The Right to Free Movement as Temporal Deterritorialization in the Landscaped Garden
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Emma Patchett
Emma Patchett is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Initial Training Network for the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) project, based at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Her doctoral research is on diaspora legal studies, metamorphosis and the theorization of literature from the Roma diaspora. She has published an essay on “ ‘Corpus cartography’: diasporic identity as flesh and blood,” Special Issue “Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid post-modernity,”Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies (2013).
Abstract
Rather than establishing the right to free movement as a fundamental right for all European citizens, the Free Movement Directive has surreptitiously enshrined the sovereign right to dissect and shape concepts of territorial belonging, as can be seen by the legitimizing of calls for restricting categories of desirability, and the delayed and flawed transposition of the directive into domestic immigration law. I will be performing a spatio-legal reading of a literary text in order to consider the implications of the legal right to free movement in the context of the Directive, specifically in relation to the Roma in Europe. This paper will argue that the narrative construction of a garden space serves as an effective metaphor for the attempt to derive agency and embodiment from the traversing of supra-national space, and will consider the role of counter-narrative as potentially deterritorializing or “uprooting” concepts of territorial belonging within the EU. Rather than destabilize national belonging through the cultivation of a heterotopian pluralistic space, complex vertical legalities pruning the garden space emphasize instead a liminal space of boundaries enacted through the Directive, which provide an ambivalent solution to marginalized groups. This spatial reading attempts, therefore, to move towards a temporal – rather than territorial – inter-pretation of the embodiment of space and the right to free movement.
About the author
Emma Patchett is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Initial Training Network for the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) project, based at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Her doctoral research is on diaspora legal studies, metamorphosis and the theorization of literature from the Roma diaspora. She has published an essay on “ ‘Corpus cartography’: diasporic identity as flesh and blood,” Special Issue “Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid post-modernity,” Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Gardens of Justice
- Voltaire's Garden
- A Bundle of Sticks in My Garden
- The Right to Free Movement as Temporal Deterritorialization in the Landscaped Garden
- The Other Otherwise: Law, Historical Trauma and the Severed Gardens of Justice
- “He Does Not Love Me, Nor I He!” The Critic's Love is of Critique, not of Law
- Research
- Renaissance Actors and Lawyers: Instability of Texts and of Social Trafficking: The Comedy of Errors
- Where Laws do Reach: Public Opinion, the Theatres, and the 1737 Licensing Act
- “The law is a wise serpent”: Subtextual Subversion in The Revenger's Tragedy
- The Voice of Martha Ray
- Western and Post-Western Mythologies of Law
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Gardens of Justice
- Voltaire's Garden
- A Bundle of Sticks in My Garden
- The Right to Free Movement as Temporal Deterritorialization in the Landscaped Garden
- The Other Otherwise: Law, Historical Trauma and the Severed Gardens of Justice
- “He Does Not Love Me, Nor I He!” The Critic's Love is of Critique, not of Law
- Research
- Renaissance Actors and Lawyers: Instability of Texts and of Social Trafficking: The Comedy of Errors
- Where Laws do Reach: Public Opinion, the Theatres, and the 1737 Licensing Act
- “The law is a wise serpent”: Subtextual Subversion in The Revenger's Tragedy
- The Voice of Martha Ray
- Western and Post-Western Mythologies of Law
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
