Race and Crisis

Suman Gupta, Satnam Virdee, Suman Gupta, Satnam Virdee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429686368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the European Union seemingly teetered from a financial crisis to an immigration crisis around 2015 and onwards, discourses of race appeared to congeal in various member states. In some instances, these came with familiarly essentialist constructions; in others these were refracted cautiously through concerns about security, national and cultural integrity, distribution of public resources and employment, and so on. New political alignments surfaced on the back of such concerns, and established organizations changed their agendas accordingly. The border regimes of EU member states became increasingly fraught, both in terms of their everyday operations and in terms of the close attention and vociferous debates they attracted. In most instances, the internal and external borders of the EU hardened, and with increasing frequency the cohesion of the transnational union seemed on the verge of fracturing. Indeed, very real fissures opened up with secessionist moves and referendums. Through each step in this juncture of upheavals, the significance of race has been reiterated in tangential ways and sometimes with unabashed straightforwardness.

This volume explores this juncture around 2015, and the constructions of race and of crisis therein, for specific contexts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The introduction gives an overview of the juncture, focusing on the rise of Eurosceptic nationalist political parties and their electoral success. Subsequent chapters are addressed to the management and representation of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, border regimes in the Czech Republic, the narratives that converged on Brexit, riots in England, antagonistic popular movements in Sweden, racialization in crisis management in Italy, perceptions of migrants in Greece, and how race may be structured in and challenged through classroom pedagogy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: European crises: contemporary nationalisms and the language of "race"
• 1. The "migrant crisis" as racial crisis: do Black Lives Matter in Europe?
• 2. The hieroglyphics of the border: racial stigma in neoliberal Europe
• 3. Racism, Crisis, Brexit
• 4. Rioting and the politics of crisis
• 5. "Race" and the upsurge of antagonistic popular movements in Sweden
• 6. Racialization and counter-racialization in times of crisis: taking migrant struggles in Italy as a critical standpoint on race
• 7. Migration, crisis, liberalism: the cultural and racial politics of Islamophobia and "radical alterity" in modern Greece
• 8. Blackboard as separation wall: classrooms, race and the contemporary crisis in Germany
• Index