Assimilation is most commonly defined as “the process of adapting or adjusting to the culture of a group or nation”. In We Refugees, Hannah Arendt persistently employs words such as “adjust”, “change” and “fit” – all alluding to the notion of assimilation – a highly pertinent, yet many times misused term. Arendt rebuffs the definition of assimilation as “the necessary adjustment to the country where we happened to be born and to the people whose language we happened to speak,” propounding an alternative philosophy that, “We [refugees] adjust in principle to everything and everybody.”
Written from the perspective of a refugee, Arendt voices the struggles Jewish immigrants or newcomers experienced in their countries of refuge, wherein they were made to feel “undesirable”, told they don’t “belong”, and were denied their basic right to be treated as dignified human beings. Arendt goes on to elaborate how persecuted Jews were compelled to be “damnably careful in every moment of [their] daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who [they] were, what kind of passport [they] have…” In the face of such deeply embedded hostility, wherein Jewish immigrants’ very identity was put into question, assimilation meant abandoning their sense of self “to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles.” From “enemy aliens” to “boches” to “prospective citizens”, the Jews were labelled and appropriated even in countries and communities of their apparent refuge, driving them to breed the “insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews.” In this way, assimilation came to mean negation of their identity and the forced adoption of different identities.
I found Arendt’s interpretation of assimilation deeply thought-provoking and relevant to our exploration of “How Movements Make Meaning” as it compelled me to reconsider two things. Firstly, as an aspiring artivist who hopes to shed light on the plight of refugees through art, I feel challenged to not just highlight the one-dimensional, but rather two-fold injustice refugees face – they not only experience hostility from the country they flee/are expelled from, but many times from the countries they hope to find freedom in. And thus, assimilation becomes as important an issue to talk about as refugeehood itself. Secondly, in a more literal sense, as dancers who are learning and immersing ourselves in new dance forms (Kathak & Contemporary), I believe we will most definitely experience assimilation in dance itself, as we too will have to “adjust”, “change” and “fit”. In our case, however, we have the privilege, rather right, to retain and express our identity as part of this process. Given this, I am curious to discover how the macro-crisis of immigrant assimilation can be translated and reflected through the micro-scale assimilation we will undergo through dance, and thus truly understand the relationship between activism and art.
Dictionary.com Unabridged "Assimilation." Accessed 6 Jan 2018. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/assimilation. Arendt, Hannah. "We Refugees" Altogether Elsewhere: Writers o Exile. ed. Marc Robinson. 110-116. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Hi Nandini,
This is an amazing keyword essay. And what I’m going to do is just take it a little bit further and elaborate on your question, what do you do if you intend to be an “artivist?”
Well, a few students objected to having to read while having to dance, to travel and to engage with refugees. But this article opens up your eyes was that considers the nuances of the impact of a word – refugee – a situation – adapting to a new place – and the consequences of resistance and rejection. It plays out in ways we don’t often consider and, as Arendt explains, the effects do not happen once and in the same way – it changes over time and consequently changes both the people who inflict the pain and the refugees who have no recourse but to transform themselves in relation to that experience. This complex syndrome also changes how you might design an art intervention, like those that were described by Natalie Zervou which allowed the refugees to assert their identity in expressive form, or even like we did at Kipseli, which took the class out of the camp and allowed it to happen by mingling with others in a public space in the middle of the city. You have to know what the specifics of the situation are first, in order to create a change in the structure of the problem. Camps are a problem because they increase rather than diminish xenophobia. So like Nadia Christopolou from the Melissa Network, you devise strategies to make refugees an asset rather than an “unseen” burden that the citizens might feel corrupts their culture. There has to be a sense from both sides that what happens enriches everyone – that one’s advantage is not the other’s loss.