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.
Author(s): Graham Huggan (editor), Ian Law (editor)
Series: Postcolonialism across the Disciplines; 6
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 224
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction • Graham Huggan
Part I. Concentrationary legacies
2 Concentrationary legacies: thinking through the racism of minor differences • Griselda Pollock
3 Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and feminist activism in eastern Europe: a case study of Romania • Elisabeta Zelinka
4 Racism, (neo-)colonialism and social justice: the struggle for the soul of the Romani movement in post-socialist Europe • Nidhi Trehan and Angéla Kóczé
Part II. Racisms of migration
5 ‘A soft touch’: racism and asylum-seekers from a visual culture perspective • Alex Rotas
6 Migration, racism and postcolonial studies in Spain • Landry-Wilfrid Miampika and Maya García de Vinuesa
7 The ‘sick man’ beyond Europe: the orientalization of Turkey and Turkish immigrants in European Union accession discourses in Germany • Christoph Ramm
Part III. Multiculturalism and its discontents
8 Postcolonial racism: white paranoia and the terrors of multiculturalism • Ashwani Sharma
9 Intolerable humiliations • Philomena Essed
10 The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy: racism and ‘cartoon work’ in the age of the World Wide Web • Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
Part IV. Towards the future?
11 Violence in France: crisis or towards post-republicanism? • Michel Wieviorka
12 The politics of imperial nostalgia • Robert Spencer
13 Afterword: Europe’s racial crisis? • Ian Law
Index
