, “Judith Butler’s ‘New Humanism.’”
27. Liebsch and Goodwin, “Grief as a Source, Expression, and Register,” 242.
28. Ibid., 240.
29. “Art Collective Buries Migrants in Berlin.”
31. Ibid.
32. von Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning,” 454.
33. “Creative Activism in Berlin on the Refugee Crisis.
34. Berliner Zeitung, quoted on http://politicalbeauty.com/dead.html.
35. Spiegel Online, “Africans Remembered: A Memorial.”
36. Butler, Frames of War, 1.
37. “Opening: Minute’s Silence for Migrants.”
38. Kington, “Lampedusa Shipwreck.”
39. Rygiel, “In Life Through Death.”
40. See in particular Alonso and Nienass, “Introduction: Borders and the Politics of Mourning”; and Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning.” See also Stierl, “Contestations in Death”; and Lewicki, “‘The Dead Are Coming.’”
41. Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders,” 256.
42. Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning,” 461.
43. Ibid.
44. The term ‘Black Mediterranean’ was coined by Alessandra di Maio; see di Maio, “Mediterranean, or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy.”
45. Saucier and Woods, “Slavery’s Afterlife in the Euro-Mediterranean Basin.”
46. For example, see Broeck, “Commentary”; and Saucier and Woods, “Ex Aqua.”
47. Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” 65.
48. See Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
49. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.
50. Broeck and Saucier, “Dialogue: On European Borders,” 36.
51. Broeck, “Commentary,” 26; Du Bois, Darkwater; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; James, C. L. R. James on the ‘Negro Question’.
52. Césaire, “Discourse on Colonialism,” 174.
53. See Saucier and Woods, “Ex Aqua”; Broeck and Saucier, “Dialogue: On European Borders.”
54. Broeck, “Commentary,” 33.
55. For an example, see Bauman, Strangers at Our Door; Miller, Strangers in Our Midst.
56. Bhambra, “Europe Won’t Resolve the ‘Migrant Crisis.’
57. Hansen and Jonsson, “Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe,’” 461. See also Hansen and Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History.
58. Hansen and Jonsson, “Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe,’” 449.
59. Amongst others, see Bauman, Strangers at Our Door; and Miller, Strangers in Our Midst.
60. Broeck, “Commentary,” 25.
61. For an explanation of the difference between justice and pity, see Boltanski, Distant Suffering.
62. Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning.
63. Hesse, “White Governmentality.”
64. Mills, “Global White Ignorance”; see also Sullivan and Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance.
65. Wekker, White Innocence.
66. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 5.
67. Ibid., 5.
68. Ibid., 4.
69. Diken, Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory, 334.
70. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 2.
71. Berlant, “Subject of True Feeling,” 53.
72. Ibid., 83–4.
73. Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity,” 152.
74. Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning,” 461.
75. See Broeck and Saucier, “Dialogue: On European Borders”; and Saucier and Woods, “Ex Aqua.”
76. Wood, “Antiblackness of ‘Modern-Day Slavery’ Abolitionism.”
77. Broeck, “Commentary,” 32.
78. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies, 5.
79. Hall, Black Chronicles II, ii.
80. Butler, Frames of War, 14.
82. Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013, 253.