After Identity: Mentalities, European Asymmetries and the Digital Turn

Abstract

‘Send it back to where it came from’, said an American talk show host during the 2016 election campaign in the United States. In an episode of ‘Full Frontal’, Samantha Bee referred to what she called Donald Trump’s un-American ‘brand of right-wing, racist, anti-immigrant demagoguery’. The place of origin she had in mind for this unsavoury ethics was Europe.1 Whether or not racism was actually part of the American election campaign is not of concern in this chapter. Rather, the focus lies on Samantha Bee’s suggestion to send racism back to Europe, a proposition that is part of a long-standing tradition of American anti-Europeanism.2 Bee made use of a common trope according to which the good things in the United States are American and the bad ones European. In her argument, ‘Europe’ functions as a discursive construction that serves to make a statement about America rather than Europe. Whether or not she was convinced that all Europeans are racists is not really relevant. The significant point is that whatever Samantha Bee may have imagined America to be does not necessarily correspond to valid, verifiable truths about Europe. Each culture, each group and each individual creates a mirror image of its ‘other’, just as Americans create an image of themselves by constructing the Europe they like or dislike. We call such self-reflecting mirror images ‘identities’.