Heidi Armbruster

Imagining Europe: everyday narratives in European border communities

This article examines the role of ‘Europe’ in our border narratives. One of the most striking parallels across our entire data set was the absence of Europe or ‘Europeanness’ as a self-chosen category of identification. In contrast to other categories, European references only appeared in response to direct questions by the interviewers. This article shows how people conceptualised Europe and the EU, once invited to do so by the interviewer. Both Westerners (all citizens of EU member-states) and Easterners (all citizens of ascendant EU member-states) anchored their views in distinctly local contexts. At the same time there were many narrative and discursive overlaps on either side: Westerners often construed a congruence between Europe and the EU and used this thematic field to define their own national and socio-economic identity. For many Easterners the links between Europe and the EU were much less clear and the topic provided a discursive field within which people articulated a sense of economic and political disempowerment. In both cases Europe generated the clearest sense of belonging only when it came into play as an out-grouping device against immigrants who are deemed non-Europeans.

‘Realising the Self and Developing the African’: German Immigrants in Namibia

This paper is based on research among German immigrants in Namibia, a country with a long history of colonisation. After Germany, the first colonial power, ceded the territory as a consequence of the First World War, South Africa effectively ruled the country until 1990. Both former colonial powers established principles of white rule and initiated settler communities, whose descendants still live in the country. This article examines biographical narratives of German immigrants who have settled in Namibia since the 1950s. It focuses on their discourses of self-understanding in this postcolonial, post-apartheid context. The discussion follows two related issues: the cultural models of personhood that narrators use to represent their historical selves, and the ways in which these models are applied to recent historical change in Namibia. The article concludes by showing how both perspectives work to recycle colonial imaginations.

Negotiating Multicultural Europe

This book is about neighbourhoods and networks between the diverse people of contemporary Europe who live in a globalized and globalizing world and across different types of borders: physical and mental, geopolitical and symbolic. The books theme is set within the larger framework of globalization and geopolitical re-ordering on the European continent, processes in which the supra-national EU has played a highly significant role and where transnational relations increasingly become the norm. This collection is based on qualitative social research in a range of European locations. It explores community relations that are marked by boundaries whose primary local definitions are national, ethnic or racial, and it examines the local negotiations of those boundaries, including the attempts to overcome them. The book thus brings into comparative perspective the negotiations of national and historical identities that are often foregrounded by border studies, and concerns with ethnic and multicultural identities which tend to be the domain of migration studies.

‘With Hard Work and Determination You Can Make it Here’: Narratives of Identity among German Immigrants in Post-Colonial Namibia*

This article is based on ethnographic pilot research among German immigrants in Namibia. It employs content and discourse analysis of interview narratives emerging in conversations with two generations of German migrants: individuals who settled in the 1950s and 1960s and a younger cohort who immigrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Interview extracts in which respondents address their arrival and adjustment are chosen to explore narrative reconstructions of integration in (post)-colonial Namibia. However, integration is largely sought in the social and symbolic context defined as ‘German’ and ‘white’, and in dissociation from Namibia as ‘Africa’. Silences, ambivalences, and contradictions at the narrative level reveal these generational cohorts to be slightly different, yet equally evasive about the problematic inheritance of white privilege. While, in contrast to the earlier migrants, the more recent arrivals maintain appeals to liberalism, these interviews suggest that 16 years after independence Namibian whites have not yet begun a process of critical self-reflection.