European Others

Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe

Dados Bibliográficos

ID23152125
AutoresDavid Gramling (0000-0002-0027-4453, autor correspondente)
Ano2012
Volume104
Fascículo2
Páginas303-305
Data de publicação2012-01-01
Open AccessNão
TipoREVIEW
Resenha deEuropean Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Fatima El-Tayeb, 2011
PeriódicoMonatshefte (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0026-9271 • E-ISSN: 1934-2810
EditoraUniversity of Wisconsin Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/mon.2012.0052
OpenAlexW1767093129
IdiomaEN

Reviewed by: European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe David Gramling European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. By Fatima El-Tayeb. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. xlvi + 253 pages. $25.00. It is difficult to say whether this finely wrought monograph would have come into being as it did, were it not for a fiery 1999 essay by Bourdieu and Wacquant that opened with this rather strong claim: “Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized [End Page 303] as such” (“On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture & Society 16:1, 41). The cautionary exemplum that emerged from this initial claim is that of race, which Bourdieu and Wacquant saw as an always already fictive “black-white” binary. They claimed that North American discourse deduced a false racial binary from its slave economy, its segregation politics, and its Civil Rights movement; then retrospectively imposed it on its own populations despite all available evidence of the many shifting referents beneath and around blackness and whiteness; and then finally, and “cunningly,” exported this dehistoricized black-white binary southward and eastward to political contexts for which it was not suited. One of the many necessary ambitions of El-Tayeb’s book is to push back against this precipitous logic about the “globalization of American problems.” “To reference race as native to contemporary European thought,” inveighs El-Tayeb, “violates the powerful narrative of Europe as a colorblind continent, largely untouched by the devastating ideology [of race] it exported all over the world” (xv, my emphasis). The colorblindness at issue in European Others is that of, among other things, the immigration and integration debates that unfold on Center-Left front pages in Hamburg or Paris—about whether third-generation “Turks” have made the difficult leap into Germanness, or “North Africans” into Frenchness, or both into Europeanness. Such chronic conjectures about cultural fealty, according to El-Tayeb, rest on the errant presumption that Europe does not have an underlying race problem that might hinder the performance and adjudication of such identificatory leaps among Europeans of color. Meanwhile, precisely these Europeans of color—in the living rooms of Ghent, Manchester, Utrecht, and Lyon—are “by now as European as those worrying about them” (xii). El-Tayeb’s stance—taken up against the now global purveyors of such universalized concepts as habitus and symbolic capital—requires a great deal of rigorous theoretical and empirical follow-up in European Others, which she provides with a humane imagination, textual rigor, and energetic political vigilance. First, El-Tayeb needs to prove her case that there is indeed a durably racialized norm undergirding “proper Europeanness,” up against which autochthonous Europeans of color—who may or may not have ever been also North Africans, Turks, Surinamese, Sinti or Roma in a given time, context, or paradigm—remain in a permanent state of social and symbolic precariousness. A strategic essentialism, El-Tayeb’s term “Europeans of color” refers to an invisibilized transnational population that has been subjected to the triage mechanisms of integration discourses over the past six decades, discourses which either a) conceive of people of color as the cultural extensions of “sending countries,” (often countries that neither sent nor saw them, and in some cases, countries that no longer exist), or b) statutorily adjure them to be naturalized nationals through and through, abdicating any political responsibility for their still precarious, racialized status domestically. Chapter One of European Others demonstrates how the pursuit of a European postnational identity since the Second World War has relied on the preemptive exclusion of race as an actionable category of discourse. Europe-internal conversations have instead sought recourse to “integration” as a delimiting lever of civic belonging and, in so doing, broadcast a centripetal universalism that denies concurrent, durable processes of racialization by which Europeans of color remain stuck in a disinterpellated “privileged partner” position. The ensuing analysis locates long-term refugee youth [End Page 304] as the symbolic fulcrum of Europe’s civil-rights policy discourses and pursues a bio-political account of how these populations experience daily subjectification between Europeanness and statelessness. Chapter Two is a sweeping survey of...

Art · Ethnic group · Globalization · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · Anthropology · European history and politics · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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