Deaf Identity Revisited 159
It is likely that structural support, with further cross-cultural dialogue among deaf
migrant pioneers and Flemish allies, are needed for bridging initiatives to be able to
take place (for more discussion of multiple belongings, see the section titled “The
Quest for Deaf Identity and Deaf Studies”).
This process illustrates a clash between a second-stage process of emancipation
with a fixed Flemish deaf community identity concentrating on common elements,
and a third-stage movement with deaf individuals, in this case deaf migrants, try-
ing to open up boundaries to facilitate participation in multiple communities. This
dialogue develops at the crossroads of emancipation movements of deaf citizens
and migrants in Flanders. The parallel model of emancipation in deaf migrants,
discussed earlier, has been popularized in Flanders and the Netherlands since the
beginning of the 2000s, when Paul Scheffer published his essay “The Multicultural
Drama” (published in Dutch as “Het multiculturele drama” in 2000). The model
of emancipation and, more particularly, the popularization of the conclusion that
multicultural society has failed, has fueled and narrowed debates on multicultural-
ism over the last 15 years. In their book The Limits of Multicultural Flanders. A Lion
in a Cage, Arnaut and colleagues (2009) refer to a Flanders that has been paralyzed
in the threat of identity, calling for the protection of their “own” norms, values,
and cultural heritage in light of an increased problematization of the integration
of migrants.
While citizenship was practiced on the basis of ethnicity and legal rights in the
19th century, contemporary citizenship has received a cultural entitlement based
on the legal distinction of autochthons (who claim to be “real” citizens) and alloch-
thons (“strangers”),† which makes it difficult for allochthons to coproduce Flemish
identity and heritage, “narrating and imagining Flanders in all its heterogeneity”:
“the recognition of the material reality of multicultural, multiethnic or multireli-
gious Flanders is a fact, but the symbolic reality—the imagination—is behind”
(p. 20, translation mine). As such, it is necessary to make room for a “Flanders
which, in other words, can leave the cage of ‘autochthony,’ and in which everyone
who participates in its daily coexistence—apart from culture, ethnicity, religion,
gender... —can actually belong” (p. 25, translation mine).
Exploring the rise of autochthony movements in Africa and Europe, Ceuppens
and Geschiere (2005) illuminate how similar discourses appear self-evident across
very diverse contexts, problematizing “the extreme malleability of the concept”:These discourses promise the certainty of belonging, but in practice, they
raise basic uncertainties because autochthony is subject to constant redefini-
tion against new “others” and at ever-closer range. (p. 385)The vagueness and emptiness of the term enables it to be employed as “self-evident”
in very diverse settings, often tied to different understandings of “belonging” within
the same nation state, paradoxically being dangerously exclusive of “the Other” in
its promise of stability.† For reflection on this terminology and comparison with the term “indigenous,” see Ceuppens and
Geschiere (2005).