Géraldine Mossière

Time, Space, and the Fantasised Other in Me

As the epiphenomenon of a current malaise de civilisation, spiritual retreats epitomise the manifold quests for personal well-being as well as an existential longing for harmony that are based in the sacralisation of everyday life. This chapter shows that these spiritual quests for a fantasised elsewhere echo and catalyse individuals’ journeys within the frame of an hermeneutic of the self that draws on issues of authenticity and authority. This process is transposed into a space and time matrix where the geographical circulation parallels a circular view of time. If spiritual retreats have sacralised the orientalist encounter with alterity, in postcolonial and globalised settings, they resituate the tension between the seeker and the local in a space of creativity that is promoted by the shared experience of co-presence in the world.

The intimate and the stranger: Approaching the “Muslim question” through the eyes of female converts to Islam:

Drawing on an ethnography among Quebecois and French female new Muslims, I consider how converts epitomize and embody the “encounter” between Muslim and western societies. By choosing Islam, converts position themselves on the margins, giving them a unique perspective on the “West.” My participants’ reflexive narratives hinge on continuity/disruption dialectics that dissolve the commonly held dichotomy between Sameness and Otherness. In analyzing these narratives, I view subjectivity as a rhetorical construction and elaborate upon converts’ daily intimate encounters and dialogues with Otherness in social spaces. In light of Simmel’s figure of the Stranger based on distance and proximity, I show that converts’ experiences echo the “pacific coexistence” that Muslim and European populations have experienced historically. I argue that narratives are crucial to understanding how Islam—as a political and symbolic language of Otherness—can help frame and profile emergent western subjects and identities.