The Cosmopolitan Turn in Renzo Martens’ Enjoy
Poverty and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba
MA Thesis Comparative Literature 2017/2018
Martine de Rijck Supervisor David Duindam
Introduction... 3
Introducing the objectives... 3
Chapter Outline... 5
Chapter 1: Art, Morality and Ethics... 7
Intro... 7
1.1 Politics vs. Ethics... 7
1.2 Morality vs. Ethics... 10
1.3 Art and Ethics... 13
Chapter 2: Privilege and Dilemma... 20
Intro... 20
2.1 Ethical dilemmas in Enjoy Poverty...21
2.2 Ethical Dilemmas in La Superba...27
Chapter 3 Imagination and Reflection... 35
Intro... 35
3.1 La Superba, cosmopolitanism and ‘the other’...36
3.2 Enjoy Poverty, ‘the other’ and empathy...42
3.3 Re-framing the economy of affective images...46
Conclusion... 52
Introduction
“To what degree can an artist stimulate the spectator’s political consciousness with his output? In what way can an artist break certain habits or thought patterns within everyday
reality? What is an artist’s responsibility in making a work of art?” (Ruben de Roo, Art and Activism in the age of globalization, 332)
Introducing the objectives
The artist Renzo Martens and the author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer are two internationally operating and critically acclaimed artists. Although Martens and Pfeijffer work in two different media, the first as a visual artist and the latter mainly as a writer of fiction, they share a deep-felt interest in the ethical and political potential of art and literature. They both reflect on the role of the author or artist as a public figure; they experiment with the position of the artist or writer within the artwork or novel; they cross the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction or
documentary and art, and, last but not least, their work functions as an intervention in contemporary public debates on the consequences of a globalized world: its social, cultural and economic inequalities. With these similarities on one side, what are still the different manners in which these artists detect, portray and act on these vicissitudes of globalization? And how should we understand the nature of moral dilemma’s connected to globalization that these artists detect, describe and to which they make exemplary responses?
In this thesis, I consider Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) by Renzo Martens and
La Superba (2013) by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as critically engaged artworks, which are
forcing its viewer to reconsider his or her ethical, political and moral values. I seek to explore ethical issues and moral dilemmas that arise in cosmopolitan encounters within Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty and Ilja Leonard Pfeijfer’s La Superba and how these artworks can be valuable by contributing to a greater understanding of the ethical dimensions of cosmopolitanism by focusing on the notion of cosmopolitan imagination.
The documentary and art film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty claims that the poverty of the Congolese population is in fact one of Congo’s most lucrative export product. But, just as with the more traditional export products as cocoa, palm oil and coltan, the poor hardly benefit from the profits earned over their hard work. Martens sets up this
emancipatory program where he teaches the poor how they themselves can actually benefit from poverty, hence, to turn their poverty into a resource. He teaches them to take pictures, just as the journalists from Western newspaper would do, of the most horrible images they can find in their environment, because these are the pictures that ‘sell’. On their new mission, Martens and the poor encounter a lot of bureaucratic opposition, which causes the project to fail in the end. Instead, Martens offers a neon sculpture to the people of the plantation village, reading ‘Enjoy Poverty’, as a reminder that if they cannot change their poverty, they should rather enjoy it as a valuable resource.
The novel La Superba tells the story of the protagonist, also called Ilja1 Leonard
Pfeijffer, who moved from the Netherlands to the Italian city of Genoa to start a new life. He is the prototype of a flâneur and walks through the streets of the city and observes the lives of its citizens. Genoa is a harbor city and has become a residence to many
immigrants since the migrant crisis. While walking through its medieval streets, Pfeijffer contemplates his own motives to move from the North of Europe to the South and about the motives of these migrants to move from the South of the equator to the North. His flâneurisms often leads to encounters with its citizens, with whom he has extended dialogues about their lives. What Pfeijffer states is that many immigrants came to the North with a completely unrealistic idea of Europe. Many of the migrants held the belief that there would be plenty of work, or, no need to work because they would get rich from just being on benefits. Many risked their life to take this dangerous crossing of the
Mediterranean Sea to realize after they arrived that nobody wants them here. One of the ways that Pfeijffer tries to stand up for the migrants towards the end of the novel is by drawing a parallel between the Italian economic migrants between 1880-1920 that undertook the crossing to America and these contemporary migrants from Africa. By drawing this parallel, Pfeijffer tries to appeal to a shared human condition of the need for exploration and the search for a better life, even if these expeditions can become
catastrophes in themselves.
Chapter Outline
Hereby, I hope to have introduced the objects and that I have outlined my theoretical point of departure. In the next chapters I will focus more on answering the following question: How can the ethical dilemmas brought up in the works of Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba and their different approaches advance or criticize the notion of cosmopolitan imagination?
In the first chapter I will elaborate more on what my interests are in relation to the aforementioned research question and why I think this research question is relevant. I
argue that art has lost its link with morality and society and that it should engage itself more with ethical questions, because art, ethics and morality are in a way all related to one another.
In the second chapter I will investigate which dilemmas occur in the artworks and how the context of these artworks, although they differ heavily from another, are the result of an ever more increasing globalised world, and how the context of the works is contributing to the rise of such ethical dilemmas. Subsequently, I will look at the position of the artists towards these dilemmas and consider which choices the artists are making when facing them.
The third chapter will frame the presence of the artists within the work and their relation to ‘the other’ and how they represent “otherness”. Touching on La Superba I will consider the notion of narrative imagination as described by Martha Nussbaum and I will compare this to the notion of cosmopolitan imagination as described by Marsha
Meskimmon. For Enjoy Poverty however, I will speak about the connection between affective images and empathy, and how these two relate to the notion of cosmopolitan imagination.
Chapter 1: Art, Morality and Ethics
“To what degree can an artist stimulate the spectator’s political consciousness with his output? In what way can an artist break certain habits or thought patterns within everyday
reality? What is an artist’s responsibility in making a work of art?” (Ruben de Roo in Art and Activism 332)
Intro
In this chapter, I will elaborate more on I came to my research question and why I think this is relevant. First I will explain why I will focus more on the ethical aspect of art and literature rather than its political aspect and how the ethical and the political are related to each other. Then, I argue that there is a false distinction between art, morality and ethics. I believe art has a duty to engage itself with ethical questions and to have a social relevance that can trigger the ability of the viewer to critical self-reflection. For this thesis I will mainly focus on cosmopolitan ethics, as I believe that this is most relevant to the artworks that I have chosen.
1.1 Politics vs. Ethics
Within cultural studies there tends to be more attention for politics and arrangements of power, but less so for morality and ethics. And although politics and ethics are often mentioned in the same breath, the focus seems to be more on the political
one can find many portrayals of arrangements of power and inequality in relation to politics, such as the unequal distribution of wealth between the North and the South resulting in extreme poverty in Congo, or the illegal immigrants from Africa arriving in Italy. However, I am more interested in ethics and morality on an individual level and what one can do to bring resistance to the forces of these political systems in the battle against inequality. Therefore, I want to examine how the artist is portraying these inequalities and which moral and ethical dilemmas the artist is facing internally of the work and in the representation of these inequalities.
I consider these inequalities portrayed in the works such as the North-South division and the migrant crisis as important issues within our contemporary question of globalization. To connect these contemporary problems with the process of globalization I use the world-system theory and more specifically, the dependency theory as described by the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Dependency theory is the idea that there is an international hierarchy that under develops the Global South, formerly known as ‘Third world countries’ by the Global North. Wallerstein understood the relevance of this theory to describe Africa’s political situation and came to the conclusion that the
dichotomy of core and periphery countries had been fundamental to the rise of modern capitalism. To him, modern capitalism was an evolving system in which structures of new institutions and exploitations had emerged as was happening in earlier hierarchical systems such as colonialism. (Chase-Dunn 399).
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has described our current historical phase as “second modernity”, with which he attempts to reconcile sociologists’ theories of
modernity with postmodern ones. Beck argues that today we are experiencing the transition from the industrial society, modernity, towards a risk society, second
has become aware of the consequences of industrialization and thus of the new risks that have emerged towards all forms of life. It is the success of the technological and scientific progress of the industrial society that has made the transition possible towards a risk society. And because of the reality of globalization, these risks have become global risks. Ironically, in the risk society, we experience the dark reverse of the progress of
industrialization. These risks that Beck is naming are merely risks due to technological and industrial successes. Risks such as climate change or nuclear disasters are all the consequences of our highly developed technological society. The vulnerable in our society are often more exposed to the dangers of the risk society. Towards the end of his career Beck developed a normative theory on how to face the challenges of a world risk society. His answer to these risks was a call for solidarity out of rationality, because of our shared vulnerability to those risks. He defined a notion of realistic cosmopolitanism that would provide an answer to the side effects of globalization, that is, ‘how ought societies to handle “otherness” and “boundaries” during the present crisis of global
interdependency?’ (2004, 430). His main idea, in short, is that there should be a
fundamental respect for differences and otherness where the either/or binary offers a false alternative. Instead, he pleads for a possibility of both/and, where people can belong to both a local and to an international community.
Wallerstein’s notion of the Global South and North and Beck’s theory of global risk with his answer of cosmopolitanism are valuable here in relation to the objects that I have chosen, because they highlight the contextual aspects of the dilemmas that the artists are faced with in the works and offer a ‘realistic’ answer to these dilemmas, or to
categories of risk, in the shape of a cosmopolitan approach, such as Beck is providing. I am interested to find out to which extend the artists make an appeal for a cosmopolitan ethics in order to face these dilemmas.
1.2 Morality vs. Ethics
In this thesis, I want to focus centrally on ethical dilemmas, because I believe that globalisation is changing the world at a rapid pace, which can put us in situations that we have not found ourselves in before, that places us in front of difficult choices. More than ever we are constantly confronted to make choices that have an influence that we can often not foresee. I am curious to examine which paths one can take when confronted with these ethical dilemmas and to see if one is aware that one has been placed in front of a dilemma. Although the artworks contain dilemmas internally, the artists are also confronted with dilemmas in the representation of their subjects.
In order to explain what an ethical dilemma is, it is firstly necessary to speak about what is meant by ‘ethics’. As Alain Badiou states in “Ethics: An essay on the
Understandings of Evil” that the word ethics “has today taken centre stage”, would it not that its actual definition is still up for debate, philosophically speaking (2). The word ethics has its etymology in the Greek root ‘Ethos’, which means something as moral nature or character, but I think it is important to set out a few definitions from which I will argue which definition I will use in this thesis.
The Stoics were without a doubt one of the first philosophical schools that made ethics the core of their philosophy. Their ethical philosophy was very similar to the Aristotelian virtue ethics, where virtues would refer to a positive character trait.
Accordingly, a person who possesses the right virtues is an ethical person and will then automatically know how to do ‘the right thing’. We will later see that Martha Nussbaum’s
cosmopolitan ethics of world citizenship relies densely on the Stoic and Aristotelian virtue ethics.
Ever since the enlightenment, ethics has been used interchangeably with morality, or - as Kant would say - practical reason. Central to Kantian ethics is his notion of the categorical imperative, which applies to all people: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” (Kant in). Kantian ethics are based on a universal norm for moral judgement and therefore make a strong appeal for reason and a certain picture of rationality, just as Beck’s
cosmopolitan ethics, which he calls “cosmopolitan common sense” (Beck 2004, 431). One needs to keep in mind that all these models of ethics are prescriptive rather than descriptive, and, are therefore normative. Anti-moralist philosophers as
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud criticized these systems of normative ethics, because in order for these systems to have any value, one needs to make a certain claim on the nature of humans, a claim that these philosophers were not willing to make. The American philosopher Sarah J. Harper claims that these anti-moralists were using the stricter, more empirical term ‘morality’ to indicate to ‘principles of action’, while using the broader term ‘ethics’ to attribute to the spectrum of other moral phenomena, which could be explained by more evolutionary forces, such as the need for reciprocity in order to survive as a species. This allowed them “to abandon morality without also abandoning any alternative” (Harper, 1065). Therefore these anti-moralists were making a division between morality and ethics, where normative ethics would equal morality, which is undesirable, and could be considered a sphere within the domain of ethics as a whole. According to Harper this division between spheres of the moral and the ethical is problematic. The conclusion Harper is making is that the division between morality and ethics is questionable both on theoretical and on a practical level, because they fail to
meet a standard of theoretical coherence. In other words, if one cannot come up with a system that is able to translate ethics to the domain of morality, then this incompatibility and disunity tends to lead to conflicts.
Harper offers a solution to consider ethics and morality in terms of ‘social roles’, by which she means social roles in general terms, not in specific, socially recognized roles. This would implicate that each role such as mother, teacher, friend or artist, comes with certain moral obligations. It is easy to see why Harper would advocate for a role-centred morality, as it is at least more clear-cut to think about ethics and ethical
obligations within the frame of a moral role, because it delimits responsibility towards a more tangible and delineated sphere. Yet I disagree here with Harper for two reasons, firstly because I think that one can carry many social roles in life or a role can even overlap within a certain situation, which does not make it easier to understand which moral or ethical norms or rationales to follow, due to the conflict between roles. Secondly, Harper’s solution of a role-centred morality bears the risk of falling into the concept of a fixed identity and therefore does not carry enough flexibility for the complexity of an ever-changing and increasingly globalized world where it is not always clear which roles we inhabit, and in the end the impracticality of dividing moral normativity into a role.
I will try to argue that it is this complexity of the interaction between the social context and these blurring of the so-called overlapping ‘moral roles’ that we can find in both artworks. By putting yourself as an artist inside your work, a conflict can arise between different ‘levels’ in the artwork, or, in case of the novel, a conflict on its levels of narration between the author, narrator, focalizer, and character. This can occur in
particular when the author is putting himself in the text or when the filmmaker becomes a character in the film, if the genre of the novel or film does not fit into a particular
difficult for the reader or viewer to understand ‘who’ is speaking, ‘who’ is representing or ‘who’ is represented and from which ‘role’ they are speaking or representing. Due to their complexity of roles and their additional conflict it makes La Superba and Enjoy Poverty excellent artworks for a critical examination for their ethical potential and value.
Therefore I think it is more fruitful to look at the artworks in terms of the dilemmas that they bring up, than to examine them on a level of roles, because these dilemmas arise exactly due to the conflict of roles. In the artworks, both artists are in fact questioning and playing with these roles and with the additional responsibilities that accompany them.
What I do take from Harper’s argument, however, is that morality and ethics are neatly intertwined and I will consider them as two sides of the same coin. It is important to understand the false distinction between morality and ethics, because in this thesis, I also want to consider art and literature as subject to near-same or comparable questions. I believe that art has the potential not to simply represent the world as it is, but also to change it, for the better or worse. Art and literature is not merely a reflection of that ‘what is’, or, as the German art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann formulates it in How to do
things with art: “… artworks not only are products of given circumstances, they also
contribute to the existence of these very circumstances.” (151). If we want to take the contribution of artworks to “these circumstances” seriously, then at least art and literature have to be understood in moral and ethical terms as well. This means that as cultural critics, we have a certain obligation to understand cultural objects in terms of their ethical question and to judge them in regards to their morality and ethics.
The notion that art and literature are not completely autonomous from the ethical sphere deserves a bit more attention. According to Mark William Roche, art and literature have left the sphere of morality ever since the age of modernity and under the influence of enlightenment philosophers. He attributes this to the fact that the age of modernity identified itself by a technological transformation as the most important feature in the twentieth century. As a result of this technological transformation, our paradigm shifted towards a “means-end thinking” that is characterised by technological rationality. Given the far-developed complexity of technology in our current era, art and literature have become completely autonomous spheres. As Roche states that “given the complexity of modern technology, literature and technology seem to have become separate and unbridgeable spheres”, and therefore, art and literature has moved more and more away from science and has created stronger ties with the humanities (10).
The influence of technology with the paradigm shift towards a ‘means-ends thinking’ also had its influence on art and literature. For centuries, a considerable part of all the art that was produced had served a purpose within a religious context, where these institutes of religion where indeed the carriers of moral pedagogy and authority. Literature as it is known today is a very recent phenomenon especially if one looks at the dominance of the genre of the contemporary novel over other genres as poetry or plays. One could even claim that the birth of the novel matched the era of modernity. Before modernity, art and literature were created within a moral context, but, according to Roche, because of this ‘means-end’ thinking, “modernity increasingly lost its belief in a religious or even simply moral frame (11).
Kantian ethics replaced Christian morality, but as mentioned earlier, these ethics needed a certain metaphysical assumption on reality that did not seem to stand up to the criticism of some philosophers, which lead towards an increase in scepticism. The various
disciplines within the humanities developed themselves into a descriptive rather than normative focus of study, therefore focussing on the complexities of the fast changing society, while staying away from moral evaluation. This means that the focus on ethics and morality faded into the background both for the artist as for the critic and academic.
Roche claims that a central idea of modernity is that each sphere of life is
autonomous and which also included the autonomy of the arts (11). The infamous slogan “l’art pour L’art” was born, or in other words, art’s value had become completely
intrinsic and therefore it had no longer the need to serve a religious, moralistic, didactic or utilitarian purpose. Originality replaced art and literature’s previous goals and the
liberation of the latter. This freedom brought about a well of never-before-imagined range of aesthetic and conceptual opportunities.
Thus, although the autonomy of the arts has brought positive changes to the development of the arts into having more varied and diverse aesthetic options, it is in fact exactly this autonomy that I want to question here. I argue that the separation between art and society is problematic, because I believe that an important role of art is to reflect on ethics and moral values. As I mentioned earlier that I believe morality and ethics are two different sides of the same coin, I now want to state explicitly that I do not consider art and ethics as completely separate spheres. In the same line of Harper’s argument that it is philosophically problematic to state that morality and ethics are separate, I argue that it is incorrect to suggest that the quality of a work of art cannot be evaluated from its the content, which can only happen from within a moral frame, and that this would stand apart from the evaluation of an artwork as a whole. It is philosophically untenable to consider morality as a separate sphere among many others such as art, politics and science, because each of these spheres requires a set of rules, or, ‘ethics’ as a guiding
principle for any kind of human enterprise. To act without any kind of ethical norms can bring about justification for any kind of behaviour.
This brings us back to the question of the legitimization of art. I believe that any kind of human enterprise should have moral legitimacy, and especially those who are funded with public resources. The value of art can thus be legitimized by referring to its intrinsic value or by its value to society. Questions of legitimization of the arts such as “Why should we read literature or look at art?” are fundamental to ask in a society where the funding of the arts and humanities has been under fire for more than a decade. It is not in vain that Martha Nussbaum speaks of a crisis in the humanities education, because its value to society has been reduced to economical terms, i.e. is education in art and literature profitable enough? All around the world policy makers would view them as “useless frills” which would certainly not help to stay competitive on the global markets (2010 2). One can easily draw a parallel to Roche’s notion of means-ends thinking and its influence on the arts and Nussbaum’s observation of the influence of the economization on the arts.
I believe that one of the possible ways in which art and literature can be
considered valuable for society outside of economically profitable terms is to point out the moral value of art and literature; in other words, can we learn a moral lesson from art and literature? Roche states that one of the ways in which art can teach us something is by revealing a reality that would otherwise remain hidden from us. The artwork is also able to claim legitimacy and also gains a certain sense of autonomy, because it is not merely mirroring reality, but shining a new light on it, that through the artwork, one can achieve a greater insight into it.
In relation to ethics, artworks can show a reality where the viewer will be confronted with the consequences of actions or decision-making. Like Beck’s theory of
risk society, Roche states that in the technological age, the impact of our actions is not always directly visible, and therefore artworks can play a vital role in educating people about the consequences of their ethical implications (18). This does not mean necessarily that the artwork itself should provide an exemplary moral frame, it can in fact be entirely the opposite, as one can also learn from an ‘immoral’ artwork of what one should not do.
Nussbaum claims that in order to become a responsible citizen who can relate well to the complexity of the world he is part of, it takes more than just factual knowledge and hard science alone. She speaks of the necessity of the third ability of a citizen to cultivate an ethical awareness, which is what she calls the narrative imagination (2010 95). She affirms that the artwork can create a space for play in which the viewer can participate from a safe distance through the narrative imagination and contemplate on different perspectives in order to become more aware which can lead to higher sense of ethical commitment.
The works that I have chosen for the thesis are valuable precisely for the reason that I mentioned above, because they are bringing visibility to a reality that would
otherwise remain hidden. In the case of Enjoy Poverty it is not immediately clear what the artwork tries to reveal. At first, it seems to reveal the everyday reality of poor people in Congo and of the ‘poverty industry’ consisting of photojournalists and NGOs that these people find themselves surrounded with. At a deeper level, Enjoy Poverty reveals the false mechanisms of empathy being evoked by the poverty industry and how art should try not to fall into the same ‘empathy trap’. But, the outcome is pessimistic, because Martens is aware that he is as guilty in being part of the poverty industry as are the NGOs and the journalists. Therefore the conclusion can be drawn that art is part of a system that operates by the same rules of capitalism. However, the difference between Enjoy Poverty and the ‘poverty industry’ is Martens’ capacity for reflexion and being ‘aware’ that he is part of it.
This awareness seems to lack completely with NGOs or photojournalists as they claim to do valuable work that apparently after years of money being sent to Congo has not
changed the situation much for its citizens in poverty. Because Martens has this awareness and is implicitly pleading guilty, it invites the viewer to contemplate on this perspective and enter the domain of play, which through engagement with the ethical dilemma’s inside the artworks can lead to a greater sense of awareness and can create a space for reflection on the implications of the viewer’s ethical positions.
In La Superba the reader becomes a witness to the encounters between the protagonist Ilja and the various citizens of Genoa. The people that Ilja meets in these encounters are crossing all boundaries of social class and origin, such as a prostitute, a refugee and an alcoholic. This gives the opportunity for the reader to engage himself with people that he would otherwise not so easily come into contact with. La Superba tells the story of these people and dismantles the prejudices that one often holds against them. Although the notion of narrative imagination and its potential for the reader to engage with these people through these encounters and stories within La Superba is evident, the protagonist Ilja is also critical of this idea. Ilja states several times in the novel that we all live in our own reality bubble and that is can be extremely difficult to break free of that bubble. Therefore, La Superba reflects on the power of narrative imagination, that it can be a powerful tool to engage oneself with one another, but that can also lead to the
maintenance of illusions by believing in a narrative that may in the end no longer bear any ties with reality.
To take the first step in the comparison between the two artists, I state that we are comparing here ‘the cynical’ versus ‘the authentic’. On the one hand we have the cynical artist Renzo Martens who is facing the dilemma, or risks through his cynicism the
them the failures of the poverty industry. The other hand side, there is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer who faces the dilemma of staying authentic and sincere, in his attempt to be authentic to himself he risks falling into the trap of irony, or that people will take offense of his honesty.
There is no easy way out of ethical dilemmas in our contemporary world. By staying hopeful and positive, or by taking a cynical attitude, both approaches are carrying their own risks and cannot be taken as an end position or provide us with a definite moral lesson.
Chapter 2: Privilege and Dilemma
“There is nothing more absurd either than the assertion that contemporary art does not involve any political project, or than the claim that its subversive aspects are not based on
any theoretical terrain”
(Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998, 11)
Intro
In this chapter I will investigate which ethical dilemmas occur in the artworks and how these dilemmas relate themselves to the socio-historical, institutional and material context of these artworks. I argue that these contexts, although they differ heavily from one another on specific aspects, are the consequences of an ever more increasingly globalised world. Globalization comes with certain challenges and therefore, the ethical dilemmas present in the works can be understood as the embodiment of these challenges of
globalization. Thus, I believe that to investigate the nature of these ethical dilemmas and how they relate themselves to their context and to globalization, can provide us with an insight into the unforeseen forces of globalization that often remain hidden, but that are revealed through these works, hence the artists are bringing visibility to these forces. Subsequently, this chapter will look at the approach of the artists towards these challenges and which dilemmas they encounter and how they position themselves through the choices that they are making inside the artwork. This chapter will thus not focus on how
the artist and the representation of these ethical dilemmas relate themselves to cosmopolitanism, as this will be the subject of the third chapter.
2.1 Ethical dilemmas in Enjoy Poverty
The artist Renzo Martens acts as a character in his own film Enjoy Poverty. The film is completely shot and located in Congo, where Martens speaks with many people such as photojournalists, NGO employees, plantation owners and plantation workers, who are all in their own way part of the ‘poverty industry’. In the opening shot of the film, plantation workers are complaining to Martens that they have to work very hard for very little (0’0’35). The second scene, as we can see here in the still frame below, depicts white people in a refugee camp, smiling, while taking pictures of the poor. These two scenes are, in short, the essence of what Enjoy Poverty is about.
(00’02’05)
The two main players of the poverty industry that are being addressed in the film are the humanitarian aid organisations and the media. The film shows many examples of photographers working for western news media taking pictures of the bare living
conveys the premise of the film, namely ‘To whom belongs poverty?’ According to Martens, poverty has become an export product, something that can be sold, as it has created jobs for many people such as the NGO workers and the photojournalists. The ‘authorities’ do not agree with Martens, when he expresses his view in a different scene at the World Bank conference that poverty might actually be Congo’s most lucrative export product, as to them poverty is a “shared defeat for the entire community” although its spokesperson had to admit that Congo is in fact receiving more money in the fight against poverty than it makes through its more traditional export products such as coltan and copper (0’8’10).
The title ‘Enjoy Poverty’ also occurs as a neon sculpture in the film and is perhaps the only reference to the fact that in the end, Martens remains a visual artist. Here, ‘Enjoy
Poverty’ is meant as an imperative, confirmed by Martens himself in the film and,
although the main spoken language in Congo is French, the English title is clearly directed at a Western audience. The neon sculpture, installed on a plantation for its workers is Martens personal answer to the aforementioned premise of the film ‘Who owns poverty?’ Martens believes that poverty is an important resource to the people of Congo and that, once they realise this, they should take control over this valuable resource.
Towards the end of the film he even expresses this view quite literally when he says to one of the plantation workers that “If you’re going to wait for your salary to grow, so you can be happy, you will be unhappy your whole lives.” (1’10’31). In this shot, the
plantation workers express their hope and expectations of Martens. They see him as one of these benefactors, who would try his best to help them and send ‘reports’ to western organisations in the hope that help would come and that their situation would change or improve. It is painful when they realise that Martens has no intention of helping them
after he shatters their hope with his answer to the question of why he came here: “To tell you, you better enjoy poverty rather than fight it and be unhappy.” (1’10’50).
From its title of Enjoy Poverty to Martens’ explicit statements of advice to the poor, Martens has taken up the role of a know-it-all and that he, in the role of a Dutch, white-male entrepreneur, has an idea of how these people should live their lives and face their ‘unchangeable fate’. Martens is - sometimes literally - playing with taking up different social roles, from being a journalist, to benefactor and an artist. In all the roles his
Western attitude shines through brightly, party determined through the connotation of his style of clothing i.e. by dressing himself in a white-collar shirt in the jungle of Congo. By putting himself inside the artwork and acting in front of the camera, he is no longer merely a spectator or observer of that ‘what is happening’, but becomes an active participant in it. Through acting in these social roles, he creates expectations from the viewer. One would think that Martens would explicitly criticize the poverty industry or the neo-colonial setting in Congo, but instead he merely reveals this setting and comes with a rather absurd advice for the poor. He also creates expectations from the plantation workers, because they believe that he came to help them, hence he causes disappointment or irritation when he does not meet their expectations.
Martens hereby enters into an artistic practice in what Nicholas Bourriaud has described as ‘relational aesthetics’, where the role of an artwork “is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but actually to be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist” (11). Bourriaud’s notion takes as theoretical and practical starting point human relations and their social context, and therefore goes beyond the artificial space of an art institution or art installation, something that Martens is doing in the film as well. If ‘real-time’ parts of Enjoy Poverty can be seen as an art installation, for example the neon sculpture that Martens built in
plantation village, it has been completely removed out of a more independent and traditional art context, such as the gallery or a museum. But it is especially Martens’ presence and interaction with the people in the film that make Enjoy Poverty an example of Bourriaud’s notion of ‘relational aesthetics’ because he enters into social relationships that each come with expectations.
In the aforementioned fragment where Martens positioned himself as a journalist or a benefactor, the plantation workers were disappointed by him because Martens ‘turned out to be an ‘artist’ and there seems to be a conflict of roles between artists and journalists or educators. Martens was merely playing to be one of those roles to make his point about the poverty industry. In the essay ‘The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn’ Mary Anne Francis criticizes Bourriaud’s formalist aspect in Relational Aesthetics, because Bourriaud would not pay enough attention to the real social demand of the other and to the
appropriation of another person’s professional activity by an artist (29). She notices the useful distinction that Bourriaud makes between “existing” and “recreated” social forms of the artist, because these activities “are only representations of (non-art) jobs in the world” (28). They are never real.
In the case of Enjoy Poverty Martens’ role in the film is ultimately that of a performer. He is recreating situations where he is acting to be someone that he is not. One of the clearest examples where this is happening as we can see in the still frame over here, is the moment Martens is standing in front of a white board in a small classroom like setting, literally educating the Congolese about how they can make a proper living out of their poverty by selling photographs.
(00’32’48)
Here, Martens ideological departure point is neoliberal, where according to the
mechanisms of the free-market certain pictures will sell for a higher price than others. By depicting scenes such as misery and poverty, or how Martens phrases it himself: “raped women and dead bodies” the Congolese would be able to compete with the international press photographers. Elsewhere in the film, we witness exactly those international press photographers saying that sadly, dead bodies sell better than a carnival parade.
It is exactly this relational aspect between Martens and the Congolese, the appropriation of social roles and where these roles come into conflict with one another together with their created expectations, which bring up certain dilemmas for the artist. It was never really Martens’ plan to empower the Congolese in order to find a way out of poverty. This example of Martens pretending to be a development worker resembles Bourriaud’s notion of the “recreated” social forms, and here Francis’ critique on these representations of non-art jobs seems so be valid, because the Congolese people and their needs are real, but Martens’ ‘job’ is not. Martens’ role in the film does not propose any kind of realistic solution to the hopeless situation of the Congolese in poverty. In fact, through Martens chosen cynical attitude, he cannot find a way out of this role dilemma,
but has become even complicit in one of the problems he is trying to address: the poverty industry.
A second reason why Francis’ critique of relational aesthetics is relevant here is because Martens is speaking from a privileged position. He makes the plantation workers unsolicited part of his artwork, while they were thinking that he was there to help them. There is an unequal relationship between Martens and the plantation workers due to a power imbalance. This power imbalance operates on several levels. Firstly, Martens has access to different media to carry out a message about the situation of these workers, because he is a Western artist with a press-card. Secondly, Martens has more financial means and can therefore not really understand what it means to be poor, hence the
ridiculousness of his almost ‘new-wave style’ logic of saying that they should accept their destiny of being poor and not fight it.
Martens’ privilege is adjacent to Gloria Wekker’s notion of ‘white innocence’, which can be described as “the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia”. Wekker’s case study covers the paradox of Dutch culture, but her argument can be applied also outside of the Dutch national borders, namely that overall, white people seem to benefit from a privilege that they have gained throughout history, originated among others by their colonial rule. Martens almost certainly does benefit from this privilege, and as I will discuss in the third chapter, the virtues of cosmopolitan citizenship and privilege seem to go hand in hand. With privilege comes a certain responsibility. The question here is, how does Martens takes up this burden of responsibility? That is perhaps the biggest dilemma of a white-male artist that is trying to portray inequality and social injustice. In the third chapter I will zoom in more on the cosmopolitan answer to this ‘burden’ of responsibility and to which extend the notion of cosmopolitan imagination offers a way out of this dilemma.
For now I will state that cosmopolitanism and privilege seem to be two sides of the same coin, because from a privileged position it is much easier to adapt cosmopolitan values as they are closer to universal values that are characteristic of the many people in privileged positions already.
The first dilemma that Martens is facing is how he should approach his subjects, these plantation workers. In the film, he chooses a cynical attitude and tells them they are never getting out of this poverty situation, as mentioned in the fragment above, so that they might as well enjoy it. The question is if there would have been a different option imaginable, if Martens had decided to stay more engaged with his subjects and being more hopeful. One might wonder if Martens is in the position to give advice to these plantation workers and is it his right to scatter the hope of these plantation workers and in which name and purpose? Is he doing any ‘good’ to the workers by these actions?
Secondly, if Martens is acting from a privileged position, then it is essential to mention that he is not using his privilege in favour of the Congolese people on the spot. The only thing he does for the plantation workers is setting up an emancipatory program for the Congolese photographers that was always supposed to fail in order to support his own cynical attitude towards the poverty industry. The young men ask Martens if he can arrange an international press-card for them so they can have access to the market of pictures in poverty, after they have been denied access to the MSF hospital, because they were only making pictures for money and not as a professional photojournalist, Martens tells them their project will fail (01’08’27). I find the disappointment in the eyes of the young men extremely painful, especially when this scene gives the impression that Martens already knew upfront that they would never be able to sell their pictures for more money as what he initially promised them in the classroom when he drew the table on the white board. It seems that Martens only started this project to proof his own point about
the mechanisms of the poverty industry and not to sincerely help the young men to escape their poverty situation.
2.2 Ethical Dilemmas in La Superba
The protagonist in the novel La Superba bears the same name as its writer, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. Apart from the name, there are more resemblances between the two, but it is important to keep in mind that the protagonist Ilja is a fictionalised version of the author, and not the real author. Readers often tend to assign all kinds of characteristics of the protagonist to the author, and in the case of La Superba, the author Ilja has not made it easier to name the protagonist after himself. Apart from the novel, Pfeijffer wrote several other works that deal with the same themes and narratives as La Superba, such as the television-series Via Genoa and a novel that is considered to be La Superba’s non-fictional counterpart Letters from Genoa (2016).
As La Superba tells the story of the Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer who moved from the Netherlands to Genoa, migration is one of the major themes in La Superba. And it is not only Ilja’s migration that is at the surface of the novel. Many characters in La
Superba have a migration background; some of them are illegal migrants. The novel thus
compares the ‘luxurious’ immigration of Ilja to Genoa to the immigration of the ‘fortune seekers’ from Africa and to the historical mass immigration of Italians at the end of the 19th century to the ‘Promised Land America’. The novel also reflects on other types of
emigration of Dutch people who would like to move to a different country in the hope that they would get a better life.
Other major themes in the novel are Ilja’s reflections on one’s fantasy and objects of desire: its discrepancies between ‘reality’ and hopes and dreams. With reality and its discrepancies I do not mean some abstract metaphysical reality, but I define it as that how one actually experience life versus how one thought life would be. This everyday reality, of course, is neatly intertwined with the theme of migration, and as Ilja points out at various moments in the novel, people have their own reasons and hopes for migration, though many of those stories of hopes and dreams do not hold stand to the reality of everyday life.
It becomes clear at an early stage that the immigration of the protagonist went a lot smoother than of many of his fellow immigrant citizens. He did not come to Italy because he was poor and unfortunate in his native country. On the contrary, in his homeland everything was going easy and smooth; it was time for a change, and for a little more challenge in life. In a conversation with Rashid, an economic immigrant from Morocco who has difficulties in understanding why Ilja would move from the Netherlands to Genoa, Ilja explains him why: “I knew everything already. I knew the story already. And at the end of the day, I’m an artist. I need input. Inspiration is what they call it, but I hate that word. The challenge to wake up in a new city where nothing is obvious and where I have the privilege2 to reinvent myself anew. The challenge of waking up. Got that?” (53).
Of course Rashid cannot understand Ilja’s explanation. When Ilja asks him in a different encounter why he came to Genoa, Rashid at first makes fun of him by mirroring his previous answer, that he came here because he was bored in Casablanca, that he did not come here to make money, but to write a book, and that he enjoys the new challenges that life has to offer here in Genoa such as sleeping with nine people in a small apartment shared with other pests (71). The 2 I have chosen to deviate from the English translation and to translate the Dutch word ‘voorrecht’ as ‘privilege’. The original English translation uses here the word
encounter between Rashid and Ilja illustrates Ilja’s privileged position from which he is experiencing his immigration. What is happening here is that the privileged Ilja is telling to the less privileged Rashid that he would like to have less privilege and experience more challenge in life, in which he implicitly says that he envies the less privileged. Ilja’s problem of ‘suffering from privilege’ is of course completely a laughing matter compared to Rashid’s problems or lack of privilege, and falls into the category of ‘first-world problems’. The first dilemma that can be found in this fragment is the difficulty of speaking from a privileged position about this privilege with somebody that is less privileged. It seems that Ilja is lacking any sense of tact here and is not aware yet of himself and his privilege and of those who are lacking in this. Remarkably enough, it is Rashid in this fragment who is actually aware of his own privilege that he has relative to his fellow immigrants from Africa, because he has a temporary residence permit and many of the other Africans in Genoa are staying there illegally. Perhaps the notion of privilege in this novel can be described as privilege being a relative matter; one can be more or less privileged relative to other people.
Throughout the encounters in the novel the other important theme becomes visible, namely the friction between on the one hand fiction, fantasy and imagination and on the other the reality of everyday life. Ilja notices that the different people he speaks with all live in their own version of reality and have their own reasons for immigrating to Genoa, and that in the end, their version cannot withstand the reality of everyday life. One dominant thread that goes through all the narratives of immigration is the belief in a better life somewhere else. That this is often not the case, and especially not with the economic refugees from Africa in Genoa or in the past with the immigration wave from many
Italians to America between 1880-1930, is something that Ilja finds it important to bring to the attention of the reader. Ilja himself also suffered from an unrealistic and rosy picture of his immigration to Genoa. He moved to Genoa in the hope to realise one of his long-held dreams to live the life of
my long-cherished dream of a jealousy-inducing rich and carefree Mediterranean existence among true, authentic people who haven’t yet unlearned the art of attributing importance only to the things that really matter: perfume, taste, elegance, and a natural, noble way of life. (107)
Ilja openly admits that he is also a victim of his own fantasy where he often gets entangled in thoughts. He uses the city of Genoa and its labyrinth of the old historical city centre as a metaphor to describe his mental state. The title La Superba, literally translated as ‘Overconfidence’, refers to the city’s epithet and is for Ilja the proud and ironic
reclamation of people’s struggle with their hopes and dreams. Geographically, Ilja also uses Genoa as a metaphor for the whole of Europe:
Behind her impenetrable walls of border checks, asylum procedures, investigators, and forced expulsions, she lies there showing off her promise of new Mercedes and BMWs. Anyone managing to force their way in takes this as reason enough to believe they’ve achieved their dream. They’re in paradise. The rest will follow as a matter of course. And then they’ll wither away in a leaky two-room apartment with eleven of their countrymen and be exterminated like a rat. (108)
In other words: the idea of Genoa, just like Europe, may look beautiful, charming and full of character on the outside, a place where a golden future will be waiting for you, but as soon as one enters its labyrinth of bureaucracy, one gets sucked in by its harsh reality and the dream will soon be shattered into pieces.
As Ilja points out how many of the boat refugees and other immigrants he encounters in Genoa suffer from their own fantasy and naivety, Ilja also faces himself and his naïve thoughts, when he considers buying an abandoned theatre together with a Danish
immigrant named Walter. They get carried away by their own enthusiasm and soon believe they can become millionaires from its profit. They also have an unrealistic image of how to run a business in Italy as mafia and other illegal activities and forces are soon upon them. Ilja thought he could set up this theatre with the logic of a Northern European, not realising that business in Genoa operates by the rules of the mafia. Soon they are being threatened with lawsuits by the mafia and find themselves in an extremely uncomfortable situation. Ilja has to admit his naivety: “But I was genuinely shocked. Genoa had always seemed like a civilized northern Italian city to me. Well, civilized might be the wrong word. But in any case, northern. The Mafia were part of the south.” (202) His naïve attitude and focalisation can be described as ‘Orientalist’ as he sees the Italian and South-European culture as something completely different from his Northern European customs. The North-South dichotomy does not only operate on the level of difference between Europe and Africa, but as we have seen before also between Northern Europe and Southern Europe, and, as Ilja points out here, also between the North and South of Italy. But apparently, Ilja made a miscalculation to consider Genoa as ‘North’, and to believe that this would mean free from the mafia.
Although the aforementioned examples of Ilja’s naivety and his privilege to engage in his encounters with fellow immigrants with an open and sincere attitude could
perhaps be better explained due to social class privilege, there are also examples in the novel that explicitly state Ilja’s white-male privilege. One part of the novel is completely dedicated to the story of Djiby, an immigrant from Senegal. Ilja has been advised by Rashid to speak with Djiby because of his “spectacular refugee story”. (81) Rashid seems to be somewhat cynical towards Ilja and his interests in all these immigrant stories and calls him “concerned white citizen of the world” (81), something that I will elaborate on more in chapter three when I will speak about cosmopolitan imagination and Ilja’s sincere interest in ‘the other’.
And Djiby’s story is indeed spectacular. He had to cross the Mediterranean twice before he managed to set foot on land in Italy. All in all he had to spend more than 3000 Euros to come to Europe travelling by land while a plane ticket from Senegal to Europe would have been a lot cheaper. As that is not an option for Senegalese due to the
impossibility of getting a visa, they have to travel via illegal routes. Everybody is his family invested in Djiby’s trip, hoping he would repay himself manifold by only living off benefits in Europe. But Djiby is not able to find enough work to survive in Europe, let alone to send back to his family:
“Can you maybe lend me fifty Euros, Ilja?” “Why don’t you go back, Djiby?” “Are you listening to what you’re saying?” “That’s not the way I meant it. I…” “I know you didn’t mean it that way. No one who says that kind of thing really means it. That’s the problem with us black people. The whole time everyone keeps saying stuff about us that they don’t mean. But they do say it. And you’re a good person, Ilja, I’m sure you know it. You’re not a racist, no more than those
hundreds of shop, bar, and restaurant owners I’ve asked for a job are racists.” (308)
This fragment and Djiby’s observation of Ilja’s behaviour brings out a part of Wekker’s definition of ‘innocence’, as it “enables the safe position of having license to utter the most racist statements, while in the next sentence saying that it was a joke or was not meant as racist.” (17) Wekker continues her argument by that the speaker of the racist statement may claim that he or she has a friendly or privileged relationship to the black person in question, that he or she is entitled to make such a comment. This fragment thus shows that Ilja, in his all naivety and sincerity, is also ‘guilty’ of white innocence.
Summarising that, although at first sight there is thus a similarity in terms of the role of the author or artist in Enjoy Poverty and La Superba, because both works carry a strong presence of the author inside the work, it is important to point out that La Superba is a different medium and genre and therefore operates by a different set of rules, namely the rules of fiction, where characters can be invented, and where the reality can be put to the hand of the writer. Where Martens might be playing a character in Enjoy Poverty, the other people in the film are not actors. In the case of the novel, the author has much more flexibility in the way in which he treats the characters, because it is fiction, hence they operate at a different level of ethical responsibility and accountability.
Noteworthy is that both Martens and the protagonist Ilja share a similar economic and white-male privileged position, but choose to take a different attitude towards their less-privileged environment. Where Martens is taking up different social and professional roles, through which his cynicism becomes apparent, Ilja tries to remain sincere and open in his role as protagonist by sharing all his inner thoughts and weaknesses, which leads to sometimes painfully naïve behaviour or rudeness through his blunt comments.
Although Enjoy Poverty and La Superba are not explicitly related to one another, one can look at both works and find causality between its outlines of one and the other. If one
considers the interrelatedness of the works in terms its socio-economical context, one can see why the circumstances of the Congolese in Enjoy Poverty can drive people to be attracted to the idea of Europe. The illegal immigrants from Africa present in La Superba have most likely lived in very similar and hopeless circumstances as the Congolese in
Enjoy Poverty.
I would like to conclude this chapter that, although both Martens and Ilja are privileged white-male artists, both use their privilege differently in their message to its audience. Martens remains distant from the Congolese and will not come on an equal footing to the Congolese due to him always staying in his role, but Ilja slips every now and then in his own unrealistic expectations and naïve behaviour which puts him at the same level as the other characters of the novel. Ironically enough, as Enjoy Poverty is a sort of documentary, Martens is completely in control, as the film is highly staged, though
La Superba is fiction, it carries a certain roughness to it, as its protagonist is by far not
slicked or idealised. This makes it easier for the reader to identify with the protagonist of
La Superba than with the staged version of Martens in Enjoy Poverty.
In the next chapter I will elaborate more on the problematic relationship of privilege and cosmopolitanism and how through these works this notion of cosmopolitan
imagination can be advanced or criticised. As we have seen so far, not everyone is equally entitled to freedom and wealth, which seems to make the option of being a cosmopolitan citizen only something that is reserved for the white-male citizens of this world.
Chapter 3 Imagination and Reflection
“Empathy produces a total travesty if it doesn’t unravel the nature of the outsider’s presence. What the world calls for is something else, a deeper empathy I’d say.”
(Renzo Martens in conversation with T.J. Demos, “Towards a New Institutional Critique, 2012)
Intro
In this chapter I will investigate the possibilities of narrative imagination as described by Martha Nussbaum and its potential for a cosmopolitan imagination in relation to the artworks. I will do this by looking at the representation of the artists and of “otherness”. Likewise, I will examine to what extend these artworks play with the very thin line between voyeurism and having a sincere interest in ‘the other’. As I have argued in the previous chapter, in Enjoy Poverty Martens frames the media’s share in the poverty industry, but by making the film, he becomes complicit to the problem that he is trying to criticize. In La Superba, however, we have found a protagonist who seems to listen empathically to the stories of the people that he meets in everyday encounters. I want to examine what these different approaches can teach us about the effect of narrative imagination and if these works are ethically directing its viewer towards a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ or are criticizing the idea and practicality of cosmopolitan ethics.
3.1 La Superba, cosmopolitanism and ‘the other’
Perhaps one of the most striking features of La Superba is its diversity in characters and their voices. As most of La Superba’s story is set in the public spaces of Genoa, in its various bars and palazzos, Ilja experiences various ‘adventures’ and encounters many people with different backgrounds. In the novel’s first chapter during one of his nightly escapades, Ilja finds a woman’s leg behind one of the garbage cans in a small alley near his house. Not knowing what to do, he leaves the leg behind and decides later to go back and to bring it home with him. This event in itself already seems highly unlikely, but it will get even more extreme when the leg starts to talk back:
I gently pinched each toe. “You have such tiny little toes,” I said. She began to laugh. It tickled. The back of my hand slid along her shin. The jagged edge of a nail caught in her stocking for a moment. “Sorry.”(23-24)
This magical realist touch at the beginning of the novel sets the tone for both the narrator and the protagonist: to be unreliable and often lost in his own fantasy. But as it may be, this fragment also shows the protagonist’s potential for a vivid imagination. I will later elaborate on the element of vivid imagination and argue that it is precisely this that deserves credit for directing the reader towards a cosmopolitan imagination.
The previous fragment also showed that Ilja is a solitary walker as he wanders and strolls through the narrow streets of Genoa. He could therefore be described as a relocated version of the 19th century Parisian ‘flâneur’. Traditionally, the flâneur’s
habitat were the streets of Paris, or more precisely, its arcades, from which this Parisian Bohemian figure, as a man of the crowd and the symbol of modernity would observe the
eminently suitable for showing a certain amount of curiosity for his environment and therefore it is not surprising that Pfeijffer has chosen for his protagonist to take up this shape. It is clear from the beginning of the novel that Ilja finds it important to be a part of this crowd; although one might also think he suffers from vanity:
I’ve bought myself a new wardrobe so that I can slip into this elegant new world a new man. A couple of Italian summer suits, tailored shirts, an elegant pair of shoes, as soft as butter but as sharp as a knife, and a real panama hat. It cost me a fortune, but I considered it a necessary investment to give my assimilation a boost. (7)
When the flâneur is placed into a multicultural environment, the flâneur cannot help but to engage with what this diversity has to offer him. The British sociologist Keith Tester defines the flâneur as a self-conscious, but utterly empty figure, because he waits to be filled by his object of observation: the urban environment and its crowd. He attributes, like the poet or the artist, meaning to faces and things to his own sovereignty. Therefore, the flâneur is able to treat this object with a detached attitude, an attitude that is “only a short step away from isolation and alienation” (6). His emptiness provides the possibility to lose himself in what he observes, that will bring us to the essence of his existence, which is about freedom, the meaning or lack of meaning of existence and the being-with-others in the modern urban city.
As mentioned before, Ilja spends a lot of time in the public spaces of Genoa where he meets many people. Two of them have a significant part of the novel dedicated to them and their life story: the Englishman Don and the Senegalese Djiby, whom I have
imagination’. Don is a true storyteller and infamous in the whole of Genoa for his heavy drinking and unpaid debts. Don’s anthem is Yellow Submarine from The Beatles, a song with which he always ends his nights after excessive alcohol intake. However, after his death, many of Don’s life stories turned out to be completely made up. It is therefore remarkable that Ilja ends the part on Don with warm words:
He was a living legend and it will be difficult for the city to get used to the fact that he is now a dead one. Smiling behind his sunglasses, he drank himself to death and laughingly invented a life story to go with it. The bum. The drunken bastard. He enticed all of us into the labyrinth of his fantasies. And he succeeded —he was the most popular immigrant, the most successful foreigner in the whole of Genoa because he never assimilated, never fit in, and always stayed himself. In fact he had refined himself into a caricature of himself. (172)
Even though a person like Don, a notorious drunkard and deceiver, would be considered by many to be the ‘scum of society’, Ilja still manages to speak about Don in a connective and positive way. The fact that Yellow Submarine was his anthem is not a coincidence: it is a metaphor for that we are all living in our own encapsulated reality. According to Ilja, the people in Genoa loved him and even the reader will be able to sympathise to a certain extend with the extreme character of Don, in the same way as we can also recognize ourselves in the character of the Senegalese fortune seeker Djibby, who, with completely unrealistic expectations, was hoping to find a golden future in Europe.
In fact, Ilja invites the reader to reflect as well on its own dreams and fantasies by an anecdote on a Dutch television show from the nineties called A Place in
would have one dream, which was to start over somewhere new, someplace south and somewhere warm. These people were full of hope, and thought they had it all figured out by starting a new adventure, but would end up with similar pierced dreams as the other immigrant characters in La Superba, having expectations that are too high and that do not match with the everyday reality. By pointing out that it is not only the fortune seekers from Africa that come with unrealistic expectations to Europe, Ilja shows that it is
something inherent of being human to have hope, even if this hope is leading to illusions, which one should perhaps not judge too harshly.
An important aspect that is somehow related to this element of vivid imagination that is also being addressed in the novel are Italy’s nationalistic and patriotic stories on immigration. Italy has a rich history of immigration. At the end of the 19th century until
the First World War, millions of Italians left their country to move to Latin America and to the United States in search of a better life. Ilja frames this wave of immigration as if the Italians were actually the same fortune seekers as the current boat refugees and that they were also hopelessly naïve. But this is not how Italians like to remember their history:
The official website of the research institute for Italian emigration to both Americas emphasizes that the Italian emigrant was characterized by pride in his fatherland and an unwavering belief in human progress based on work and a strong awareness of civilian virtues and religious piety. It’s actually there in black and white. This is comparable with the things I’ve sometimes heard right-wing Italian politicians say: the Italian emigrants went in order to work, while the African rabble flooding Europe have only come to steal. And then to think that the research institute is financed by the province, which since time immemorial has been in left-wing hands, you can just imagine (192).
In this fragment, Ilja makes an appeal to look critically at this history and to who is writing it. And if this ‘history’ is repeating itself, that again, one might think twice before judging the fortune seekers negatively, as economic immigration is a phenomenon of all times.
As La Superba tells the story of many such people being lost in their fantasy, we might have to understand the close relation between fantasy and imagination. In the aforementioned fragment with the woman’s leg, Ilja puts himself at the level of these characters, as this fragment shows that he also suffers from being lost in his own fantasy and is therefore no better than them. According to Martha Nussbaum, it is exactly this potential for imagination, or what she would call ‘narrative imagination’ that plays an important role in creating “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have” (2010 95-96). She continues that cultivating this narrative imagination can lead to more sympathy towards others and that playful exercises in creating this sympathy can be done through literature and art education (2010 106).
I argue that La Superba would be a ‘school example’ of a literary work that can trigger its readers’ imagination in order to sympathise more with ‘otherness’ in the novel and that ultimately through this exercise in empathy and imagination, one will have a less distant and hostile attitude towards the ‘the other’ that these characters in the novel seem to represent. The other would here refer to the migrants that have come from Africa to Europe or to people that deviate from the norm of being a successful white male, such as people who suffer from a drug addiction, sex workers and transgender people. For the sake of the cosmopolitan argument that I am trying to build, I have merely focussed on
