Rewriting the City: Collective Literary Initiatives Resisting Nationalism in Europe

Drawing on the notion of polyphony as the interplay of many voices in unity and difference, this article explores two collective literary projects in Europe that aim to co-construct alternative forms of community by situating belonging across multiple scales and using writing practices to form political solidarity and claim a “right to the city” (Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. Writings on Citie s. Blackwell. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas; Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution . Verso). We argue that these city-based initiatives redefine the social fabric of urban spaces through shared encounters across languages, challenging discourses that frame the city as an alienating space and countering the abstract and imaginary bonds that sustain the nation-state and which tend to exclude non-citizens from the community (Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . Verso). Without idealizing the city and cultural production as immune to discrimination or political and economic domination, we define these initiatives as counter-hegemonic sites, in which writing emerges in friction with and as resistance to nationalist narratives. Blending literary and ethnographic analysis, the article shows how the collective En Palabras, which foregrounds migrant experiences in Barcelona through literary production, and the Letters to Homeland writing workshop in Brussels, which interrogates nationalisms and the meanings of homeland, use the formats of the anthology and the workshop to bring about polyphonic articulations of belonging beyond territorial and linguistic origins.