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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2023

Edge People

Résumé

Identity is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses." 2 So wrote historian Tony Judt in 2010, in an article in the New York Review of Books called "The Edge People." Over and against the collective labels imposed on groups of people, Judt identifies with those of shifting identifications, who speak multiple languages, who navigate between multiple confessions and convictions, who live on the ragged and complex interstices between states, empires or "civilizations": what he calls the "edge people". Judt was a specialist of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century history of central and eastern Europe, where many cities saw mixing of Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims and Jews, speaking a babel of languages. Throughout the twentieth century, pogroms, the Shoah, mass deportations and forced immigration put an end to the cosmopolitan mix of many of those cities as nationalist states sought to impose linguistic, ethnic and religious homogeneity in their territories. Judt's fear was that such forces were continuing to impose their tribal definitions of identity in the twenty-first century, and that the "edge people" were becoming a rare entity. In 1998, Amin Maalouf had expressed similar worries in his essay Les identités meurtrières. 3 Maalouf, a Lebanese Christian who had lived in Egypt, immigrated to France at the age of 27 when civil war erupted in Lebanon. Arab, Lebanese, Christian, French, European: Maalouf is all these things and more, but found in the 1990s that he was increasingly asked to explain which of those was his real identity, as if in the end one somehow had to choose one of the many facets of one's life and define oneself as narrowly belonging to one homogenous group. Such conceptions of identity are "murderous" for Maalouf, because they can push people to marginalize, exclude and attack those who do not fit into the group, whether that group is defined by ethnicity, religion or nationality.
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Dates et versions

halshs-04162118, version 1 (14-07-2023)

Licence

Paternité - CC BY 4.0

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04162118 , version 1

Citer

John Victor Tolan. Edge People. Thomas Serrier & Ekaterina Makhotina. Zwischenwelten: Grenzüberschreitungen Europäischer Geschichte, WBG, pp.83-87, 2023, 9783534276134. ⟨halshs-04162118⟩
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