Europe: Globalization’s Inferiors

Abstract

The chapter looks at David Greig’s Europe (Traverse, 1994), which is argued to visualise the lives (and deaths) of globalization’s inferiors, described by Zygmunt Bauman as those on the move (who seek dignity) and the locals. Defining confounding as the uncertain sensation produced as a result of the unmarking of contours of categories, elements, concepts, etc., the chapter argues that Europe uses (at least) two kinds of confounding simultaneously: a confounding of elements (time and setting, chorus, narrative and images) and a confounding of concepts (Europe, identity, perpetrators and victims, and home, borders and exile). This multi-layered architecture of confounding discloses those concepts and elements as holed and reveals an idea of Europe as aporia and as a work in progress.