Communicating temporalities: The Orientalist unconscious, the European migrant crisis, and the time of the Other

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Authors

DOBOŠ Pavel

Year of publication 2020
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Political Geography
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629819302549
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102176
Keywords Orientalism; imaginative geographies; chronopolitics; temporality; migrant crisis; Czech Republic; communication geography; Facebook
Description The paper analyses communication about the European migrant crisis in East-Central Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, as it was happening on the Facebook platform. In discussions amongst Czechs, the collective Orientalist unconscious shapes what imaginative geographies are communicated, and how. The paper argues for a coupling of the critique of Orientalist imaginative geographies and Deleuzean critique of the pointillistic chronological time. Both, imaginative geographies and the chronological time, acknowledge difference only as the difference from the Same. In the analysed communication, imaginative geographies draw on several notions of temporality that depend on the chronological time. These are the single timeline of progress, tunnels of time, movement towards apocalypse, and repetition of the past. They transform African and Middle-Eastern imaginative geographies and understandings of people migrating from these spaces. They also compose an imaginative geography of Western Europe which collapses under the surge of migrants. It provokes an irreconcilableness between the anti-immigration and pro-migration attitudes of discussants as it leads to emplacing the other attitudinal side in the past time. Therefore, the paper calls for an ethics of the event and the need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of diverse temporalities and accidentality of a present event.
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