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Devising conviviality: intersubjective becoming through labor of community-building

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Abstract

Based on an ethnographic take on Malmö Community Theater, this article focuses on the method of devising in theater to explore the labor of community-building it generated in terms of performative alliances, embodied translations, affective negotiations and resource (re)distribution. Particular attention is paid to the negotiation of gendered/racialized narratives that have been central to the border-making practices of the European states and the place-making practices of newcomers. Departing from Levinas' work on intersubjectivity and Gilroy's conceptualization of conviviality, this article argues that convivial encounters that are not based on a shared history may need to be facilitated by community-building labor for intersubjective becoming to be rendered possible, and can be sustained through the unfolding of alterity rather than the recognition of commonality. The article also argues that ethnographical methods are well-suited to capture the factors and processes that feed into the making and unmaking of emerging subjectivities.

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Notes

  1. For notable exceptions, see Hadfield (2009), Rzepnikowska (2017), and Vincent et al. (2018).

  2. In the vocabulary of Malmö’s asylum movement, “people with the experience of migration” is often preferred over the word “migrants”, and “people without the experience of migration” stands in opposition to this category. In this daily speech, migration is conceptualized as one of the many experiences one may have, rather than an overarching identity.

  3. Recent migratory movements to Europe have been framed as ‘crisis’, which induced a form of collective anxiety and legitimized the execution of emergency measures such as emergency border controls that otherwise, outside of the construction of this event-ness, would not be morally or ethically justified (Rajaram 2015).

  4. Amin (2008) defines conviviality as civic ease in public spaces, Neal et al. (2013, p. 315) uses being ‘at ease’ as a proxy word for convivial, and Wise and Velayutham states that convivial relations are “affectively at ease relations of co-existence and accommodation” (2014, p. 407).

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Funding

The broader research this work is part of was funded by GRACE, Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe, a European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 675378.

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  1. Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Tegiye Birey

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Tegiye Birey

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Correspondence to Tegiye Birey.

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Birey, T. Devising conviviality: intersubjective becoming through labor of community-building. Subjectivity 14, 133–153 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-021-00122-3

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