Abstract
Abstract. Non-western minorities in Europe, one can argue, are experiencing particularly vulnerable processes of subjectification and identification. They are often caught between double processes of inclusion/exclusion, integration/segregation or identification/estrangement. This article explores some of the complex and ambiguous processes of identification within this group, in connection with development of the spatial identity of Danishness. It starts with a short theoretical pinning down of the figure of "the stranger'' working as a basis for the empirical analysis. Organised in three sections, each interpreting a specific narrative of identification, the analysis subsequently explores processes and problems of identity formation within a minority group increasingly designated as "strangers'' within the Danish nation state. The article concludes on the different ways in which uncertainty and ambivalence infiltrate the identity formation.
Highlights
Thinking about subjectivities in crisis in a European context, it can be argued, some of the most vulnerable identity formations occur amongst newcomers to the region continuously facing identification as “strangers”
In this article we will explore the identity formation in this situation of “strange(r)ness” through a case study from Denmark, but first we will take a short look at the very concept of the stranger
Ambivalence gets into the centre of the identity formation of the “stranger”
Summary
Thinking about subjectivities in crisis in a European context, it can be argued, some of the most vulnerable identity formations occur amongst newcomers to the region continuously facing identification as “strangers”. In bodily encounters – face-to-face and/or mediated through images formed in encounters performed in other times and other spaces Such an understanding can already be read out of classic texts on the figure; for example when Simmel (1950) states that the stranger is a person “who comes today and stays tomorrow”, or when Schuetz (1944), along the same line, understands the stranger as always being in a situation of approaching – coming closer to those who are at home. Men and women of colour, he says, develop a third-person consciousness trying to reconcile their own experiences with the operation of a “historical-racial schema” within which their corporeal schema is supposed to fit In this way, ambivalence gets into the centre of the identity formation of the “stranger” First we give a short presentation of the research project that forms the basis of this article
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