“We Must Talk about Cologne”
Race, Gender, and Reconfigurations of “Europe”
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Abstract
The perceived crisis triggered by the current refugee influx highlights the contradiction at the heart of human rights discourse. Modern humanity has been constructed as both European and as universal; the racialized “Other” against whom the “modern human” disturbs this construction by laying claim to human rights from the very heart of Europe. The sexualized violence reported in Cologne on New Year’s Eve fed into racialized fears of refugees and immigrants promoted by groups on the radical right, even as racialized fears returned to mainstream discourses. Critical responses to the racism of the radical right unfortunately also participate in racialized discourses by resorting to “Europe” or “European values.” This analysis suggests the need to consider Europe as a field of power, one in which the contestation over what Europe is or should be results in concrete, racialized disparities in access to social mobility, education, or public agency. A project for racial, gender and economic justice requires the thinking of Europe as an ongoing project of world-making. The call to revisit or reclaim “European” values cannot succeed here. Nor can a response to the new right (or the newly normalized racism of the center) allow the new right to determine the parameters of debates about possibilities for the future.
Contributor Notes
Beverly Weber is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her first book, Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture (Basingstoke, 2013) investigates the key role violence has played in defining the position of Muslims in the German public sphere. Recent publications on race, gender, and Islam in Europe appear in Feminist Media Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, and German Studies Review. Her current book project examines the racialization of European human rights discourses. A second co-authored project (with Maria Stehle) explores intimacies and migration in contemporary European visual cultures.