Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced

Upplyst fundamentalism? Invandring, feminism och högern

Genom Europa löper en islamofobisk politisk vind med negativa inställningar till invandring, underblåst av extremhögern. Liz Feketes fokus är hur dessa strömningar i och med kriget mot terrorismen har blivit mainstreampolitik i många europeiska länder. Detta politiska skifte, för ett assimilationsinriktat och monokulturellt samhälle behöver och får dock sina feministiska cheerleaders

Neoliberalism and Popular Racism: The Shifting Shape of the European Right

Neoliberal economic policies, emergency laws, a permanent war culture and the securitization of migration have all inflated the cause of the ultra right. And of course it finds echoes of its racist politics in the prevailing rhetoric against migrants, Muslims, Roma and the indolent poor, the ‘scroungers’ that hold the ‘strivers’ back. Yet the ultra right is insurgent. Its growth represents a challenge to the neoliberal status quo inasmuch as the ultra right sees neoliberalism as antithetical to a hierarchical, nationalist, monocultural society with a strong state. I provide below an anatomy of the ultra right, from its various currents and mutations to its web of relationships, fanatical fronts, criminal subculture, provocations and violence. But the ultra right has neither emerged in a political vacuum nor is it divorced from mainstream political culture, where the electoral extreme right plays a significant role, as I go on to show

The shifting shape of the European far right

This is the second article in our series Trouble on the­ Far-Right. Since 2011 signs have been multiplying in Europe of a far right grassroots insurgency in the making. And there were signals, too, of a racist insurrection: arson attacks, petrol bombs, paramilitary and vigilante activities, and the stockpiling of weapons. The first major indication of the far right’s capacity for mass murder came from Norway on 22 July 2011. Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, mainly teenagers, whom he shot dead at the Labour Party youth summer camp on Oslo’s Utøya Island. At his trial, Breivik described the youngsters he so cruelly murdered as ‚traitors‘ who had embraced immigration in order to promote an ‘Islamic colonization of Norway‘.