Abstract:
To understand Europe is to insist on the necessity for a plurality of
approaches to belonging, citizenship and participation in the spaces that the
multiple concepts and lived everydays of European identification configures.
Proceeding via brief considerations of two 2005 pan-European cinematic
productions, each in different ways involved with imaginings or modellings of
European belonging, I am interested in keeping spaces open for multiple
Europes, allowing for transvaluations of the inherited and the consumed, the
appropriated and the indigestible, to occur among, across and beyond its operating
borders. By way of delimiting this inquiry, my focus is restricted to the films’
evocation of the tensions between two topoi that can be seen as structuring each
of them: firstly an expanded imaginary of Europe and its ‘elsewheres’ as
elucidated above, and secondly the evocation of what might be thought of as ‘the
European street’.
