If you are teaching or studying Islamophobia in the context in the recent global upsurge in anti-Muslim hate incidents, I’m sharing this reading list based on sessions I have taught on various modules.
As with much hate speech online, the layers of hate in this exchange are hidden in “coding and euphemism,” said Ben Gidley, an academic at Birkbeck, University of London with expertise in antisemitism.
Gidley pointed to @breakingbaht’s phrase “dialectical hatred.”
“It’s this idea of antiwhite racism as a kind of Jewish conspiracy,” he said.
This, he said, is rooted in the American far right’s conspiracy theories about critical race theory, its supposed spread in universities, and the idea that Jews support it. “It’s this idea of Jews taking offense at racism and ignoring anti-white racism,” he said.
The exchange also echoes the “great replacement” theory, or the idea, widely embraced by white nationalists, that nonwhite people will replace white populations, Gidley said. Some versions of replacement theory baselessly accuse Jewish people of orchestrating the replacement. “It’s not always antisemitic, but in many cases it’s this idea of blaming the Jews, Jews supporting this, is the antisemitic version,” Gidley said.
“I feel Musk must be aware that all these ideas are at least adjacent to antisemitism,” he added.
I’ve been thinking this week about rivers and oceans, and was looking for something I wrote in the past, and realised that all of the posts on the COMPAS blog have migrated to a new URL since I last linked to them here, with most of my posts now filed under the author “COMPAS communications”. So I thought I might repost some of the ones I wrote here, starting with this one.
Climate change and migration: COMPAS December Breakfast Briefing
COMPAS Communications 7/01/2015
What does it feel like to be flooded?
The media monitoring project at the Migration Observatory has analysed thousands of UK news articles on migration from the last few years, showing which words are most often associated with migrants – and the same finding was repeated more recently specifically for Romanians and Bulgarians arriving in 2014. One finding was how often, across both tabloids and broadsheets, words suggesting water were used as a metaphor for migration, such as flood, influx and wave. In one recent example, Michael Fallon, a Conservative minister, echoing Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, described “whole towns and communities” in the UK “being swamped by huge numbers of migrants.”
Photo by Shenaz Rafiq, COMPAS Photo Competition 2013
Fallon particularly mentioned England’s East Coast, and his comment was made as two coastal constituencies switched their votes to the anti-immigrant UKIP. It is interesting that it is in coastal areas where anti-migrant sentiment – the feeling of being swamped and flooded by migrants – is strongest. Oddly, though, these coastal areas typically have some of the lowest numbers of migrants in the UK.
Many of these coastal areas, however, face a very different and very real flooding risk. Research shows that our coastal areas are vulnerable to climate change because of rising sea levels and wave heights and accelerated coastal erosion. The deprived and “left behind” seaside communities which UKIP is targeting may be especially vulnerable because of their reliance on the coastline for economic and social activities, because of ageing populations, deprivation and isolation, which negatively impact on resilience and hamper adaptation.
These issues are hard to think about; many of us tend to bury our heads in the sand rather than face up to the enormity of the challenge of climate change. Perhaps thinking about immigrants is easier.
But for many communities globally, the flooding has already long begun.
Some events I’m speaking at or helping to organise.
2 May to 11 July: Birkbeck Psychosocial Studies Summer Programme. Speakers include Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon on reactionary democracy. | ONLINE/IN-PERSON | Register: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/?tag=22
16 May: British Association of Islamic Studies annual conference, Aga Khan University London | Paper: “Eating (with) the other? Muslims, Jews and shared food in urban Europe”, Panel: Intercultural Entanglements: Unstaged Muslim-Jewish Encounters in Europe | IN-PERSON | Register: https://www.brais.ac.uk/conferences
6 June: Muslims & Jews in Urban Europe – Informal Encounters, Misunderstandings and Commonalities. Keynote by Steve Vertovec, introduction by Anne-Sophie Lamine, oud by Anis Fariji. | IN-PERSON | MISHA, Strasbourg 15:30-18:30
19 June: Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment June webinar: Identity Politics and the Hostile Environment with Rima Saini and Nira Yuval-Davis | Presentation: “Identity Politics and the Hostile Environment” | ONLINE | Register: https://ssahe.info/
In the Autumn, as the world watched the destruction of East Aleppo and as Donald Trump was elected president of America, my son was reading George Orwell’s 1984, and I found myself re-reading it.
I was struck by one extraordinary passage. The main character, Winston Smith, describes watching a newsreel film in a cinema of a boat full of refugees being bombed by a helicopter “somewhere in the Mediterranean”. A “middleaged woman”, he writes, “who might have been a jewess” sits in the bow with a little boy in her arms, screaming and hiding his face in her chest; she covers him with her body “as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him”. The party members in the cinema cheer as the boat explodes.
Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Orwell and his readers would have seen, on newsreels in the cinema, the harrowing images of barely alive survivors of liberated camps such as Bergen-Belsen, of groups of stateless Displaced People drifting across Europe for years after the war ended, boats full of Jews in the Mediterranean denied ports because of the fear of contagion.
These camps and boats are the images invoked by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his concept of “bare life”, zoological life denuded of humanity through the state’s violence. He drew on Hannah Arendt, who had herself experienced internment as refugee, who had written in 1958 that “The chief characteristic of [the] specifically human life… is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography… bios, as distinguished from mere zoé”. Eric Santner names zoé stripped of bios as “creaturely life”, when human life “assumes the cringed posture of the creature” – the cringed posture, I think, that Orwell describes as the “jewess” on the boat tries to save her son from the screaming bullets.
In the last few years, we have seen many – far too many – examples of such creaturely life, not least in Orwell’s Mediterranean. The resonance between the twentieth century’s dark noon and the crisis of today is striking, and I thought this is something that historians and legal scholars should be writing about. And shortly afterwards I discovered that in fact it had been written about, in this extraordinary book by Itamar Mann.
Itamar’s book takes as its starting point the “ethics of encounter”, the ethical demand opened up by the face of the other. I think this is partly because the face reveals, as Arendt suggested, the bios, the biographical life, of the individual. We saw this in 2015, when the recognition of the faces of boat people (including Aylan Kurdi) sparked the #RefugeesWelcome movement across Europe and beyond.
Itamar’s ethics of encounter is a retrieval of an older ethical order that precedes the nation state, not least in the Mediterranean world. We find it, for example, in the Talmud, where it is written that “Greater is the reception of wayfarers than the reception of the [divine spirit]” (Shab.127a) and that Job made “four doors for his house so that the [wayfarer] should not be troubled to go round it to find the entrance” (ARN vii). We find it too in the Koran, which says that “There is no good in the one who is not hospitable”, and which frames hospitality as a gift to the host rather than to the guest.
The borderless desert land of Job and Mohammed, like the “high sea commons” that Itamar writes about, is a space that exceeds the dominion of the sovereign, which, Itamar persuasively argues, makes it not anarchic in the negative sense but instead ethical. It opens space, as Itamar argues, for a “politics beyond the bounds of membership” (19).
In one of the most important contributions the book makes, Itamar reads Arendt’s underrated essay “We refugees” against the grain of later writing, arguing that the right of encounter grounds a refugee politics that goes beyond the reduction of the refugee to bare life: in his chapters on the Exodus voyage and the Vietnamese boat people, he retrieves vital stories that show how the universal boatperson can demand presence, assert a right to speak that is also a demand to be heard, reclaiming biographical life even while locked out of political membership in the nation state.
When I read the Orwell passage I quoted above, I tried to write about it in relation to the slaughter of Aleppo, as we watched the final moments of East Aleppo’s residents struggling to maintain a liveable, biographical life as barrel bombs fell from helicopters day and night. Agamben, and Arendt before him, argued that the physical violence that produces bare life is always preceded by a form of political violence which strips away the humanity, and the human right to have rights, from bodies, in order to place them outside the law and legitimate to kill. This dehumanisation explains why the party members in Orwell’s description cheer at the creaturely posture of the “jewess”.
This political violence proceeds through images and language. People are named swarms, hoards, cockroaches: categories which demand extermination. And it proceeds, as Arendt argued, through the law, not lawlessly: Jews were de-naturalised, stripped of citizenship by the Nazi state, before they were transported to the camps.
And, although not genocidal like the Nazi war on Jews, Bush’s war on terror created new legal categories of unlawful combatants, legitimate to kill or indefinitely detain or to render for torture in allied states such as Syria. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer explains that Assad’s Syria was one of the most common destinations for America’s rendered suspects, held in a prison known as The Grave for its coffin-sized cells where they were subjected to a frame known as the German chair used to stretch their spines.
Assad’s regime has learnt the lessons of this, and the effectiveness of designating civilians and rebels as terrorists in order to justify killing on a mass scale. Its allies have repeated the same lines. In November, one of Russia’s most senior generals, Sergei Rudskoi, said that “The entire male population [of Aleppo], including teenagers above 12 years of age, has been forcibly mobilized by militants.” This was a clear warning that Russian killing of Aleppo’s population would be considered fully lawful.
Authoritarian law requires the production of bestial enemies. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, summarising Hobbes, characterised the reason of the state as Protego ergo obligo – I protect, therefore I obligate.As GW Bush needed Osama bin Laden to justify the suspension of law to maintain homeland security, as Donald Trump needs his “underreported” (and even imaginary) terrorist acts to justify his authoritarian rule, Assad needs Daesh to maintain his infinitely more brutal form of homeland security.
I worry sometimes that the emphasis on refugees in liberal discourse can sometimes obscure the brutality of the violence which refugees flee, including the structural violence unleashed on the global South by neoliberal capitalism as well as the sort of violence Assad has unleashed on his subjects. The figure of the universal boatperson is too often abstracted from the story of where they came from. It is easier to make the connections from the distance of time: we connect the Jewish refugees of the 1940s more comfortably to Hitler’s death camps than we do the Syrian refugees of today to Assad’s killing fields. I think this is because the ethics of encounter point to a responsibility to act against genocide that we fear to take up, not least because of our experiences of where this has gone brutally wrong in the recent past (a topic briefly raised in chapter 3, in relation to the Kurds of Iraq).
I think Itamar’s book, although he does not make this point explicitly, offers us a way of thinking about this, when he talks about Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaoh’s daughter broke Pharaoh’s laws, following the ethical demand of the rights of encounter even when against the sovereign’s laws. Itamar illustrates this with a beautiful fresco from the ancient synagogue in Dura-Europos in Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates and historically a border community based on trade and traffic across the river that was for much of history a porous boundary between empires. At the start of the revolution, Dura and its region, Abu Kamal, liberated itself from the regime, and experienced several months of participatory self-rule. Dura was captured and its synagogue destroyed by Daesh, but the tenacity of the revolution in the region, despite the power of Daesh and the regime, show us the tenacity of the spirit of Pharaoh’s daughter, despite the power of the sovereign, to continue to assert the human rights of encounter against the law’s monopoly of violence.
The nature of society and equality across age groups, industry, habitats and public policy are among 13 exciting new projects announced today.
The projects will enable researchers in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and Japan to collaborate on the social sciences and further strengthen international cooperation.
Funded by the Open Research Area for the Social Sciences (ORA), which aims to minimise bureaucracy in international research, the projects are delivered by:
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), France (FR)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany (DE)
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada (CA)
UK Research and Innovation Economic and Social Research Council (UKRI ESRC), UK.
They will associate with the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), who as in the previous ORA round, have already established a process for Japanese researchers to participate in complementary projects.
Projects include:
Muslim-Jewish encounter, diversity & distance in urban Europe: religion, culture and social model (ENCOUNTERS)
Ben Gidley, Birkbeck College (UK)
Anne-Sophie Lamine, Université de Strasbourg (FR)
Matthias Koenig, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and Steven Vertovec, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (DE).
New journal article by Sami Everett, research co-ordinator of the Encounters project:
Une Ambiance Diaspora: Continuity and Change in Parisian Maghrebi Imaginaries
This article is an investigation of ethno-commercial exchanges and interactions between Jews and Muslims of North African heritage that takes account of their cross-cultural antecedents and continuities. The ethnographic focus is a telecommunications company called M-Switch located in the Parisian neighborhood of le Sentier, the trajectory of which is part of a broader cultural and economic shift observable in the neighborhood from industry to new technologies. This particular company is a privileged site for witnessing how people work with and across religious differences between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims in France. The ethnography looks at how contemporary, non-nostalgic reconceptualizations of the past are utilized to negotiate an ethnically plural and potentially convivial present. Relationships within the company have a Maghrebi center made up of shared cultural memories, economic interdependency, and changing gender and class relations. More specifically, relationships between Jews and Muslims at M-Switch are often defined by a desire to re-appropriate and adapt a Maghrebi world. This project is complicated by French and geopolitical representations of ethno-religious conflict.
This talk looks at antisemitism, the primary motivator of the Holocaust, and calls for a way of confronting it that locates it within the larger global history of racism. In particular, I will draw out some of the ways that anti-Jewish racism and anti-Muslim racism have historically been related to each other. Looking at antisemitism in this relational way can enable stronger anti-racist responses to antisemitism, as part of the challenge of standing together across communities.
Hosted by Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, and University Equality and Diversity champion
29 January, Old Library, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Organised by Equality & Diversity, Cambridge University
Beautiful Pembroke College. (My @bbkpsychosocial BA lecture on Monday was about cultural capital, & last night about the somatic norm in elite institutions (using the brilliant “Space Invaders” by@spatialmutation) so my trip to Cambridge today feels like a bit of a field trip.) pic.twitter.com/3bKVt2y7CF
Three reports to which I contributed along with Ruth Sheldon, mainly written by Jonathan Smith and Lenita Torning.
Media, Faith and Belonging
This report by the Faith & Belief Forum and the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck calls on media organisations to provide more opportunities for religious groups to represent themselves.
The report finds that inaccurate, sensationalised and simplistic media coverage reinforces negative stereotypes of religious groups, increasing the potential for suspicion, fear and communal violence. The report highlights how journalists, academics, community organisations and religious groups are working to address the issues in three ways: by challenging inaccurate stories, telling their own stories and working together to make a shared story.
It is the third and final in a series of reports supported by a grant from Dangoor Education which look at different aspects of belief and belonging in London.
This report by the Faith & Belief Forum and the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck explores the issue of religious hate crime, and provides recommendations for organisations working to address the issue.
It draws on insights from a May 2018 roundtable at Birkbeck which brought together 23 local organisations, academics and policy experts to explore the issues and share good practice. The report recommends that responses to hate crime should be led by local communities and seek to challenge divisive narratives with messages of belonging. Responses to should be collaborative, bringing together faith groups, faith forums, community organisations and local government.
It is the second of a series of three reports supported by a grant from Dangoor Education which look at different aspects of belief and belonging in London.
This briefing paper by the Faith & Belief Forum and the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London explores and provides recommendations for how to create a London that’s more inclusive of people of different faiths and beliefs.
The report draws on insights from a June 2018 roundtable event where 25 local organisations, academics and policy experts gathered to discuss factors for exclusion for Londoners from different faiths and beliefs, and to share good practice on inclusion. While the focus of the report is on London, it contains plenty of insights for those looking to remove barriers to belonging in the rest of the country.
It is the first of a series of three briefing papers supported by a grant from Dangoor Education which look at different aspects of belief and belonging in London. The next two reports will look at hate crime and the role of the media.
Prompted by a series of deadly attacks in Paris in 2015 and his son’s query about why Jews were one of the targets, Alexandre Amiel, a French-Moroccan Jewish filmmaker, set out to make a trilogy of films whose aim is to trace the origins of modern xenophobia in France towards Jewish, Arab and Black communities.
a. how French republican secularism (laïcité) forces people to chose singular identities which causes a sense of “schizophrenia” and encourages the corrosive cultivation of invisibility that Jews resort to from fear of antisemitism;
And b. the vicious circle whereby fear of antisemitism leads to “ghettoisation” (residential and educational choices) that prevents the meaningful encounters that would start to break down antisemitism. What’s the way out of that circle? pic.twitter.com/f6J4LrBeIV
As a fragile resource for hope I’d offer up the stories of quotidian Jewish-Muslim encounter @SamiEverett described in this article:https://t.co/9vrUMhRLkR
Also screened last night: Kippa by young film-maker Lukas Nathrath, a disturbing short based on a true story of antisemitic bullying in Germany. Very worth watching if you get the chance. pic.twitter.com/RxIaAR9CU1
The debate afterwards brought home the intense state of insecurity of UK Jews right now. This is understandable, but I worry that it means we lose sight of other dangers threatening our and other communities. https://t.co/5kyX6C7aEy
Not sure if I’ve already posted here about the post I wrote for Sociological Review last year about A Sivanandan. I’m pasting it here (in the version I submitted, so probably with some typos) below, as this when I looked earlier I wrongly thought that the page on the Sociological Review site was down.
First, Stephen Ashe wrote a brilliant entry for the Global Social Theory website (a very important site if you don’t know it) on Siva. Here’s the opening:
SIVANANDAN, Ambalavaner
Ambalavaner Sivanandan was a scholar-activist and novelist who lived between 20 December 1923 and 3 January 2018. Sivanandan made a distinctive contribution to political and intellectual life in Britain. Indeed, as Colin Prescod explains, “There is a generation of Black British community activists who emerged politically in the heady days of the late 1970s and early 1980s for whom Sivanandan is possibly the most original influence on their lives.” And yet Sivanandan’s scholarly writings have not always been given the attention they deserve. For example, Stuart Hall once commented that Sivanandan’s “…essays deserve to be better known…They have acquired…a remarkable ‘underground reputation’: thumbed over, read and reread, argued about and debated wherever these issues are taken seriously. They have also, frequently, been plagiarized – which is its own kind of recognition.”
Stephen kindly cites my blogpost:
Sivanandan lamented the downturn in class struggle, and the way in which the anti-racist movement shifted away from class politics and towards ‘a fight for culture’ during the 1980s. The decline of political blackness and the subsequent fragmentation into various, if not an ever-increasing number of, ethnic categories marked a critical turning point. For Sivanandan ‘culture itself was evacuated of its economic and political significance to mean lifestyle, language, custom, artefact’ (cited in Gidley 2018). For Sivanandan, this period signalled the ‘degradation of black struggle’. As Ben Gidley notes, Sivanandan also resisted the turn to what he felt were forms of social theory increasingly disconnected from political struggle, which he viewed as being all the more impoverished for this. In ‘All that melts into air is solid: the hokum of New Times‘, Sivanandan offers a robust critique of Stuart Hall and others in and around Marxism Today for making ‘no attempt to rethink Marxism itself or the basis of the new liberatory revolution of the production process’, as well as the Labour Party’s re-orientation and compromise with centre ground politics in the face of Thatcherism’s hegemony (p.20).
Looking back now, in my post I should have pushed back gently against Siva’s critique of Hall, an activist critique I shared back then. I think Hall’s work gave us tools for understanding the changing nature of racism, authoritarian populism and capitalism, and it gave us routes out of class reductionism, that remain vital and urgent today – while what Siva disparagingly called “the fight for culture” was (and is) also a necessary task.
Here is the text of my post. I am grateful to Emma Jackson for inviting me to this, and Mark Carrigan for editing, and I also recommend the other pieces in the series by Jas Nijjar and Adam Elliott-Cooper (here and here).
Sivanandan’s pessimistic hope in a degraded age
I moved to London in 1991. In many ways, it was a miserable year for me. I started a Philosophy degree at a Russell Group university, and I found myself loathing the entitlement and privilege, the casual homophobia, racism and class conceit of the student body and most of the lecturers. Reading the obtuse texts of Greek philosophers and struggling with the esoteric exercises of formal logic felt mind-numbing.
In particular it felt completely irrelevant when there was so much suffering and violence going on outside the ivory towers – Rolan Adams had been stabbed by a racist gang in Thamesmead, then Rohit Duggal was killed in Eltham, Ruhullah Aramesh in Thornton Heath and Sher Singh Sagoo in Deptford; Delroy McKnight, diagnosed as schizophrenic, bled to death after he sawed through his neck with a piece of glass broken from his Wandsworth cell window; Vandana Patel was stabbed to death by her husband in Stoke Newington police station where she had sought safety from him; Ian Gordon, a black psychiatric patient, was shot dead by Telford police; Orville Blackwood died after being given an injection of “calming” drugs in a Broadmoor secure unit; Omasase Lumumba was killed while being “controlled and restrained” by six guards in Pentonville; there were riots in Blackbird Leys, Handsworth and Dudley; Freedom Bookshop was burnt out by fascists – and I was listening to lectures about Leibniz. The final straw came for me with Bishop Berkeley and the question of how we know if there is a world external to the self, which seemed to me the least relevant question imaginable. I dropped out.
Outside the classroom, I had thrown myself into political activism and in particular into anti-racist and anti-fascist politics. Anti-Fascist Action was growing. Its Unity Carnival on Hackney Downs had 10,000 participants; a march in Bethnal Green under the slogan “Beating the Fascists: An old East End tradition” had 4,000 participants; and in 1992 a pitched battle at Waterloo Station would lead to a decisive victory against the white power music scene. Grassroots organisations such as the Newham Monitoring Project, Southall Black Sisters, the Monitoring Group in West London and Greenwich Action Committee Against Racist Attacks were defending black communities from racist attack across London. The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) relaunched its intendent magazine. The Institute for Race Relations published Deadly Silence, a devastating litany of black deaths in custody. Alongside this, I haunted the public libraries and independent bookstores of London, devouring CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Walter Rodney – texts that seemed to make sense of the world so much better than anything on my college reading lists.
Sivanandan was never the headline speaker at public events, but his presence was vital in this period, as a person and as a thinker. I volunteered at CARF, so met him a few times, but I was shy, and my first real conversation with him was just after I dropped out of college, and it left an indelible mark on me. When I told him about leaving the course, he said, with a mischievous smile, “Yes. I forget who noted that the philosophers just want to interpret the world, in various ways – but you want to change it.” My young heart glowed. Looking back, I’m sure he’d met a thousand kids like me, idealistic radicals who wanted to make a difference, but at the time I’d felt my intellectual hero had looked inside me and recognised something unique.
He also said, “Make no mistake about it: there is no anti-racist movement today.” The movement, he said, was a faintly flickering flame compared to an earlier cycle of struggle, but that our task was to tend it, “in the pessimistic hope” that it would return to full flame again. That spirit of pessimistic hope seems to me still vital today – I later recognised it in Hannah Arendt’s mid-twentieth century reflections on “dark times”, as well as Gramsci’s prison notebooks. And similarly Sivanandan’s diagnosis of British anti-racism’s abeyance also seems vital.
That diagnosis had, I think, four elements. First, the mainstream (white) left (exemplified by the Anti-Nazi League, relaunched at the end of 1991 by the Socialist Workers Party, and now trading under the Stand Up To Racism brand) had exchanged militant anti-fascism for a populist moralising, focused on the (white) campus and on the (white) High Street. This stance demonised the far right as “Nazis”, but lacked any analysis of the racism and the material forms that shaped their appeal, and lacked any ability to communicate with those communities, who, having been broken by neoliberal de-industrialisation and evacuated by the left, might be pulled towards the message of the right.
Second, Sivanandan argued that some of the successes of the anti-racist movement in the 1980s had turned out to be pyrrhic victories. The threat of uprising posed by the inner-city rebellions of the 1980s awoke the attention of the left at the moment when post-New Left radicals were moving into positions of power in municipal bureaucracies. But the municipal left’s embrace of anti-racism proved poisonous: “the fight against racism moved from the streets and the shop-floor to the town halls and the committee rooms where bureaucrats sought neatly packaged solutions to throw at ‘the problem’ and its vocal spokespeople.” Personal racism rather than institutional racism became the site of struggle, and anti-racism became a platform for individual career advancement. Sivanandan described this process as “the degradation of black struggle”.
But Sivanandan’s critique wasn’t just of the personal compromises of former comrades who chose less austere lives than his; it was also of a reorientation away from what he saw as real politics. “The fight against racism became a fight for culture, and culture itself was evacuated of its economic and political significance to mean lifestyle, language, custom, artifact.” The passing of political blackness, and its replacement with ever narrower ethnic categories, stood for him as indicators of this degradation.
In a period of political defeat, many intellectual retreated into ever more obtuse forms of theory, politically as disconnected from the struggles of the inner city as the Leibniz and Berkeley I rejected during my first attempt at university. Sivanandan’s bitter polemic “All That Melts into Air is Solid: the hokum of New Times”, aimed partly at Stuart Hall, slices through some of these theories with the brilliance and hardness of cut diamonds, showing how intellectual radicalism in the academy could provide an alibi for degraded forms of anti-racism in state bureaucracies.
However, although he saw the movement away from the anti-racism of the 1960s and 1970s as a form of degradation, he did not argue for a simple return to its fixed certainties. Racism, he argued, “never stands still. It changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function, with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances, to that system.” Speaking as part of the post-Windrush generation of citizen-migrants from Britain’s colonies and former colonies, he went on to note that “The racism we are faced with today is not the racism we faced 40, 50 years ago, when we first came here.” This heightened awareness to racism’s mutability meant racism’s new forms came into clearer focus
When CARF relaunched in 1991, its first issue included a long analysis of resurgent anti-Arab racism starting before, but rising rapidly as a result of, the first Gulf War. The article also discussed the return of anti-Islam racism in the wake of the Rushdie affair. Similarly, Sivanandan’s concept of “xeno-racism” recognised the turn at the end of the 1990s towards the racialisation of migrants, that would come to dominate the politics of our time. Like anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism (and the new antisemitism of the same period, to which Sivanandan was less attentive), this was a radically non-epidermal racism: “not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors.” A racism “that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well.”
Within academia, the failure to recognise the repressed nexus between race and human mobility has been institutionalised in a split between a race-blind migration studies, on the one hand, and, on the other, an ethnic and racial studies that is only now starting to take migration seriously.
From the perspective of 2018, perhaps the long march into the institutions, of which Siva was so dismissive, can now also been seen as a victory for the anti-racist struggle, and even the attenuated forms of anti-racist policy of that period helped trigger a generational change in racial attitudes. Even these thin victories have been enough to generate resentment and a sense of dispossession from those fragile wearers of a threadbare white privilege, so many of whom voted to take back control in 2016.
Is the flame of anti-racism, which Sivanandan saw as barely flickering that day in 1991, alight still? Are there grounds for even pessimistic hope in the age of Trump and Brexit? Sivanandan argued that new forms of racism always meant new forms of resistance. The avoidable tragedy of Grenfell Tower, for all its horror, has shown us this again: a working class community, whose complexity in terms of immigration status and racialisation exceeds even the supplest academic descriptions of “diversity”, enacting a praxis consisting of solidarity, autonomy, mutual care and dignity that point towards not just how to “interpret the world in various ways”, but maybe, just maybe, also how we might start to change it.
Ben Gidley is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. His latest book, co-edited with James Renton, is Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. Ben tweets at @bengidley.
Seed Meeting – Culture, Religion and Social Model: Paris and London in comparison
The Seed Meetings programme of the French Embassy in the United Kingdom aims to facilitate international cooperation between researchers in the UK and France.
The seed meeting “Culture, Religion, and Social Model: Paris and London in comparison” brought together senior professors and early career researchers in the social sciences and humanities from both sides of the Channel at the French Embassy in London to interrogate the premises and methodologies with which we might work as a network to conduct comparative work on religious minorities (particularly Muslims and Jews) in and across the two cities.
Researchers from Université de Strasbourg, Université de Toulouse, Université de Picardie, EHESS, Sciences Po Paris and Sciences Po Bordeaux discussed the issue with colleagues from Cambridge, SOAS, UCL, King’s College, Warwick University, Birbeck University, Durham University, University of London Institute in Paris, University of Sussex and the University of Sheffield.
Discussions included considering the texturing of urban space in relation to community-formation, architecturally, culturally, demographically, historically, and socially; the ways in which the image of the city, the neighbourhood and urban space gets curated, notably in museums and in the media, and the importance of civil society and associational politics in shaping these representations at the local and national level.
The group reflected freely about such “methodologies of encounter,” shining a light on the importance of walking, mapping, surveying and measuring by blending methodologies of ethnography, quantitative sociology, spatial syntax, archival research and social network analysis. They discussed the use of new technologies and digital art to elicit responses and track community and neighbourhood data and finally argued at length about scale of research, from the house, to the school, to the hospital, to the shop to the street, and about definitions of what, after all, is it to live in a community, religious, urban, national, or otherwise.
Through a successful meeting of scholars from a range of disciplines, the focused discussions uncovered several ways forward to sustain and develop the network in a seminar series in France and the UK, a workshop that would reunite those present in Sciences Po in spring 2020, a scheme of writing in pairs France-UK for a journal, and the collective planning of micro pilot studies which would drive forwards a significant comparative research project.
Professor Anoop Nayak makes a fascinating reference to @bengidley’s phrase: “stigmatised cartographies of the city’s dishonoured spaces” when discussing race and class division in Gateshead @migration2019pic.twitter.com/vezDTN0jyz
On 4 May 1978, the day of local elections, Altab Ali, a young Bangladeshi textile factory worker in Whitechapel, was murdered on his way home from work. His murder was the catalyst for major anti-racist mobilisations amongst the Bangladeshi community and others in the East End of London. The community had been inspired by anti-racist activism in Southall following the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in 1976. Last June, a day-long symposium, Race, Violence and the City was held to mark the anniversary of his murder. It would have been tempting to reflect back on the events of 1978 as a testament to how far we have come since Ali’s murder and there is undoubtedly much to celebrate: the allyship and solidarity which emerged in the aftermath across London, from Brick Lane to Southall and beyond, as well as the successes of the Bangladeshi community in establishing themselves in the East End. Once we start to think about the wider background to Altab Ali’s murder, however, it reminds us more of what remains to be done.
Conclusion:
The Battle of Brick Lane drew on its precursor, the Battle of Cable Street, but Ben Gidley cautioned against premature triumphalism; he reminded us that while the battle against fascism had been ‘won’ in the 1930s, this had not averted the need for a Battle for Brick Lane forty years later.
What all these examples illustrate is the importance of joining the dots, both across time and across different aspects of social life and how we, as scholars and/or activists might ensure that interconnectedness is named and explored. Post Brexit and following the election of Trump there has been a significant upsurge in discussions of racism amongst the commentariat both in and beyond academia. Yet there seems, amongst some, a wilful neglect of the historic intellectual and emotional labour of anti-racist activists and academics who have always contextualised racist violence in a wider landscape and are in no way remotely shocked by such events, however saddened or indeed traumatised they might feel in their immediate aftermath.
As well as the messages pushed in the media, the words of politicians also matter; which drives the other is a semantic debate that matters little to those whose blood is being spilt on the streets. Indeed, irrespective of whether media drives political discourse or vice versa we as the readership or electorate are ultimately responsible; our choices (including the decision to remain silent) about what we are prepared to tolerate matter. And as advocates for social and racial justice what we choose to remember and forget matters.
I was on France24’s “The Debate” with Francois Picard this week, talking about antisemitism in light of issues relating to the yellow jacket protests in France and the Labour Party in the UK.
Is France becoming more anti-Jewish? Or has hate speech become more uninhibited? After some Yellow Vests hurled abuse at Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, people are rallying in Paris against anti-Semitism. Last year, anti-Semitic incidents rose 74% in France. Is social media enabling hate speech and fostering a culture of violence? Is that violence born from a changing world order, with weaker institutions like trade unions that used to channel grievances and tone down extremes?
Cain Burdeau wrote up the broadcast for Courthouse News:
“We’re living in a time when there’s been a crisis of trust in sources of authority, sources of information, sources of knowledge, and so people seek alternative truths,” Ben Gidley, a senior lecturer in psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London, said during the France 24 debate. “Once you stop believing in truth, almost anything can be true.”
Juan Branco, a lawyer for the yellow vest protesters, acknowledged during the France 24 debate that some protesters were guilty of anti-Semitism. But he blamed those incidents on people connected to the far right and said the movement’s leaders rejected anti-Semitism. He added that there was an intense effort to purge racist views from the protest movement.
Gidley said the rise of anti-Semitism was a troubling sign for Europe and does not bode well for the state of democracy.
“Jews are often one of the canaries in the coal mine,” he said. “It’s not just Jews, other minorities as well. You can take racist attacks as a kind of good indicator on the health of a democracy. Jews and other minorities are the first victims of a sickness in democracy.”
Migration studies and antisemitism in France and Europe, 12 December at Sciences Po. I’m just doing a brief slot on the UK. Some great speakers in the round table: Nonna Mayer, Virginie Guiraudon, Laura Morales, Patrick Simon, Hélène Thiollet, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden. pic.twitter.com/OYYMaLmQWA
En 2015-2016 l’Europe a connu un afflux exceptionnel de réfugié.e.s et de migrant.e.s, fortement médiatisé et politisé, propice aux rumeurs et aux instrumentalisations. Comment faire des enquêtes sur ces populations dans une perspective de sciences sociales ? Quels sont les problèmes méthodologiques et éthiques qu’elles posent ? Comment y remédier ? Ce symposium se penche sur ces questions en deux temps. Un retour critique sur une enquête comparative menée dans 5 pays européens, ‘’Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe Today: is there a connection?’’ coordonnée par David Feldman au Pears Institute (Birkbeck, Université de Londres) et financée par la Fondation allemande EVZ (Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft/Mémoire, Responsabilité et Futur) sera suivi d’une table ronde croisant les regards de spécialistes des migrations et des migrant.e.s.
In 2015-2016 the EU experienced an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants, widely mediatised and politicised, favoring rumors and instrumentalisations of all kind. How can one conduct surveys on such populations in a social science perspective? What are the methodological and ethical problems they raise? How can one cope with them? This symposium addresses these questions in two steps. A critical revisiting of a comparative survey conducted in five European countries, ‘’Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe Today: is there a connection?’’, coordinated by David Feldman at Pears Institute (Birkbeck, London University) and funded by the German Foundation EVZ (Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft/Remembrance, Responsibility and Future) will be followed by a round table bringing together experts in the research field of migrations and migrants.
Elodie Druez & Nonna Mayer Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe Today: Is there a connection? The case of France
Contrepoint des autres équipes/Counterpoint by the other teams
Allemagne/Germany : Mathias Berek (Technische Universität Berlin)
Belgique/Belgium : Muriel Sacco (ULB) & Marco Martiniello (Université de Liège)
Pays Bas/Netherlands: Annemarike Stremmelaar (University of Leiden)
Royaume-Uni/United Kingdom : David Feldman & Ben Gidley (Birkbeck, University of London)
16h-16h30 : Pause/Break
16h30-18h30 : Table ronde/Round Table
Virginie Guiraudon (Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS), Laura Morales (Sciences Po, CEE), Patrick Simon (INED), Hélène Thiollet (Sciences Po, CERI, CNRS), Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (Sciences Po, CERI, CNRS) Enquêter auprès de migrant.e.s, problèmes méthodologiques et éthiques/Round Table Migrants’ Survey: Methodological and Ethical Problems
Itamar’s book takes as its starting point the “ethics of encounter”, the ethical demand opened up by the face of the other. I think this is partly because the face reveals, as Arendt suggested, the bios, the biographical life, of the individual. We saw this in 2015, when the recognition of the faces of boat people (including Aylan Kurdi) sparked the #RefugeesWelcome movement across Europe and beyond.
(Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft/Mémoire, Responsabilité et Futur) sera suivi d’une table ronde croisant les regards de spécialistes des migrations et des migrant.e.s.
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