Mepschen begins
by citing Susanne Wessendorf and her account of the super diverse district of
Hackney. However, he argues for a different result or set of conditions in the
district of the New West in Amsterdam. Specifically, he calls the processes by
which super diversity comes to be understood in the New West as the ‘culturalisation
of everyday life’. Mepschen argues for ‘a dialectic of flow and closure’, conditions
of increasing heterogeneity and simultaneous fixity. For Mepschen, Dutch
culturalism controls and fixes identity by highlighting the physical and
somatic proximity and alterity of others. This institutes an autochtony that
establishes a dichotomy of guest and stranger, us and them. Mepschen also
argues that a lack of discourse, a purely visual operation wherein people are ‘indifferent
to difference’, prevents discussion, ‘an increasing physical awareness of the
cultural corporeal alterity of others. In the Netherlands there is a clear
boundary between autochthonous (local) and allochthonous residents (from elsewhere).
For Mepschen, this boundary plays a crucial role in everyday discourse and
interaction and points to what Rancière calls ‘distribution of the sensible’ –
people navigating alterity as intimately linked to political discourse and
public life that produces meaning in everyday life.
In the ethnographic vignettes, Mepschen affirms
that the constitution of authochtony is contigent on alterity. In the first
vignette, the two interviewees (two Dutch ladies in their 50s and 70s) speak of
a loss of cohesion and sense of community, reflecting on the changes and
gentrification of the neighborhood. Indirectly and through their speech acts,
they scapegoat the immigrants living in the district for the alienation they
feel, which results in part also from the gentrification of their neighborhood.
Additionally, the dialogue touches on the issue of class as Dora and Maria
reflect on the consumption habits of immigrant communities. In the second
example, the division between the autochthonous and allochthonous is constructed
in terms of homosexuality wherein Dutch culture is constructed as tolerant of
sexual freedom and homosexuality, while immigrant or Muslim communities were
represented as being homophobic. This was further spatialised by the fact that
the immigrant communities, coded as intolerant, live in peripheral districts
while progressive white liberals reside in the centre. In conclusion, Mepschen reflects
on modernity and conditions of modern cities as passifying interactions through
a culture of ‘neurological shock’. City inhabitants shelter themselves from
sensual overloads. In particular, Diversity in city becomes ‘a visual agora’ to
the detriment of debate and discourse. The argument proceeds to conclude that
the fact of diversity itself doesn’t entail an understanding of the alterity of
others.
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