Abstract

I situate my project within critical and interdisciplinary frameworks of cultural politics of strangers and otherness that approach the relationship between community, transnational urbanism, and globalization. Much of the existing literature on communities assume that a community shares a singular identity and delineates its spatial and cultural boundaries accordingly. This way of representation of ethnic communities, however, only results in naturalizing ethnic communities and clear distinction about who is the host group and who are ‘strangers.’ Like Young (1990) who asserts the politics of difference, the ideal of community is dismissed because it denies and represses any kinds of social differences. However, rather than dismissing the notion of community, this research suggests a “community of strangers” as a new perspective of the community. This perspective depends on the philosophical discussion surrounding the “inoperative community” (Nancy, 1991), which means that, rather than as a goal to be accomplished, a community just exists by sharing infinitudes of human beings, specifical contemporaneity in terms of spatial and temporal limits. The notion of a community of strangers, while deconstructing the traditional meaning attached to the community, aims to show that people with heterogeneous backgrounds, who are strangers to each other, can belong to a community without having to share sameness.