“On behalf of vulnerable strangers”

Despite the existence of neo-nationalist and populist parties and the public performance of racist and xenophobic sentiments and tactics across Europe, there is a concurrent consolidation of community practices in sites identified with vulnerability and insecurity such as refugee camps and makeshift shelters. These community practices are performed by stateless persons and citizens, immigrants with documents and displaced persons without documents, and professional activists and volunteers, in other words, all human beings whose lives are overlapped by need, despair, and care. The effort, however limited and inadequate, to cater to the refugees’ claim for a good life in bad times by providing not only shelter and food but also educational and, for some at least, professional possibilities has engendered new strategies of forming new communities or polities-to-come across the cultural, ethnic, religious, and language divisions. These communities are symptomatically represented by the figure of the interpreter who is hired to mediate between the camp life and the public sphere, the refugee and the state agencies, the condition of statelessness and the polis. The interpreter, a refugee and stateless person selected by the NGOs and state agencies for his language skills, exits his and her condition as a subaltern life forced to be outside hegemony – with no documents, no right to rights, physically contained within shelters and beyond closed borders, but also socially and politically stranded. He/she exemplifies a life that refuses to sink while enabling the communities-to-come by being the subject whose interests are invested in the rights of others. This chapter examines contemporary conceptualizations and representations of community and the human grounded in the scene of the human disaster on the Mediterranean shores. This scene does not only reveal a new chapter of European exceptionalism but also stages the possibility of what Leela Gandhi in Affective Communities calls “the communities of belonging on behalf of vulnerable strangers” (189).