Institutskolloquium der Kulturanthropologie/ Europäische Ethnologie Göttingen
11.01.2023, 18:00-20:00Uhr (CET), Verfügungsgebäude, Raum 3.106 und Online via Zoom
East-West inequalities and the ambiguous racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’
von: Aleksandra Lewicki (University of Sussex)
Abstract: A growing scholarly literature suggests that people who moved from Europe’s East to its West are racialized. Others argue that the concept racism adds little to our understanding of intra-European mobilities and speak of ‘migratization’ or ‘xenophobia’. Many of these scholarly contributions have in common that they conceive of discrimination as occurring after migration. What is more, they focus on the attitudinal dimension of ‘prejudice’, as expressed in the media or the narratives of East-West movers themselves. What thereby slips from view is that racism has wider geopolitical-economic and legal dimensions, and structures life opportunities. This article explores how categories such as ‘Eastern European’ are deployed, invoked and how they are put to work – via policy or the law. Empirically, the analysis draws on data collected for the ‘Reaching out to close the border’ project in Britain and Germany, and includes the mapping of statistical evidence, statements by political representatives, and qualitative interviews with public figures who express opposition to immigration. The analysis shows how neoliberal policies – including the precarization of labour, the politics of austerity and the fortification of borders – have attributed a distinctive positionality to ‘Eastern Europeans’ in West European racial hierarchies. On this basis, I suggest that people from Europe’s East are distinctively, yet ambiguously racialized, and discuss various facets of this ambiguity. Most notably, ‘Eastern Europe’ is inferiorized within Europe, but is often positioned within global racialized categories of ‘Europeanness’. This distinctive racialization, I argue, is not a product of 21st century mobilities but reflects and reproduces the longstanding peripheralization of the region. Of course, racialization shapes people’s everyday lives after migration; yet, it also channels the life opportunities of those born in the East of the EU over the course of generations.
Unthinkable Europeans in Unequal Europes. Defining Romani Europeans Out of Whiteness
von: Manuela Boatca (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Abstract: Present in Europe for centuries, but still not considered of Europe or addressed as Europeans, the Roma are not part of Europe’s reckoning with either racism or enslavement. Such reckoning routinely restricts European racism temporally to the Holocaust, conflating racism with antisemitism; and relegates enslavement spatially to Africa and the Americas, equating enslavement with the transatlantic trade. The Roma fall through these temporal and spatial cracks in Europe’s current politics of memory. I trace this structural oblivion to an Occidentalist imaginary that equates Europeanness with whiteness and that has historically produced unequal Europes in the South and East of the continent to which non-white and other non-conforming populations, histories, and events can routinely be relegated. Drawing on Michel Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the Haitian Revolution as an "unthinkable history" made by enslaved Black people, I argue that European politics of memory will remain incomplete as long as the history and the present of anti-Roma racism, the legacies of Romani enslavement, and the implications of such histories for the (im)possibility of constructing an identity as Romani Europeans are deemed unthinkable in an Occidentalist white Europe.
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