7 Decolonial migrant claims to the metropole
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Mahdis Azarmandi
Abstract
In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the northern Mediterranean shores that are now thought of as European? This chapter looks at Barcelona and Salonika as Europeanised but not necessarily European cities. In examining their historically diverse urban centres, contact points of migration patterns and more recently sites of migrant settlement, we try to provide insight into different approaches to migrant claims to and contestations of both the cityscapes and their embedded memories. Eurocentric readings and makings of these cities have flattened out or erased their not-so-European urban and social fabric. Situated in decolonial de-linking and divesting from the ways in which these cities are moulded and modelled in Eurocentric epistemologies and imaginaries, this chapter looks at migrant and queer of colour politics and historicity that circumvent the pressure and strengthening of ethnic, racial, national, and post-national European mythologies by identifying with the city and its neighbourhoods while producing multicentred and intersectional narratives and spaces of belonging, becoming that de-Europeanise urban space.
Abstract
In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the northern Mediterranean shores that are now thought of as European? This chapter looks at Barcelona and Salonika as Europeanised but not necessarily European cities. In examining their historically diverse urban centres, contact points of migration patterns and more recently sites of migrant settlement, we try to provide insight into different approaches to migrant claims to and contestations of both the cityscapes and their embedded memories. Eurocentric readings and makings of these cities have flattened out or erased their not-so-European urban and social fabric. Situated in decolonial de-linking and divesting from the ways in which these cities are moulded and modelled in Eurocentric epistemologies and imaginaries, this chapter looks at migrant and queer of colour politics and historicity that circumvent the pressure and strengthening of ethnic, racial, national, and post-national European mythologies by identifying with the city and its neighbourhoods while producing multicentred and intersectional narratives and spaces of belonging, becoming that de-Europeanise urban space.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Figures ix
- Contributors x
- Acknowledgements xiv
- Introduction 1
-
Part I: Provincialising historicism
- 1 Parochial imaginations 37
- 2 Countermapping colonial amnesia in Parisian landscapes 56
- 3 Provincialising industry 77
-
Part II: Provincialising (urban) geography
- 4 Provincialising conviviality 99
- 5 Urban infrastructures, migration and the reproduction of colonial forms of difference 120
- 6 Decolonising Cottbus 143
-
Part III: Provincialising the (urban) political
- 7 Decolonial migrant claims to the metropole 171
- 8 Portuguese Urban Studies 192
- 9 Between hope and despair 213
- 10 Theorising Hamburg from the South 235
- Coda 257
- Index 263
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Figures ix
- Contributors x
- Acknowledgements xiv
- Introduction 1
-
Part I: Provincialising historicism
- 1 Parochial imaginations 37
- 2 Countermapping colonial amnesia in Parisian landscapes 56
- 3 Provincialising industry 77
-
Part II: Provincialising (urban) geography
- 4 Provincialising conviviality 99
- 5 Urban infrastructures, migration and the reproduction of colonial forms of difference 120
- 6 Decolonising Cottbus 143
-
Part III: Provincialising the (urban) political
- 7 Decolonial migrant claims to the metropole 171
- 8 Portuguese Urban Studies 192
- 9 Between hope and despair 213
- 10 Theorising Hamburg from the South 235
- Coda 257
- Index 263
