Ginette Verstraete

Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location

Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people. In demystifying the old and new Europe across a multiplicity of texts, images, media, and cultural practices in various times and locations, Verstraete lays bare a territorial persistence in the European imaginary, one which has been differently tied up with the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Tracking Europe moves from policy papers, cultural tourism, and migration to philosophies of cosmopolitanism, nineteenth-century travel guides, electronic surveillance at the border, virtual pilgrimages to Spain, and artistic interventions in the Balkan region. It is a sustained attempt to situate current developments in Europe within a complex matrix of tourism, migration, and border control, as well as history, poststructuralist theory, and critical media and art projects.

The Politics of Convergence: On the Role of the Mobile Object

This essay rereads the debate on media convergence through the lens of the mobile consumer object. Upon reviewing the discussion of participatory convergence culture by Jenkins, Leadbeater, Rheingold and others, the article turns to Lash and Lurys analysis of the global culture industry to bring back into the picture a material world of great complexity in which convergence and participation are part of an economy of branding through differentiation across time and space. From this perspective, politics is less an act of collective human resistance by participating fans than a mode of following the meandering life of the object-brand across various media platforms.

Women’s Resistance Strategies in a High-Tech Multicultural Europe

Europe today is multicultural but a majority of citizens are unwilling to accept the implications of this reality.1 A new, transnational imaginary is needed to accommodate the numerous communities that have come to Europe in recent times and for which identity and belonging run along intersecting lines of contact beyond the national borders of Europe. Following centuries of global migration, the “new” Europe consists of a multitude of ethnic groups, religious communities, and national cultures that are constituted by, or identify themselves through, affiliations across national borders. These groups adopt what is known as “hyphenated” identities: Turkish-German, Algerian-French, Indonesian-Dutch. Not only do they identify, or organize themselves, in terms of multiple national belonging, they often also literally cross borders through travel (to family abroad), communication (with friends in the “home country”), or consumption (eating food and wearing clothes not easily available in Europe). To the extent that these movements of people, money, objects, images, and identities are not bound by nation-states we can call them “transnational.”

Media, Places, and Assemblies From Videowalls to “Smart” Environments

This essay explores the complex entanglements of media, place, and (public) space. On reviewing the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in cultural geography, the article discusses Anna McCarthy’s well-known “spatial” discussion of Dara Birnbaum’s installation Rio Videowall in downtown Atlanta. The latter serves as a test case to ground and criticize some of the insights within those recent paradigms. In the second part of the discussion, Latour’s “Parliament of Things” is foregrounded as an alternative way of thematizing the role that media technologies play in the production of place. Latour’s Parliament rethinks place politically in terms of dynamic networks that raise questions about modes of representing place and strategies of visibility in public space. Ultimately, considering the matter of place and space as a networked assemblage of subjects, objects, and media technologies allows us to interrogate the democratic nature of the media environments in which we live.

Introduction: Mobility, Technology, and the Politics of Location in Europe

The year 2000 was a unique moment in Europe’s travel industry. To mark with grandeur the end of Europe’s second millennium and the beginning of its third, the European Union named nine cities as European Capitals of Culture for that year. Originally conceived as a way to bring the peoples of Europe together through cultural and touristic exchanges in one location, the annual City of Culture Event normally gives one city the chance to showcase its culture through festivals, concerts, museum displays, public installations, local and blockbuster events, and so on. The aim of this yearly project is to let people enjoy a so-called European culture that is as common to all as it is locally unique. Although before 2000 only one city (since 1999 called a “capital” in this context) was given the honor of representing Europe on the international tourism scene, at the turn of the millennium nine cities were selected. Together they mapped the north, center, east, west, and south of the new unified Europe: Brussels, Avignon, Bergen, Bologna, Helsinki, Prague, Reykjavik, Cracow, and Santiago de Compostela. All of them were expected to contribute to the idea of