Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora and the Politics of Location

摘要

With changing notions of space, borders, nation, ideologies and migration, Europe has become a site in which one needs to re-evaluate and re-conceptualize the ways in which the European project is interpreted and viewed in today's cultural studies. This re-evaluation and re-conceptualization is precisely the primary objective of Ginette Verstraete's Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora and the Politics of Location. The book is concerned with the meaning of mobility-both real and virtual-in the European imaginary and foregrounds how transnational mobility and migration are important forces of social transformation in today's Europe. Verstraete is Professor and holds the Chair of Comparative Arts and Media at the Free University of Amsterdam, and her comparative orientation is clearly discernible in the recurrent literary, philosophical, political and artistic cross-references that run through the five chapters of the book. Its central interest lies in showing how 'movement and mobility, the universal mental maps of topology and the lived and social places of geography, are intertwined' (p. 7). It draws out via detailed analysis the full flavour of European topologies and conveys the complex relations between travel and migration.