Nira Yuval-Davis, 20 June 2011
Racialised and forced migrants are the spectre of the 'other' in the autocthonic dream of the 'pure' otherless universe which we must confront. This border-zone is our political as well as our analytical challenge, says Nira Yuval Davis
About the author
Nira Yuval-Davis the Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. Her latest book The Politics of Belonging:Intersectional Contestations will be published by Sage November 2011. She is an Israeli dissident and a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and Women In Black, .
In 1990 Nora Rätzel and Anita Kalpaka organised an international conference on racism and immigration in Hamburg, Germany. The aim of the conference was to bring to Germany international scholars and activists against racism in order to point out that what was happening in Germany at the time - especially against Turkish migrants - was not ‘xenophobia’ but racism. As the term ‘racism’ was associated in Germany with Nazism, there was an obvious reluctance to use the same terminology in ‘new democratic’ Germany. Xenophobia, in comparison with racism, seems to be almost excusable – a ‘natural’ tendency of people to be suspicious of anyone they do not know or understand. However, the organisers of the conference – and rightly so – thought that by contextualising what was happening in Germany in the 1980s in both German history and similar international phenomena, and ‘calling a spade a spade’, it would be easier to confront and struggle against what was happening.
I’m not sure that their efforts actually resulted in lessening racism in Germany, which reached new heights after reunification, but in terms of coordinating European wide anti-racist activism and policies, as well as in terms of the hegemonic discourse in Germany itself, this conference made a significant contribution to the growing acceptance that racism was the appropriate term to use.
This was so, especially because as scholars like Balibar (1990), Phil Cohen (1988), David Goldberg (1990) and others (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992) have argued, racism should not be identified just with constructions of ‘race’, but can take place whenever there are clear signifiers of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – whether it in terms of skin colour, accent, religious dress, etc. Racialisation discourse, in other words, can use any construction of ‘immutable’ boundaries for the purpose of its two alternative but most often complementary logics: of exclusion (ultimately genocide) and exploitation (ultimately slavery). Scholars like Martin Barker (1981), Taguieff (1985) and Modood (1997) talked in the 1980s and 90s about the emergence of a ‘new’, ‘differentialist’ ‘cultural’ kind of racism, which, while historically and discursively echoed with heritages of race, colonialism, cultural and religious wars, essentialised the unassimilable cultural ‘other’ as endemically inferior and/or dangerous.
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Racialised and forced migrants are the spectre of the 'other' in the autocthonic dream of the 'pure' otherless universe which we must confront. This border-zone is our political as well as our analytical challenge, says Nira Yuval Davis
About the author
Nira Yuval-Davis the Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. Her latest book The Politics of Belonging:Intersectional Contestations will be published by Sage November 2011. She is an Israeli dissident and a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and Women In Black, .
In 1990 Nora Rätzel and Anita Kalpaka organised an international conference on racism and immigration in Hamburg, Germany. The aim of the conference was to bring to Germany international scholars and activists against racism in order to point out that what was happening in Germany at the time - especially against Turkish migrants - was not ‘xenophobia’ but racism. As the term ‘racism’ was associated in Germany with Nazism, there was an obvious reluctance to use the same terminology in ‘new democratic’ Germany. Xenophobia, in comparison with racism, seems to be almost excusable – a ‘natural’ tendency of people to be suspicious of anyone they do not know or understand. However, the organisers of the conference – and rightly so – thought that by contextualising what was happening in Germany in the 1980s in both German history and similar international phenomena, and ‘calling a spade a spade’, it would be easier to confront and struggle against what was happening.
I’m not sure that their efforts actually resulted in lessening racism in Germany, which reached new heights after reunification, but in terms of coordinating European wide anti-racist activism and policies, as well as in terms of the hegemonic discourse in Germany itself, this conference made a significant contribution to the growing acceptance that racism was the appropriate term to use.
This was so, especially because as scholars like Balibar (1990), Phil Cohen (1988), David Goldberg (1990) and others (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992) have argued, racism should not be identified just with constructions of ‘race’, but can take place whenever there are clear signifiers of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – whether it in terms of skin colour, accent, religious dress, etc. Racialisation discourse, in other words, can use any construction of ‘immutable’ boundaries for the purpose of its two alternative but most often complementary logics: of exclusion (ultimately genocide) and exploitation (ultimately slavery). Scholars like Martin Barker (1981), Taguieff (1985) and Modood (1997) talked in the 1980s and 90s about the emergence of a ‘new’, ‘differentialist’ ‘cultural’ kind of racism, which, while historically and discursively echoed with heritages of race, colonialism, cultural and religious wars, essentialised the unassimilable cultural ‘other’ as endemically inferior and/or dangerous.
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