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Frames of Belonging: Four Contemporary European Travels

Author(s): Mohammed A. Bamyeh


Source: Social Text, No. 39 (Summer, 1994), pp. 35-55
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466363
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Frames of Belonging

FOUR CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAVELS

What does it mean to cross the border into another country? In some Mohammed A.
cases, the point of crossing may mean nothing more than any other point Bamyeh
along the road. This reduction of the status of borders to pure spatial
markers was (and still is) the stated ambition behind the project of
"Europe 1992," which was entrusted with doing away with Western
Europe's internal borders. According to this ongoing project, crossing
(national) borders would become purely physical travel, wherein medita-
tions on barred otherness, existential commotions on displaced belonging,
and hermeneutic negotiations were to be stripped of at least one source of
nourishment: namely legal, bureaucratic, and formal rules and regula-
tions. If "Europe 1992" refers to a certain meaningful cultural totality (as
opposed to simply a practical economic and political arrangement), then
the promised disappearance of physical borders within it would seem to
propose a certain distrust of exclusive parochial belongings and, by exten-
sion, an enhanced meaning of "Europe" as a cultural entity.
If one were to follow Norbert Elias's theory of civilization, the emer-
gence of "Europe" as a meaningful cultural concept would appear, not as
a product of any voluntarism, but rather as the gradual convergence of
originally competitive trajectories.1The convergence is indicated in terms
such as "European civilization," "European history," "European place in
the world," and, above all, "European culture." In a somewhat more
encompassing rebuttal to voluntarism, Fernand Braudel asserts that a cer-
tain type of socioeconomic system (e.g., capitalism) "arrives when every-
thing is ready."2 This presupposes that all of the background elements
(culture, polity, protection networks, etc.) are already in place. The mat-
ter at hand here, "Europe 1992," concerns the coming into being of a sys-
tem for which one of the presumptions is that an appropriate cultural
armory is already in place. The disappearance of national borders in the
western part of the continent would indicate, among other things, that
whatever cultural meaning such borders contained in the past, Western
Europe (1) is no longer in need of special borders to protect it, (2) is no
longer worth protecting, or (3) can be happily entrusted to a more
encompassing "Europe."
In this essay I will attempt to address the confluence of such proposi-
tions with the appearance of the notion of belonging. Narratives of
belonging (and, by extension, treason)3 in this context constitute a subtext
for a variety of meditations: on the possibility of accepting total otherness,
on changes of identity, on the lack of manifestation of an identity when it
is presumed, on rejecting a parochial heritage for the sake of fusion into a
more encompassing identity. As illustration, I will explore four contem-
porary texts, each of which roughly stands for a significant all-European
cultural trope. The cases concerned derive their energy from the reservoir
of accidents of belonging and reflect on a European context of one's life,
history, and ideology.
First, there is the question of a general European identity that can
present itself empirically and in a summarizable form. Such a trope is
inseparable from the alienation of difference and lack of belonging, for
which the traveler Caryl Phillips provides one of the best examples. Of the
mass of potential reportabilities from "Spain," for instance, Phillips finds
his attention captured by a curious boy precisely because "centuries of
Jewish, Gypsy, Moorish, Arab, and European blood [surge] through his
young veins."4 Such markers, drawn together to account for a face, con-
stitute a field of vision in which genetic phenomenalities and accidents of
birth are central.
Second, a variant on such an infatuation consists of claiming a lack of
concern with territorial or genetic markers, even though the quest itself is
so haunted by an attention to "origins" that the external world is reduced
to a vehicle for private meditations on the (collective) self. I will argue that
this is the case with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose chronicles of
Europe could be seen as tales about Germany, directed toward an audi-
ence consumed, particularly since World War II, with self-reflection. This
travel sketches a large circle around the self in a quest for possibilities in a
self traumatized by the nowhereness of guilt-free home territory. The
nondialogic nature of this self-which is most evident in the extent to
which presupplied images of countries like Italy or Hungary offend the
traveler-can only invite utopic fictions and impulses, with which Ach
Europa!seeks to rejoin and flavor the idea of Europe.
Third, there is the unsettled philosophical question of the nature of
the epoch in which Europe lives today. The Dutch traveler Cees Noote-
boom is perhaps the best contemporary representative of this trope. For
Nooteboom, travel is a philosophical adventure, with destinations pre-
sented as open questions rather than as explicands. And when a land is
left behind, it is not because travel has been concluded or exhausted but
because it instigates more travel, elsewhere.
Finally, there remains the question of travel as "reportage," in the
manner expected from a newscaster, whose ubiquity in postmodern soci-
eties is not inseparable from the trend to valorize travel guiding over and
above travel writing. Gone Tomorrowby Joseph Hone, a BBC correspon-
dent, offers a prototype, albeit limited, illustratinghow the reportabilityof
the Outside is detected in the first place.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh
In one sense, travel writing is a hermeneutic attempt to make the empiri- Travel reporting
cal world speak something other than that which could be provided
through the reductions of mass communications, which emphasize knowl- belongs to a
edge that can be transmitted to a hypostatized common denominator
(e.g., "the average viewer"). Such attempts are antidotes to a condition of larger scheme
relaxed attention in the manner of: "the world is already in my living
of knowledge
room,"5 which Martin Heidegger has keenly observed in Die Frage nach
dem Ding.6 Such a relaxed attention consists of the illusion of having ren-
accumulation, to
dered an otherwise hermeneutic obligation to "the world" by cluttering up
one's living space with broadcasts, relics, and commodities standing for it. which two basic
If such a state of affairs in one's living space is accepted as the prime per-
sonalizable embodiment of transnationalism in the modern age, then at treasons are
least in one sense it can be understood as a will to noncensored appear-
ances providing themselves by themselves. Against this "illusion," contem- foundational:
porary travel literature seems to epitomize a counterethic that valorizes
responsibility for subjective understanding of the world. A subjective one to the gods,
search for knowledge, as Ton Lemaire suggests in his commentary on the
the other to
spirit of contemporary Europe, emanates from a spirit of inquiry based on
"Promethean recklessness and Faustian drive."7That is to say, a quest for
the self.
subjectively garnered knowledge (traveling as a method of knowing the
world) already pronounces a verdict of insufficiency on presupplied
knowledge. Thus, travel reporting belongs to a larger scheme of knowl-
edge accumulation, to which two basic treasons are foundational: one to
the gods, the other to the self. Without such treasons, however, one is at
the mercy of transmitted knowledge alone.
A phenomenon like today's "Europe," however, cannot be experi-
enced "as a whole" at any particular moment but only as a transmitted
summary by external centers of knowledge: statistics, flags, emblems, pic-
tures, official meetings, broadcasts. Such an opposition is provided
directly in Enzensberger. One of the most interesting episodes in Ach
Europa!concerns the narrator's encounter with an imaginary Finnish ex-
president of the European Community. The ex-president lives alone in the
middle of the unspoiled nature of the Finnish countryside. He is happy
that the years of presidency are behind him, happy in his isolated but
apparently free life, happy with being able to work with his hands, with his
immense collection of lyric books. He complains bitterly about big tech-
nocracy that never gave the nonabstract citizens much thought as it was
busy designing a homogeneous Europe. It introduced Europe only in the
form of standards, tables, graphs, and numbers, but it had to ignore, he
says, the continent's inexactitudes, such as the unmappable Finnish coast:
to tell the truth of the coast, he says, you must reject the authority of the
map.8 This extra-bureaucraticconsciousness of space, this resistance to all
attempts to summarize Europe, this flirting with the possibility of virtuous

Frames of Belonging 37
chaos, have all become impossible. "And therefore, Mr. Taylor," the ex-
president tells his American interviewer, "you find me here, at the end of
the world,and not in Brussels."9The radical escape to the extremity is not
banishment, because the extremity of the vast world is as distant as
Europe. The obvious dilemma is that while the concept of Europe is
already here, its totality remains inaccessible to experience.Only techno-
cratic administration in Brussels can deliver "Europe," but it is painfully
clear to this traveler that Brussels is not Europe.
Such an impossibility of correspondence between the coming into be-
ing the concept and the frustrated attempt to translate it into an every-
of
day aura refers on the one hand to a "1992" phenomenon, in whose mak-
ing transnational bureaucracy is more prominent than mass participation.
The ex-president refers to the painful awareness that, regardless of the
fact that Europe has not yet been successfully represented in a form that it
truly deserves, "Europe" is already here; it has already had its president,
its foundational moment, its administration, its common laws, its symbols;
and as such, it has survived in spite of the flight of an ex-president,
together with his utopic inclinations, from it to the end of the world.
The ex-president's utopia is total. The landscape in which he lives is
idyllic, his connection with Europe is history, and he conducts both a life
of the mind and a life of the body. His individual independence from the
world, indeed, his abode itself, is maintained by a creative combination of
manual and mental labor. Such a combination, at the heart of Marx's
hopes for freedom from an alienated relationship to work and production,
is available only at the edges of the continent. Its perfect embodiment is
no longer the revolutionary and ideologized hero who guides the masses
but the frontier explorer, resigned from society and unaided by any sys-
tem. We find this theme in many well-known contemporary European
travelers, such as Wenders, Baudrillard, Nooteboom, Herzog, among
others. Those vast open spaces, those unlimited frontiers, that exotic inex-
actitude, can be read as banished languages about Europe, banished
because the jamming of signs in Europe by technocracy leaves no space
for the inexact, the nonpresentable, the ungovernable, or the dramatic.
Europe itself is no longer dramatizable. Europe is clearly bound and lim-
ited. The drama, especially when it offers glimpses of utopic gestations, is
located outside Europe.10
The question of the drama, particularly when it tells of an Outside, is
also a question of scale; there are the great total narratives of imperial
powers, exploits, discoverers, and grand-scale ethnology. The travels of
Ibn Battuta, Friar Jordanus, Vasco da Gama, Ibn Jubayr, the early travel-
ers of the East India Company, and countless other lesser-known figures
became integrated into the knowledge and educational systems of the
respective empires in which their descriptions provided the only knowl-

Mohammed A. Bamyeh
edge of the great Beyond. When Rifa'a Rafe' at-Tahtawi, an Arab traveler,
visited Paris in post-Napoleonic times (1826-31) to become acquainted
with "the West" in general, he found an educational system in which
accounts of travels into Algeria1' and the Ottoman Empire were taught,
side by side with French, general history and historiography, Greek
mythology, and Napoleon's biography.'2 Beginning in the second half of
the nineteenth century, when Max Muller, Leopold Schroeder, Andrew
Lang, W. Robertson Smith, and others used ethnographic compilation to
bring into being the discourse of anthropology, travel lost its monopoly
over transmitting knowledge about the Outside. Such a loss of monopoly,
it can be argued, had indeed begun as early as the second half of the
eighteenth century, when travel lost its aristocratic nature and began to
enroll the ascending bourgeoisie.13Side by side with already supplied nar-
ratives of manners and customs, the Outside began to offer itself as a
medium for reflection and self-reflection, and as an aid for personal trans-
formation. It ceased to be the stuff for purely encyclopedic renditions of
otherness.
Cees Nooteboom stands out as contemporary Europe's most astute
representative of this form of travel writing. Nooteboom always returns to
tell of distant travel as an experience in transformation, as a ground for
philosophical meditation-a rather rare practice in the genre of contem-
porary travel writing. It is perhaps for this reason that his travels are con-
ducted, more often than not, outside Europe. One of his earliest travels,
he tells us, was to what is now the former Dutch colony of Surinam, a trip
in which one of the earliest details that could be remembered was the one
book accompanying the traveler on the ship, Ovid's Metamorphoses:

Perhapsbecausethere,underthe blazingskies,I had hoped to leavemy past


behind, somewhereover there betweenthe spikedshrubson the slopes, as
the snakeleavesits skin,as if I could changeinto someoneelse. But thatcan-
not be.14

Various grounds can be provided for the impossibility of such a meta-


morphosis, not the least of which is the qualification of the spiked shrubs
on the slopes to be entrusted with the past. Here, the "past" is an enclo-
sure of one's essence, but not the essence itself, like the skin of the snake,
worn only to be left behind, anywhere and at random and without much
thought as to the suitability of the burying ground. Would one react dif-
ferently if one had to leave one's skin behind and wear the Other if it were
the streets of New York City, an island in the middle of the Pacific, or in
proximity to a metropolis? The question posed by such a travel, with the
Metamorphosesat hand, is the appropriateness of the destination to grasp
a heritage, thereby freeing the ego from the experience of its limits, setting
the ego on the road again toward the horizons. In one sense, this dilemma

Frames of Belonging 39
could be related to a particular point in time at which a verdict on history
(personal or collective) is called for, yet cannot be delivered: the opulence
and accumulated record of one's past is neither so large as to inhibit all
thought of its disposal, nor so inessential that the nature of the dumping
ground is of no great consequence.
The Netherlands, Nooteboom's point of departure (and return), and
the country of his most devoted audience, may itself be seen to give rise to
this question. According to Hubert Smeets, one of its commentators,in only
half a generation the country was transformed from a semi-industrial,
agrarianland with a rigid code of morality into a "developed" culture with
high importance attached to individualism and all kinds of liberties, and
with a rare dialectic between religiosity and permissiveness.15With a past
so morally and organizationally different still within a single generation's
purview, the very phenomenality of metamorphosis becomes the central
subtext of national philosophy.16
In the case of Nooteboom, we have on the one hand a hint at a desire
to overcome an accident of birth, and on the other, an uncertainty about
the outside large enough to enlist a counterdesire to remain unscathed.17
The foreign being what it is, Nooteboom's flirtation with treason must
fail, one must know beforehand that it had to fail, because otherwise the
preoccupation with safeguards against a successful metamorphosis con-
taminates the possibility of traveling. Nooteboom's explicit talk of treason
("if there was already a talk of treason, then it was I who must have
attempted it"),18 a thought haunting a young man's first voyage, can be
seen to be premised on a modernist phenomenality of travel: this kind of
travel was taken more seriously than most travel is in the age when
tourism has overpowered adventure.19 But if such is the situation with
home and travel, if there is all this preknowledge, why then travel at all?
Cees Nooteboom seems to answer in the following form, in the context
of describing the same foreign beach on which one's own history was
interrogated:
Pelicansdove againstthe blazingsky,the sun hung amidstthe coconuttrees,
silhouette-likeagainstthe bright light, black figures glided up the sea in a
hollowedout tree trunk,the enchantedbeachwas as emptyas the pagesof a
book whichI had yet to write,and I reflected.... I was not planningto write
storiesaboutthis trip,as I am accustomedto do. This was my trip,and mine
alone.20

And yet, the beach was written. Writing here is the excuse taken from
Ovid, the record that, rather than risking the dismemberment of the past
on the spiked bushes by the sloping hills, takes the beach with all of its
shrubs along: travel writing accumulates the baggage of a past, the beach
is added to the ego in the spirit of the written, and is thereby preempted of

Mohammed A. Bamyeh
a menacing dissonance. The world written by me is that of which I am:
this is why one's own history, sailing along on the ship and chasing one
down the beach, demanding a proof of nontreason, no longer makes an
appearance. Like the writing to come, "one's own history" is, neither a
summarizable event nor an authentic or irrevocable delineation but a
placeholder for the ego until an infinitely postponable further notice. It
follows the traveler down the road with a warning that the house of the
ego ("as the snake leaves its skin") is itself the ego, that the ego is nothing
but that which contains it. My "unwilling past" can rest in peace, pre-
cisely on this unfamiliar beach, because a new writing will wed this unfa-
miliarity to my past's overworn encasement.21
Such a notion of writing is already well known. In Nooteboom's case,
it seems to engage a past that cannot be recalled without instigating a
notion of guilt. In today's Europe, the question of guilt is inseparable
from the question of the past, specifically, modern history (fascism, the
Holocaust, collaboration, the destruction of the old continent, and, less
commonly discussed, the subordination and pauperization of the
colonies). A reference to guilt, in this sense, is part and parcel of the
quest to settle an account with a sociohistorical sphere to which one con-
tinues to entertain a sense of belonging regardless. Guilt, of course, comes
from a variety of sources, usually when it is too late to do much about
what had instigated it, when it is already over, when the crime has already
been committed. It is also when one wants to disclaim responsibility for
the past in which one has lived, acted, or refused to act. And it is also
related, as everyone knows, to a kind of past that cannot be forgotten, and
for which, to borrow the Annales historian Le Goff's phrase, "centers for
the production of memory" exist.22
More recently, the question of historical guilt is being more audibly
produced in the eastern part of the continent, where the exercises of
memory-invocation are not restricted to feverish renamings of streets and
schools and factories and towns, but where one also finds antiquated and
monarchal orders dating back to the depths of previous centuries now
being remembered with fondness. A brief discussion of this state of affairs
will, I think, illustrate the point on guilt through an interesting variation.
One of the public figures who attempted to address such a phenomenon is
Andrei Plesu, the Romanian minister of culture, who recently told an
interviewer that Romanian culture and intellectual life are intensely typi-
fied by guilt.23The problem of culture in Romania now concerns the pos-
sibilities of dispensing with such a guilt. Here, the story of post-World
War II Europe repeats itself, when various national cultures were busy
amplifying the stories of resistance and disclaiming all evidence of collab-
oration as the property of individuals who were not party to a "national
heritage." In Eastern Europe we see the same search for signs of collabo-

Frames of Belonging 41
ration as an exercise of belated and now safe opposition, but which is pri-
marily motivated by guilt over not having belonged to a romanticized
phase of dissidence.24
The paradigm outlined above is an extension of Plesu's way of
explaining the rhetorical rigidities permeating the political scene of today's
Eastern Europe.25But he also hints at another source of guilt, less directly
political in nature, which he encountered after a career in art history. At
one point, Plesu discovered the absurdity of commentary: "the painting
has no possibility of speaking other than through itself," he informs his
interviewer. In this respect, guilt seems to have been stomached after
interpretationrevealed its inferiority to the work "itself." On the one hand,
the work of commentary owes its existence to the pre-existence of the art-
work "itself," which in any case has no need for the commentary and, in
fact, has every reason to complain about a discourse of interpretation that
serves only to prevent it from speaking directly to its audience. Commen-
tary here must be guilty in that it impedes the appearance of the work
Very often, the "itself." Through such a dynamic, the work of commentary reveals its
ingratitude for, indeed betrayal of, an artwork that made it possible in the
resolution of the first place. Guilt, here, is parasitic existence.
Parasitic existence in itself does not annul the principle of subjectivity.
trauma of guilt Very often, the resolution of the trauma of guilt is predicated upon rescu-
ing a guilty ego, rather than on self-flagellation. Here, we may immediately
is predicated detect three rescuing modalities: the one proposed by Plesu, premised on
abolishing the ego's parasitic existence through devaluing the work of
upon rescuing
commentary itself. Treason, here, is treason to "true" empiricality, on
a guilty ego, whose behalf no commentary can stand. In terms of travel literature, the
closest approximation of such a case in today's Europe is Nooteboom's:
rather than on who cannot avoid the thought of treason with the first step out of the
door, a thought to which the cure is not a return to the old order, but
self-flagellation. rather writing the foreign as an inconclusive drama?To fully conclude the
story by outlining all the ramifications of the foreign takes from that for-
eign, just as in Plesu's commentary, the right to a sovereign existence in
the world, a right to which it is entitled by virtue of the fact that it had
captured attention in the first place. This sovereign right of the foreign, in
turn, presupposes that it alone could demonstrate its own essence. The
conclusion to the story of the foreign must be regarded as its own entitle-
ment, rather than as that of the accidental traveler.
The trauma engendered by such a notion of the accidentality of com-
mentary to truth, and the parasitic existence that is incapable of truly
belonging anywhere in general, bring forth the question of the writer's
self-disposal. But no adequate burial ground can ever be found. One
replaces one's past by adding to it. The knowing ego becomes an ency-
clopedia of otherings, a collection of the writable, a walking record.

42 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
Hans Magnus Enzensberger offers an antidote to such a vulnerability Who cannot
to transformation by firmly establishing the priority of an original ground.
His descriptions take the form of self-reflection from whose cleavages one avoid the
can detect not only a preestablished (utopic) program (e.g., Ingeborg
Bachmann's poem, which concludes his book), but a modality of posing thought of
questions that comes in no ambiguous way from the "cold north."26In
treason with the
this spirit, a book like Ach Europa!can be read as a book about Germany.
At one point, Enzensberger himself openly expresses this possibility, when
first step out of
recognizing the pointlessness of his attempt to "know" Sweden by reading
its constitution: the door, a

My predilectionfor studyingconstitutionswas perhapsonly a typical Ger-


thought to which
man obsession,borne out of the unfortunatehistoryof a people, which had
only too much ground to dread its authorities as though a plague. .... [It is the cure is not a
possiblethat] when it is a matterof defendingone's own freedom [in Scan-
dinavia],one is not referredto a piece of paper.27 return to the old

Despite the early detection of this bias, the deeper level at which the order, but rather
original program and point of departure operate persists throughout
Enzensberger's work. His travelogue consists not of everyday diaries, but writing the
rather of an inconclusive effort to render a synthetic conclusion on what
"Europe" means. This "Europe," in turn, is measured by means of how foreign as an
distant its various components are from a utopic standard. Nowhere is
this distance greater than in Italy. There, Enzensberger sees a country tee- inconclusive
tering on the brink of collapse, yet triumphant in spite of its "pathological
drama?
calmness";28he denounces, through the mouth of the Italian author Giulio
Bollati, a country in which "natural talent triumphs over method, acci-
dental richness over the discipline of knowledge" and where everything
leads into illusion in a culture that can be situated between antiquity and
science fiction.29 Enzensberger makes no secret that his hope for Italy can
be encapsulated in Nicola Jelpo, an ordinary, hardworking, and responsi-
ble director of coin minting, whose virtue consists of honesty, clarity of
tasks, and professionalism,30 in sharp contrast to the normal conduct of
business in a hopelessly myth-ridden country. The fact that the mythical
vision of Italy is a long tradition in the West (e.g., Goethe's Italianische
Reise,Wordsworth'sMemoirsof a Tourin Italy, Byron's ChildeHarold'sPil-
grimage,Dupaty's Lettressur l'Italie, and Montaigne's Diary of a Journey to
Italy) deserves only to be loathed, for it is more concerned with what is
missing in the home of the romantic tradition than with the "real" Italy:

Just as [we did] two hundred years ago, here we can today compensate for
our defects, here we fill up illusions, here we poke around amidst the ruins of
an old, half-forgotten utopia.31

Frames of Belonging 43
Such a campaign against "illusions" gains momentum, apparently,
not only because illusions are bad in general but because there is now the
added danger that the Italian model is on its way to engulfing all of the
Europe to come, especially given that such a state of affairs is instigating
little opposition. Italy is no longer an "exotic exception," because every-
where one can now see corrupt parties, parasitic bureaucracy, patronage,
illegal work, and immobility.32The fact that "new strategies for survival"
are also detected in the same breath leads to no celebratory discourse,
since the attention of this traveler is highly focused on the pathological
aspects of the Italian model.
On the other hand, a number of recent commentators such as Peter
Fritzsche, Theodor Wieser and Frederick Spott, John Haycraft, Joseph
LaPalombara, and Uffe 0stergard reject this gloom. For many of those,
there is no reason why the spread of the Italian model should be lamented,
as it is in the upright composure of someone like Enzensberger. For
LaPalombara, Italy is not a land of indecipherable and distant myth nor is
it perpetually resting on the edge of disaster; rather, its metaphor is the
tower of Pisa: inclined but solidly anchored. LaPalombara claims that
Italy is one of the most solidly established democracies because it is per-
haps the most pragmatic country on earth, far exceeding in that virtue
even the U.S., which wishes to preserve that status for itself.33The Italian
model, one of the options open for the Europe of the future, is contrasted
by 0stergard, a Danish observer, to other availableoptions, namely Amer-
icanization (most economic freedoms, least equal) and Scandinavization
(most equal, least free). He finds an immense virtue in its seeming
ungovernability, which Enzensberger so loudly bewails:

"Italianconditions"[Enzensberger'sphrase]are not only corruption,theft,


and dawdling,but also a desperateattemptto personalizethe cold and for-
mal social manners which had created the state and the market.It is an
attemptto actually"civilize"civil society,or [even]better:to civilizewith all
the weaknessassociatedwith human effort. Whetherthe corruptionwins
out or the narrowerpersonalrelations,thatdependsto a greatextenton our-
selvesand on the analyticalqualityof the utopiaswhichwe bringforth.This
is the moralbackgroundfor my joyous celebrationupon the victoryof the
Italian[model]and otherdisordersover the well-meaningplans.There is-
at leastthereonce was-a "Danish"capacityto live withthe necessaryanar-
chy and at the same time createa reasonableframeworkfor those who did
not succeed at it. Could such a thing also be possiblein biggerstatesin the
future?34

The tower of Pisa, thus, no longer necessarily signifies the abyss lurk-
ing just around the corner, but might just as well point to the face of the
only possible utopia: its attraction consists not of its blind obedience to the

44 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
customary a priori rules of perfection, but of its silent underground trust- Nation-states,
worthiness. It displays of itself just enough to make a mockery of sym-
metric thinking. Such a magic quality-that is, defying appearances, or-in the
namely, stereotypes-is traced in 0stergard's analysis to a continuity in
Italian socioeconomic life dating back to Roman times. Following the clas- words of Benedict
sic works of Marcel Mauss and Jens Erik Skydsgaard, 0stergard points
Anderson-
out that the main category of belonging in ancient Roman society was
fides, that is, the exchange of benefits, services, and obligations through a
"imagined
social network defined by friendship and thankfulness, ratherthan abstract
rules and regulations. In such a "prosaic economy," a lack of thankfulness communities,"
(undankbarkeit)was the most grievous crime one could commit. It was
sufficient to ostracize one from society as a traitor.35Loss of belonging, in demand a con-
this respect, resulted precisely from "blind" adherence-that is, at the
cost of fides-to abstract rules.36 ception of
Here, we have a conception of belonging that operates and is valid
only with respect to small, subnational levels of personal or personalizable belonging (and,
networks.37 Nation-states, or-in the words of Benedict Anderson-
"imagined communities," demand a conception of belonging (and, by by extension,
extension, treason) of which the notion of empirical thankfulness is no
more than a disposable component.38 The experience of marginalized treason) of which
communities vis-a-vis such a demand from a larger and engulfing society the notion of
provides a dilemma articulated by Frantz Fanon as an "abandonment-
neuroses."39Those tormented by a fear of being abandoned if they fail to empirical thank-
provide belonging credentials reciprocate society's welcome by suspecting
statements of love or togetherness, persistently demanding proof of pas- fulness is no more
sions, and holding on to an essential attitude-"not to love in order to
avoid being abandoned."40 Caryl Phillips, a Caribbean-British traveler than a disposable
through Europe, uses such a concept to explain Othello's predicament.
Othello is alone in Europe, detached from all heritage that could have component.
given him support in a culture in whose moral universe he was an out-
sider. Thus he perishes from being deprived of the possibility of trusting.
This trust, then, becomes the theme of Phillips's travelogue, The European
Tribe,in which contemporary European blacks are called upon to lend
peer support to each other, so that the rightness of their positions and cul-
tures may be recertified in their eyes. The only other option is given by the
tragedy of that lone wolf Othello who, lacking support in the face of all of
Venice, succumbs to a "European death-suicide."41
Phillips's book consists of a one-dimensional European journey
through Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, France, Venice, Amsterdam, Ger-
many, Poland, Norway, and Moscow.42 It is held together by a unilinear
scene of confrontation with a white and suspicious Europe. Such a per-
sistent consciousness of alterity offers no respite since the abandonment-
neurosis has defined the limits of the expedition before it begins, very

Frames of Belonging 45
much like Nooteboom's travels. In this case, however, the world outside,
rather than being added to the ego in the spirit of its writability, is
assigned a given, foreign, uncontested identity. Phillips has no confidence
in any European shelter. Here, treason is impossible to entertain: there is
no "one's own" past to be left behind on the spiked shrubs by the slopes
on the beach. The lack of that abode of an identity-which one could
potentially speak of betraying-is itself the instigator of this travel. Phillips
begins to explore Europe after a long series of identity failures: having
grown up in Britain, he feels estranged from that hateful country and
incapable of seeing "himself" in Shakespeare or Milton to the same extent
the white man does. The United States, being a country built by Euro-
pean "second raters," is not interesting as an alternative, and it is too late
for the Caribbean, in which the author no longer has any "roots."43The
rest of the world being inaccessible or undesirable, what remains is the
hope of redefining Europe.44
Given that identities are fixed from the start, the book becomes
entirely predictable. Phillips roams Europe seeking signs of blackness,
signs of his distance from Europe, signs of Europe's distance from him,
even in the middle of the Arctic circle, where barely anyone else is in
sight. In a local bar, he finds a black woman who had been led to that cold
territory by marriage and fate. She is portrayed as a failure, much like
Phillips's other black encounter a bit to the south, in Oslo. Most of
Phillips's black discoveries in Europe, which include James Baldwin in
southern France, are lonely and in need of a vision of solidarity or belong-
ing. This travelogue grants "Europe" a unifying whiteness, rather than
affirming the legitimacy of a niche for difference. The crucial contrast in
this respect is between diversity and totalizability.While totalizing consists
of positing "Europe" as a meaningful cultural concept, the claim to diver-
sity posits the superior essentiality of a variety of local spheres over and
above what "Europe" as a whole could mean. In Phillips's travels, the
legitimacy of smaller fields of identification is sacrificed for a contest over
the whole of "Europe," a contest that must be lost, because the makers of
"Europe" are precisely the standardizers from whom Enzensberger's ex-
president had fled "to the end of the world." Thus, Phillips's frustrated
duel with "Europe" ends neither by fulfillment nor by resolution nor by
transformation. Its end is exhaustion, a demure return to England.
In contrast, while Phillips wanders around in the Arctic circle seeking
the hardly available signs of blackness, Joseph Hone's trip to the European
north reveals neither its limits nor its distance from, nor its substitutability
for, customary Europe. The lack of anyone in sight is no ground for far-
fetched meditations on identity and belonging, but rather for seeking what
links such a sparsely inhabited territory to "Europe." Thus, Hone grasps

46 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
onto one identifying sign, without which the northern landscape will not
be felt in the warmth of "one's living room": "And I could tell then how
close the music was to the spirit of the place: austere, pure, other-worldly
with a crystal line of melody-the things we know Sibelius for."45
That little-known land is thereby given a name and a representation,
a reference point and a meaning. The spirit of the northern countryside is
given to us by Sibelius. It is the same countryside, it will be recalled, to
which Enzensberger has exiled the endangered utopic inexactitude of the
continent and to which Phillips went to confirm his distance from Europe.
But in all of these cases, the north is just another escape route, open more
to Enzensberger and Phillips than to Hone: Enzensberger has already
denounced the south as a romanticized and corrupt fetish of the cold
countries, itself in need of being remedied rather than being the "land of
one's choice." Similarly, Phillips sees in the south nothing but
the settings of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, which he considers to
be the most morally suspect of Shakespeare's plays. For these two, the
north is an escape par excellence; indeed, it may be the only one open,
now that the road to the south has been corrupted and the East is not
really Europe (for Hone, it is the land of the "Other Europeans"). Hone,
however, being a BBC correspondent and, as such, a part of the system of
reporting, brings the north back with him by assigning to it a representa-
tion that belongs to collections forming a potential living room: Sibelius
stands for it.
Hone's book is held together by an explicit central message: every-
where in Europe he is appalled by the increasing banality and gentrifica-
tion of most (West) European city centers, with the murky exception of
Lisbon. He laments the destruction of the "way we used to live," blaming
it on tourism and economic works. Hone's source of contention, however,
is relatively easy to discern: he runs around Europe armed with literary
descriptions of places dating from the first half of the century, and there-
fore he can barely see a trace of the romanticized cities or landscapes; the
little that is left is merely waiting for its turn to be standardized and filled
with "plastic hotels." The "way we used to live" is exemplified by this
scene in a back-alley hotel bar in Viella in northern Spain, found only
after arduous search:

And quite suddenly three large and amiable Jersey cows pushed their way
through the curtain beads into the bar, stomping slowly into a back room,
eyeing the drinkers casually as they went. No one paid them the slightest
attention. I heard them being milked afterwards in what I supposed was the
kitchen. Now that's the kind of tourism I really like, and it turned into a
splendid evening. But my goodness, you have to travel far and wide in
Spain-and anywhere else these days-to find it.46

Frames of Belonging 47
One thing is There is a fine line between statements speaking of an actual "loss"
and those paying tribute to a tradition that seeks to anchor collective iden-
obvious: tities in historic continuities. For instance, Hone assumes that the extinc-
tion of the exotic in the name of homogenization is only now being
the charm
accomplished. One has to ignore, for instance, the proposition that the
existence of something we call history may itself be an indication that
enjoyed by such a destruction has been taking place all along. William Hazlitt, a trav-
eler to sites of antiquity in the nineteenth century, echoed almost the same
Hone's "way
message in decaying Rome:
we used No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol
where Julius Caesar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a
to live" lies in low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter's not equal to St.
Paul's: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I
its absence.
thought that here were works immovable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and
lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not . . . the smell of garlick
prevails over the odour of antiquity.47

One thing is obvious: the charm enjoyed by Hone's "way we used to live"
lies in its absence. Thus it can be used to interrogate a present that has
fallen into disrepair. That much of "the way we used to live" is still here
must be disclaimed, especially if its sight is disconcerting or does not
match the record. Imagine, for instance, an observation about Munich
such as: "It is almost impossible to see the origins of the Third Reich in
this very civilised place."48 The idea (which Hannah Arendt contests in
Eichmann in Jerusalem) is that the ordinariness of civilization spells out an
incapacity for barbarism. Or imagine, for instance, Hone's abhorrence of
Spanish "blood culture," in particular, and the lack of "femininity" in
the definition of Spain, in general,49 which, since it is neither part of "the
way we used to live" nor part of that which now defines European civi-
lization, is traced to Spain's contacts with the Muslim world, its geogra-
phy, and its isolation from "Europe," a continent otherwise allergic to
blood cultures. Or imagine his trip to the East, where Hone forgets that he
had lamented the loss of Western European cities to blandness, so that he
refuses to let himself be impressed with Eastern European cities such as
Warsaw and Gdansk, which were meticulously rebuilt and which, rather
than remind the traveler in a (then) enemy territory of "the way we used
to live," lead him to dismiss the reconstruction as an exercise in memory-
substitution for the emptiness of the present.50
Such cliches are typical in the repertoire of judgments populating the
system of reporting under which contemporary Western Europe lan-
guishes, and which shows no sign of letting up. It is painfully difficult, for
instance, to find any discourse about Eastern Europe that does not take its
affair with communism as its main obsession, assumption, and starting

48 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
and ending point, for that is all that the East has ever meant, and now that
it is "free," it is no longer interesting. It is immensely difficult to challenge
the standard story of a major event like World War II, with its clear delin-
eation of good and evil, together with its assumption that the Good (which
is still in charge) was not contaminated, when it went to the colonies,
with the manner of thinking of the Evil (which was unquestionably van-
quished). That is why travel as reporting, a genre typified by Hone, finds
that the time is ripe for a happier, more optimistic discourse. After all, the
road to "Europe 1992" was paved with such a complacency. And it is per-
haps for this reason that Hone's long monologue about our betrayal of
"the way we used to live" begins in the fields of Passchendaele, site of a
devastating battle in World War I. There he begins the travel through
Europe, looking at the fields around him while expressing a contemporary
lack of comprehension for why a hundred thousand men perished in that
mud.51 It is significant, I think, that such events have now become "diffi-
cult to comprehend." Is such a difficulty related to the nature of past
events themselves, or is it part of an integral Europe-to-be, a Europe
whose cultural foundations spell out, first, a will to optimism, and second,
a relaxed attention to what cannot be represented in one's own living
space?

If travel is understood as knowledge sought by subjective intervention in


an everyday normalcy that is destined to remain otherwise inaudible,
rather than as a meditation on and a magnification of the already
reportable, then the only evidence for it here is Nooteboom's travel outside
Europe. This mode pertains to travel that calls to the attention of relatively
small audiences the immense expanse of the world outside, an immensity
to which the lack of conclusivity of such a mode is itself evidence. The
continuing possibility of such a mode at the heart of contemporary
Europe is perhaps owing not to the nature of the written material itself but
rather to the continuing presence of small and marginal audiences here
and there in the continent. Such audiences, which define themselves by
unique, nongeneralizable cultural spheres, are evidenced to the extent
that a total investment in mass transmission of cultural signals is resisted.
For the fleeting forays of mass media into the image of the "world,"philo-
sophic travel substitutes extended departures that can be sustained pre-
cisely because of the ever-present, yet never fulfillable, promise of per-
sonal metamorphosis.
But within the continent itself, travel is no longer dramatic or herme-
neutic in nature. Such a relaxed expectation from traveling-indeed, the
very fact that travel has become not only philosophically but also empiri-
cally easier-is perhaps one of the general cultural tropes underpinning
the possibility of thinking of "Europe 1992" as a programmatic, orderly

Frames of Belonging 49
Travel has process, to which all talk of "cultural" investment or passion is no more
than a shy appendage. Travel has become "lite"-indeed, it is invited by
become "lite"- the diminishing phenomenality of borders themselves. On the other hand,
one of the heaviest baggages carried across any meaningfulborders, as I
indeed, it is thought would be safe to assume, is one's own sense of belonging. That
one can entertain treason indicates that a more or less essential "differ-
invited by the
ence" can be posited with which one can possibly negotiate one's soul.
The three travels within Europe addressed here reveal various reassign-
diminishing
ments of the location at which a sense of belonging could be betrayed: for
phenomenality Enzensberger, the source of contention consists of the flight into myth and
illusion from a utopic standard that may itself not be any less mythical.
of borders Treason is not the writer's deed but rather the stuff of which his or her
report consists. It is presented as a turning away from the "Bohmen am
themselves. Meer," which is not here and which cannot yet be described, but which
must nonetheless continue to be posited because, as it would seem, of the
unavoidable persistence of self-reflection. For Phillips, the trauma is the
impossibility of treason, given the impossibility of belonging. Deprived of
the possibility of trusting, Othello can engage in no duty-bound existence
of which the definition of social life consists. And amid such a predica-
ment, he takes note of the fact that European culture has allocated a spe-
cific passage for those whose social uprightness cannot be guaranteed by
the haunting possibility of treason: suicide. For Hone, as for Enzensberger
(who is also a journalist), treason is the property of the reportable and not
the author's. The loss of the great European cities to the wave of gentrifi-
cation is decried as a betrayal of a foundational point in time, coinciding
with the modernist heritage, to which the experience of the city was a
matter of life's ecstasy. It is ignored that such a "loss" can also be seen as
one of the indicators for the coming into being of a "mass society" (as it
was termed in C. Wright Mills's seminal study), to which reductive and
thus universally marketable common denominators are essential.52Such a
mass society, one could argue, was itself the precursor for the general
Europe that has been on the stove for some time. Hone protests the
destruction of an urban sense of human proximity and "felt" history (to
which the only evidence is literary), while at the same time seeking signs
of an already posited "Europe" everywhere.
This essentially journalistic operation also resides at the heart of con-
temporary telecommunication paradigms and guides its transmission of
cross-cultural signals. Naming is crucial for such transmissions: "Italy,"
for instance, is introduced not as a temporary and purely technical place-
holder for a plethora of vicissitudes, but rather as a sufficient marker for
opening a discourse about a phenomenon whose summarizable foreign-
ness is pregiven. To appreciate the distance of this operation from pre-

50 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
modern times, one need only look at the commencement of at-Tahtawi's
voyage to France in 1826. After describing the ship's departure from the
port of Alexandria (itself commented on through a history of its name and
its comparability to other cities with the same name in the world), he
begins to ponder what the sea in which the ship is sailing would be called.
He says that the Arabs call it either the "Roman" or the "Levantian" sea,
while the Europeans are more inclined to call it either the "Mediter-
ranean" or the "Internal" sea.53 The variety of names was still not dis-
turbing, and the question of the name did not then need to be settled. The
fact that only one name for that sea survives now-everywhere-refers to
more than the triumph of a certain geographic conception and its cultural
assumption. It also refers to the fact that naming itself, as an organizing
principle of knowledge, topics, locations, explanenda, and collectives, has
become crucial for tales of culture. Such namings can seek to compress a
variety of encounters, be it a cultural space, a political system, an exotic
behavior, a tone of voice, or a body of missing information. Such namings
may proceed before a reportable experience has fully crystallized, indeed,
perhaps as early as its reportability is discerned. This activity is akin to a
librarian's or taxonomer's consciousness, motivated by the need to pre-
empt, or at least prepare for, the formation of unorganizable bodies of
knowledge. In one sense, such a hesitation to leave even the slightest
pseudo-experience or pseudo-phenomenon without a larger, identifying
category is the core of Foucault's concept of the archive as the ordering of
the re-searchable.54 On the other hand, the source of such an effort to
name could be the quest to "inventorize" the experience; in other words,
in a culture that sees itself to be congested with signs, such as the post-
modern West, the principle of efficiency requires that things so new as to
demand an extra effort to be grasped and elucidated, and with which one
is ill-equipped to deal at the moment, be deposited in a name that will save
them from disappearance until their time comes. Thus, the named phe-
nomenon will be protected from erasure even though it has not been fully
experienced by all those who have it "in the living room," and even
though its magnitude is not large enough to call for a full obsession with
its substance. Such an activity dresses a named potentiality in the clothes
of authenticity.
Two of the cultural foundations for valorizing the name and naming,
as outlined above, are the congestion of the culture with signs and its
foundation on the principle of efficiency. Both have been plentiful since
the outbreak of mass communications, technocratic administration, and
cybernetic consciousness.55 To postulate that the necessity of the name
consists in its protection of the phenomenon from erasure may seem per-
tinent to a culture that distrusts its memory, a culture that knows that it

Frames of Belonging 51
has done some forgetting before, and that it is still capable of redoing it. It
is a culture afraid of confusion, realizing that without an even superficial
differentiation between things such as in their signs, one sign could easily
jam, confound, or erase another. But a name by itselfprotects no memory,
even if its presence marks an ephemeral faith that has sought to leave in a
sign its passing moment into posterity. In the meantime, what has been
named assumes its life and begins to acquire, shed, and change meanings,
just as "Europe" is doing today. "Europe" is ubiquitous in such an expe-
dition, even though it has lost the empirical evidence for its history, as
Hone attests, and is in any case incapable of comprehending it. In other
words, its treason to its history has been deadly only to its history.

Notes

The author would like to thank the SSRC-MacArthur Committee on Interna-


tional Peace and Security for its support in the research of this article.

1. Norbert Elias, Uberden Prozess der Zivilization, 2 vols. (Basel: Haus zum
Falken, 1939).
on MaterialCivilizationand Capitalism
2. FernandBraudel,Afterthoughts
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 75.
3. Significantly, all authors examined in this essay meditate, in various ways,
on a notion of betrayal whenever they address the theme of belonging.
4. Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe(London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 29.
5. Such a conception is articulated by a leading French commentator, Edgar
Morin, who discusses the inescapability of transnational consciousness by point-
ing to a clutter of objects on his desk coming from various parts of the world. See
his Penser l'Europe(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), esp. 196.
6. See Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, ed. Petra Jager (Frank-
furt am Main: Horio Klostermann, 1984).
de vijandenvan de
7. Ton Lemaire, Twijfelaan Europa:Zijn de intellectuelen
Europesecultuur? (Schoten, Belgium: Uitgeverij Westland, 1990), 33.
aus siebenLan-
8. Hans MagnusEnzensberger,AchEuropa!Wahrnehmungen
dern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 483. Elsewhere, upon visiting Por-
tugal, Enzensberger is also advised to leave his map behind because it could not
possibly tell the truth about the country (179-82).
9. Ibid., 484 (emphasis added).
10. In this context, events in former Yugoslavia or elsewhere in Eastern
Europe are also "outside" phenomena. None of the countries of the East are
being seriously considered for membership in the EC. The prevailing assumption
is that, before such countries can join, they must go through a transitional period
that would make them, economically as well as in terms of their political culture,
more palatable to Western taste.
11. Incidentally, Algeria was taken over while at-Tahtawi was still in Paris,
and became France's longest-held major colony.
12. Rifa'a Rafe' at-Tahtawi, Takhtisal-IbrTzfi TalkhTsBarTz(Bulaq, Egypt:
Dar at-Tiba'a al-Khidewiyyah, 1834), 148-49.
Studienzur
13. Gertrud Kalb, Bildungsreiseund literarischerReisebericht:

52 Mohammed A. Bamyeh
englischen Reiseliteratur (1700-1850) (Niirnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1981),
166-67.
14. Cees Nooteboom, De Brief (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1988), 22.
15. Hubert Smeets, "Het success van Nederland," NRC Handelsblad (Rot-
terdam), 8 September 1990.
16. This is not to say, however, that such meditations on metamorphosis will
always yield results or that they will always overcome practices of exclusion. The
point is simply that such a state of affairs gives rise to a widely received way of
thinking, in which both the past and the present intertwine in a rather direct (and
often pragmatic) fashion.
17. Such a theme seems to permeate other regional literatures. In his study
of the contemporary Scottish novel, Manfred Malzahn notes that when the
heroes of the novel are thrown into a foreign country, they retain an innocence
and moral goodness in spite of the potentially corrosive impact of outsidedness
on morals. That the foreign is "morally and clinically infectious," he observes, is
a widespread theme in both Scottish and American literatures. Otherwise, for-
eignness remains undefined, so that Scottish heroes, rather than confronting the
world outside, spend much of their time overseas seeking each other. See his
Aspects of Identity: The ContemporaryScottish Novel (1978-1981) as National Self-
Expression (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), esp. 201-4.
18. Nooteboom, De Brief, 22.
19. For a general treatment of this theme, see Paul Fussell, Abroad: British
Literary Travellingbetweenthe Wars(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
37-50. For some anthropological accounts of tourism, see Rolf Meyersohn,
"Popular Culture Criticism as Applied to Tourism: Parallels and Convergences,"
Loisir et societe4, no. 1 (May 1980). Also, Lloyd Hudmand, Tourism:A Shrinking
World(Columbus, Ohio: Grid, 1986).
20. Nooteboom, De Brief, 21.
21. In at least one sense, this operation is comparable to Derrida's notion of
writing as being "unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is ...
the vigilance and failure of censorship." See Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 226.
22. Jacques Le Goff, "Revival of the Historical Biography," Times Literary
Supplement, 14 April 1989: 394.
23. The discussion to follow, as will become obvious, does not address any
specifically "Romanian" culture of guilt. Rather, it is meant to illuminate differ-
ent aspects of the notion of guilt.
24. Andrei Plesu, interview, NRC Handelsblad(Rotterdam), 6 October 1990.
25. See, on this theme, Martin Pollack, "Zuriick in die Vergangenheit: Der
Nationalitatenhader im verschwindenden Osteuropa," Kursbuch 102 (1990),
54-64.
26. See for example Enzensberger, Ach Europa!, 106-8.
27. Ibid., 33.
28. Ibid., 114.
29. Ibid., 115.
30. Ibid., 102.
31. Ibid., 107.
32. Ibid., 109.
33. Joseph LaPalombara, Democracy:Italian Style (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1987).

Frames of Belonging 53
34. Uffe Ostergard, Die Politik im nachpolitischen Zeitalter (Arhus, Denmark:
Center for Kulturforskning, 1990), 27.
35. Ibid., 13-14.
36. It is significant, in this respect, that this very impersonality of (bureau-
cratic) rules furnished the ground, early in this century, for Max Weber's cele-
bration of the heightened rationality of governance and society. Weber's subtext
did not devalue personalizable networks as frames of belonging, but clearly
detected in them the potential for corruption. See From Max Weber:Essays in
Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1947).
37. The decay of personal networks in highly institutionalized societies is
also detected by the aforementioned at-Tahtawi during his stay in Paris in the
early nineteenth century. He notes that in "civilized countries," individual "gen-
erosity" to others is replaced by more anonymous charity organizations
(111-12).
38. John E Kennedy's famous words, "Ask not what your country can do for
you" are perhaps the classic expression of such a conception. The "country" is
excused from having to provide any tangibilities for which one repays with a
notion of belonging. Indeed, asking for just such a tangibility comes out as a
scorned obsession with a notion of individualism that, if imperative for economic
logic, must give way to abstraction when a phenomenality whose rewards are less
obvious-"the country"-is in question.
39. Frantz Fanon, Les damnes de la terre (Paris: Editions la Decouverte,
1961), 31-47.
40. Phillips, The European Tribe, 50.
41. Ibid., 51.
42. I am not claiming that this travelogue stands for minority literature in
today's Europe; it only typifies a specific experience of the limits inflicted upon
oneself as a result of accepting the provided definitions of social totalities.
43. Ibid., 9.
44. One context for ignoring the rest of the world is revealed at a later stage,
when the author accepts without question the superiority of the West, as evi-
denced in this dispatch from Moscow: "Why don't the Africans get more help
from the West? Wouldn't they prefer it instead of having to come into this hellish
climate and grapple with the Russian alphabet?" (118).
45. Joseph Hone, Gone Tomorrow: Some More Collected Travels (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1981), 119.
46. Ibid., 27.
47. William Hazlitt, Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1824). In
Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1932), vol. 10: 232.
48. Hone, Gone Tomorrow, 21.
49. Ibid., 73-75.
50. Ibid., 127.
51. Ibid., 10.
52. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978).
53. At-Tahtawi, TakhlTsal-IbrTz, 24.
54. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon,
1972), 79-131.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh
55. Obviously, such processes are not restricted to Europe. But "Europe
1992" offers a transparent model because in it the questions of collectiveheritage,
meaning, culture, etc., are posited by the recent coming into being of "Europe
1992." These questions call for experiments in selective forgetting, genealogical
construction, and narratives of togetherness. But, in general, it would be impru-
dent to say that "Europe" has a monopoly over any of these experiments.

Frames of Belonging 55

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