Overview
Racism Postcolonialism Europe turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically distant from Europe, back on Europe itself. The book argues that racism is alive and dangerously well in Europe, and examines this racism through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial racism can be a racism of reaction, based on the perceived threat to traditional social and cultural identities; or a racism of (false) respect, based on mainstream liberals’ desire to hold at arm’s length ‘different’ cultures they are anxious not to offend. Most of all, postcolonial racism, at least within the contemporary European context, is a racism of surveillance, whereby ‘foreigners’ become ‘aliens’, ‘protection’ disguises ‘preference’, and ‘cultural difference’ slides into ‘racial stigmatization’ ––all in the interests of representing the European people, which is a very different entity to the European population as a whole. Boasting a broad multidisciplinary approach and a range of distinguished contributors - including Philomena Essed, Michel Wieviorka and Griselda Pollock – Racism Postcolonialism Europe will be required reading for scholars and students of race, postcolonial studies, sociology, European history and literary and cultural studies.
Full Product Details
Author: Graham Huggan (School of English, University of Leeds (United Kingdom)) ,
Ian Law (School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds (United Kingdom))
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Imprint: Liverpool University Press
Volume: 6
Dimensions:
Width: 16.30cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 23.90cm
Weight: 0.493kg
ISBN: 9781846312199
ISBN 10: 1846312191
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 15 October 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere. Journal of Postcolonial Networks 20111207
The collection of essays in this volume resulted from the Racism/Postcolonialism/Europe conference held at the University of Leeds, in 2006. Transdisciplinary in its methods, postcolonial studies are applied to historical, sociological, and political surveys. Continental European debates on race and racism reveal the importance of postcolonial studies, critical studies on race, and black feminist studies; particularly, within East European Countries (Romania), continental cases (Spain, France, Germany), and the UK. The collection contains discussions on (1) the German debate regarding Turkey's inclusion in the EU, (2) post-2005 English paranoia towards multiculturalism, (3) Islamophobia and the public humiliation of minorities in the Netherlands and (4) post-republicanism in France, all of which are treated with a broad outlook placing emphases on racial ideologies central to the construction of both European nation-states and Europe. Finally, this collection deals with anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsism, and racism against migrants. The aim of this collection is intellectual and political, in the tradition of Subaltern Studies and G.C. Spivak. The authors' intention is to contribute to a postcolonial Europe that counteracts the need to repudiate [Europe's] imperial past clinging resolutely to the belief that there can be no alternative to the essentially European liberal democratic state (p.1). They address the controversial notion of multiculturalism defined as both an egalitarian approach to diversities and conversely, a specific political model of managing cultural heterogeneity in times of postcolonial 'hyper-globalization' (p.122). To envision the project of a postcolonial Europe, the authors work on past and present imperial/colonial histories in Europe through an in-depth analysis of popular and state racisms that are both nationally situated and pertinent to the European space as a political and legal structure. In all the contributions, the notions of colonialism, internal colonialism, and neo-colonialism are deployed to signify internal forms of racism, involving a number of minorities that reside in European and national territories. I would not personally use the term colonialism to identify a process that refers not to the material or symbolic conquest of a close/remote territory/population, but to an historical conjuncture where globalization, migration policies and the construction of European society induce a re-edition of the (white) nationalist paranoia. Nevertheless, I acknowledge the effort made to outline the continuity between current European racism and its colonial past through a revitalization of these terms. The use of the adjective colonial (instead of colonialism ) as a bridging-term between past and present forms of inferiorization is absolutely pertinent. Defining pro-Roma sentiments in Romania as internally colonial allows us to grasp how the activities of pro-Roma NGOs, EU anti-discriminatory laws, philanthropists, donors based in the United States, and local governments can foster the quality of life for the Roma people while denying any subjectivity to single and collective Roma formations. By defining white paranoia, German anti-Turkish feelings, and the terror of multiculturalism (p. 119) as colonial, the authors connect the current distribution and organization of racial stereotypes in popular culture, educational systems, and the political arena to the long-lived racist ideologies of imperial times. Even if it has a clear political significance, the notion of colonialism in the case of Griselda Pollock's discussion of the Holocaust (pp. 17-38) is problematic. As in the case of the chapter by Nidhi Trehan and Angela Kocze, on the Roma, the link established through the use of the term colonialism in anti-Roma/Jewish racism to colonial practices of discrimination, inferiorization, infantilization, and diminution of the humanness of colonized people is politically valuable. It enables us to trace trajectories of colonial/racial ideo- and techno-scapes across Europe, connecting the bio-political structure of control, segregation, exploitation, and elimination that innerves nation-building and colonialism as outcomes of civilization. But again, the problem is the possible misunderstanding of the particular experience of segregation and/or elimination of the less-human, typical of anti-Jewish and anti-Gypsy racisms within the nation-state building process. In using the term colonialism, these experiences are reduced to those of exploitation colonialism and its racial hierarchies. This is manifested in the distinction between Polish people and Jews. Polish people-colonized, inferiorized, and exploited-survived, while Jews-obstacles to the formation of a nation based on one history, one blood, one country ideology-did not. The colonial legacy of current Islamophobia in United Kingdom, post-2005, is at the core of Ashwani Sharma's essay. In his critique of multiculturalism as hidden white-supremacy Sharma offers an important insight on vernacular multiculturalisms in dialectical opposition to the discourse of white anxiety and paranoia (p. 128). It is against a new postcolonial racism-one that tries to contain cultural otherness in a condition that is increasingly impossible-that these vernacular multiculturalisms resist and reconfigure the nation, notwithstanding the impossibility of overcoming increasingly powerful postcolonial fantasies of whiteness and the United Kingdom's imperial nostalgia (p. 176). The battle, now, is on the meaning associated with the term multiculturalism, while multiculturalism, as Spencer states in the last essay of the collection, is hollowed out until it is reduced to little more than a signifier for multi-coloured conformity to the priorities of the British state (p.181). The decadent but still persisting fantasies of whiteness are termed Europism by Philomena Essed: While Eurocentrism emerged from the victory of conquest and the 'civilizing mission,' Europism is based in the defeat of Europe, first by the United States, now gradually being followed by the Far East (p.139). However, Europism is still fostered and underpinned by the same colonial stereotypes that sustained European colonialism. As Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius states in her discussion of the Mohammad cartoons war, the conflict corresponds to competing representations and self-representations of the colonial other in the War on Terror. Finally, Michel Wieviorka analyzes the reasons (social, institutional, cultural, political, and intellectual) that lie at the very base of the banlieues crisis of 2005 and offers a new balance between private and public spheres in France. This given proportion results from the long-running, post-republican claim of religious communities and racial minorities to both constitute themselves as a minority in the public sphere and continue to adhere to the Republic (170). This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere. -- Gaia Giuliani Journal of Postcolonial Networks 20111207 This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere. Journal of Postcolonial Networks 20111207 'The framing of irregular migration as a political concern across regions of the global North is ... linked to processes of securitization and criminalization', Vicki Squire argues (p. 3), echoing recent disciplinary trends of combined studies of security and migration. Although there has been significant work done by way of understanding how these domains are conceptually and empirically articulated, there is some way to go regarding the role that histories of particular regions play in the so-called security-migration 'nexus'. For instance, the history of Europe as a region of the 'global North' is partly the history of (de)colonisation, integral processes of which are the contemporary migrations with the politics and practices that characterise them. Post-colonial theory could be made relevant here in a plurality of ways, since the history and present of migrations to regions of Europe have oriented post-colonial problematics and research 'back home'. Huggan and Law's work Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe, extracts the post-colonial critique from its traditional disciplinary boundaries and 'exotic' objects, and draws attention to Europe's 'foreigners'. To that end, a number of scholars across the humanities explore through empirical case studies the construction and contestation of racial ideologies, broadly fitting into three thematics: 'concentrationary legacies' examines anti-Semitism and racism against Romani people; 'multiculturalism and its discontents' examines racisms of 'respect' and 'distance' within the liberal polities; and 'racisms of migration' explore themes around surveillance and the 'policing of cultural difference'. In this last section, the contributors unpack migration policy, refugee oppositional artistic practices and the 'making' strangers of Turkish migrants in Europe. Although security and/or its theorisation is not an explicit object of study, concerns about it underpin the empirical contexts analysed, namely, 'national or pan-European contexts in which difference is less likely to be seen as an asset than as a threat' (p. 8). However, these insightful and contextually 'thick' accounts could be further theorised by turning to more elaborate understandings of migration from the viewpoint of security. In other words, the post-colonial critique has a lot to gain from a more sustained engagement with how security is extended in the domain of contemporary migrations. Conversely, security studies can - and do - profit from critical engagements with the postcolonial urge to rethink racism as bound with familiar, social and political practices 'at home'. Vicki Squire's remarkable theorisation of the production of 'irregular' mobility sets the tone for the contributions to her edited volume, The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. The main theme explored in this book is the (contested) politics of mobility.The contributors examine both the ways in which mobility becomes an object of control through heterogeneous and socially dispersed practices implicating various actors in uneven power relations across mobile border zones, and the ways in which mobility is reclaimed by contesting practices of surveillance and control, practices productive of irregularity. The term 'irregularity' - distinct from the state-sanctioned 'illegality' - is used to speak to an ambivalent condition: on the one hand, there is the production of irregularity and irregular subjects through security and control; on the other hand, this condition bears the potential of a counter-politics and 'emergent struggles around irregularity to re-define what it means to be political ' (p. 9). In interpreting the politics of control, the place of technology, crime and even 'dramatic events' is taken into consideration. The second part of the book takes up the challenging task of rethinking politics through the lens of migrant agency, which is more often than not obscured by nominal, moral hierarchies which constitute migrants as incapable of being autonomous and political. The volume is conceptually challenging, its 'analytics of irregularity' potentially offer innovative lines of empirical research, and its political perspective is rather radical. However, as suggested at the beginning of this review, such an analytic framework - and security studies in general - could profit from a constructive dialogue with post-colonial theory. Such an encounter would require rethinking binaries such as the 'global North'/'global South'. It would also invite researchers in security studies to think about the cultural, racial and historical particularities of sub-regional units and how these relate to practices that seek to control and regulate transnational mobility. Both these books should prove valuable to researchers in (critical) security and migration studies, as well as to those interested in post-colonial and ethnic/race studies. Critically, the perspectives developed in these two volumes are mutually complementary, both contributing to interdisciplinary explorations of security, mobility and race. -- Christos Pallas Political Studies Review, Volume 10, Issue Number 2 201205 ... valuable to researchers in (critical) security and migration studies, as well as to those interested in post-colonial and ethnic/race studies. -- Christos Pallas Political Studies Review, Volume 10, Issue Number 2 201205
The collection of essays in this volume resulted from the Racism/Postcolonialism/Europe conference held at the University of Leeds, in 2006. Transdisciplinary in its methods, postcolonial studies are applied to historical, sociological, and political surveys. Continental European debates on race and racism reveal the importance of postcolonial studies, critical studies on race, and black feminist studies; particularly, within East European Countries (Romania), continental cases (Spain, France, Germany), and the UK. The collection contains discussions on (1) the German debate regarding Turkey's inclusion in the EU, (2) post-2005 English paranoia towards multiculturalism, (3) Islamophobia and the public humiliation of minorities in the Netherlands and (4) post-republicanism in France, all of which are treated with a broad outlook placing emphases on racial ideologies central to the construction of both European nation-states and Europe. Finally, this collection deals with anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsism, and racism against migrants. The aim of this collection is intellectual and political, in the tradition of Subaltern Studies and G.C. Spivak. The authors' intention is to contribute to a postcolonial Europe that counteracts the need to repudiate [Europe's] imperial past clinging resolutely to the belief that there can be no alternative to the essentially European liberal democratic state (p.1). They address the controversial notion of multiculturalism defined as both an egalitarian approach to diversities and conversely, a specific political model of managing cultural heterogeneity in times of postcolonial 'hyper-globalization' (p.122). To envision the project of a postcolonial Europe, the authors work on past and present imperial/colonial histories in Europe through an in-depth analysis of popular and state racisms that are both nationally situated and pertinent to the European space as a political and legal structure. In all the contributions, the notions of colonialism, internal colonialism, and neo-colonialism are deployed to signify internal forms of racism, involving a number of minorities that reside in European and national territories. I would not personally use the term colonialism to identify a process that refers not to the material or symbolic conquest of a close/remote territory/population, but to an historical conjuncture where globalization, migration policies and the construction of European society induce a re-edition of the (white) nationalist paranoia. Nevertheless, I acknowledge the effort made to outline the continuity between current European racism and its colonial past through a revitalization of these terms. The use of the adjective colonial (instead of colonialism ) as a bridging-term between past and present forms of inferiorization is absolutely pertinent. Defining pro-Roma sentiments in Romania as internally colonial allows us to grasp how the activities of pro-Roma NGOs, EU anti-discriminatory laws, philanthropists, donors based in the United States, and local governments can foster the quality of life for the Roma people while denying any subjectivity to single and collective Roma formations. By defining white paranoia, German anti-Turkish feelings, and the terror of multiculturalism (p. 119) as colonial, the authors connect the current distribution and organization of racial stereotypes in popular culture, educational systems, and the political arena to the long-lived racist ideologies of imperial times. Even if it has a clear political significance, the notion of colonialism in the case of Griselda Pollock's discussion of the Holocaust (pp. 17-38) is problematic. As in the case of the chapter by Nidhi Trehan and Angela Kocze, on the Roma, the link established through the use of the term colonialism in anti-Roma/Jewish racism to colonial practices of discrimination, inferiorization, infantilization, and diminution of the humanness of colonized people is politically valuable. It enables us to trace trajectories of colonial/racial ideo- and techno-scapes across Europe, connecting the bio-political structure of control, segregation, exploitation, and elimination that innerves nation-building and colonialism as outcomes of civilization. But again, the problem is the possible misunderstanding of the particular experience of segregation and/or elimination of the less-human, typical of anti-Jewish and anti-Gypsy racisms within the nation-state building process. In using the term colonialism, these experiences are reduced to those of exploitation colonialism and its racial hierarchies. This is manifested in the distinction between Polish people and Jews. Polish people-colonized, inferiorized, and exploited-survived, while Jews-obstacles to the formation of a nation based on one history, one blood, one country ideology-did not. The colonial legacy of current Islamophobia in United Kingdom, post-2005, is at the core of Ashwani Sharma's essay. In his critique of multiculturalism as hidden white-supremacy Sharma offers an important insight on vernacular multiculturalisms in dialectical opposition to the discourse of white anxiety and paranoia (p. 128). It is against a new postcolonial racism-one that tries to contain cultural otherness in a condition that is increasingly impossible-that these vernacular multiculturalisms resist and reconfigure the nation, notwithstanding the impossibility of overcoming increasingly powerful postcolonial fantasies of whiteness and the United Kingdom's imperial nostalgia (p. 176). The battle, now, is on the meaning associated with the term multiculturalism, while multiculturalism, as Spencer states in the last essay of the collection, is hollowed out until it is reduced to little more than a signifier for multi-coloured conformity to the priorities of the British state (p.181). The decadent but still persisting fantasies of whiteness are termed Europism by Philomena Essed: While Eurocentrism emerged from the victory of conquest and the 'civilizing mission,' Europism is based in the defeat of Europe, first by the United States, now gradually being followed by the Far East (p.139). However, Europism is still fostered and underpinned by the same colonial stereotypes that sustained European colonialism. As Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius states in her discussion of the Mohammad cartoons war, the conflict corresponds to competing representations and self-representations of the colonial other in the War on Terror. Finally, Michel Wieviorka analyzes the reasons (social, institutional, cultural, political, and intellectual) that lie at the very base of the banlieues crisis of 2005 and offers a new balance between private and public spheres in France. This given proportion results from the long-running, post-republican claim of religious communities and racial minorities to both constitute themselves as a minority in the public sphere and continue to adhere to the Republic (170). This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere. -- Gaia Giuliani Journal of Postcolonial Networks 20111207 This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere. Journal of Postcolonial Networks 20111207
Author Information
Graham Huggan is Professor of Postcolonial and Commonwealth Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is author of the influential volume The Postcolonial Exotic (Routledge, 2001) among many previous books. Dr Ian Law is Founding Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) and Reader in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.
