In the opening hour of Part Two of the First Era of Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour filmShoah(1985), an epic cinematic journey across the faces and places that mark the attempted genocide of two European peoples on European soil in the middle of the twentieth century, there is an interview with Mrs Michelsohn, the Nazi teacher’s wife. In a tightly framed close-up, a middle-aged woman’s face is set against a dark, heavily wallpapered background, at an angle that creates tension. The viewer thus encounters the face of a former member of the Hitlerjugend, a pioneer who volunteered to ‘colonize’ for...

Although anti-Semitism in contemporary Romania is radically being curbed by a variety of legislative and political measures, it is still present within Romanian society and occasionally flares up in a number of subversive contexts, including extremist right-wing political discourse and street graffiti, for example those inscribed on the Jewish Theatre in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the first main part of this chapter, some of the different forms of contemporary anti-Semitic mainstream discourse in Romania are identified; in the second part, the relationship between Jewish female activism in Romania and feminist academia is...

What can the critical-theoretical framework of postcolonial studies offer to the study of contemporary Romani oppression, especially the study of oppressionwithinthe ‘movement’ for the equal rights of Romani Europeans? In this chapter, we employ the works of a number of critics, many of them influenced by postcolonial theories, in order to interrogate the diffuse forces of power and to show how these operate within the ‘Roma rights’ movement as a means of explaining the presence of racialized hierarchies and neo-colonial dynamics. In focusing on the repercussions for legitimacy, representation and autonomy in the movement, empirical data from post-socialist...

The writer and political activist A. Sivanandan has argued that ‘poverty is the new black’ (2001). Refugees and asylum-seekers are, he suggests, demonized according to a racist rhetoric whereby they are singled out as a coherent group, then denigrated and reified. This process is xenophobic, since it draws on an implied ‘natural’ fear of strangers that is not, as he describes it, ‘colour-coded’, although its underlying racist rhetoric makes it ‘xeno-racism’: racist in substance but ‘xeno’ in form. Xeno-racism is, he asserts, a feature of global capitalism. It is meted out by the western nations of Europe, which are seeking...

The present globalized world is developing in a context of variable, multiple and, in many cases, multicultural identities, helping to produce a single space of different cultural modalities with their own specific value systems, their own founding myths, their own strategies to assert themselves in the public arena, and their own practices linked to particular histories and to their own sense of what is politically necessary, economically viable and morally or ethically good.

Cultural differences in our time urgently demand an intercultural consciousness which has, as its basic mode of operation, the concept of a reinvigorated multicultural society – a creative...

‘Turkey in Europe has come to an end, she must get out, and the less trouble she makes the better.’¹ This statement by Kaiser Wilhelm II expressed his disappointment that the Ottoman army, though trained by German military instructors and equipped with German weapons, had performed poorly against Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian troops during the Balkan War in 1912, and that the Ottoman Empire had lost all its remaining provinces in the Balkans and Macedonia, with even its capital Istanbul under threat. It seemed only a matter of time until the Anatolian and Asian parts of a weak and declining...

It is not without political significance that the discourse of multiculturalism has become increasingly interrogated in Britain since ‘9/11’, and in particular after the July 2005 London bombings. The sheer frequency of essays, talks, journalistic articles and debates in the print, broadcast and online media directly discussing multiculturalism suggests that the term has become a key locus of public anxiety.¹ It now seems as if everyone has suddenly become an expert on the subject. This intense scrutiny raises a number of questions: Why has the ‘multiculturalism debate’ been so central to the nation and its concerns about ‘terrorism’ and ‘security’?...

In a PhD workshop on ‘discourse and racism’, two students – opposite genders, both black – get into an argument. Words fly across the empty space between the two arms of the U-shaped table setting. Total disagreement. The female student shrugs her shoulders – hopeless guy, this is useless – stating: ‘I am sorry that you are sobackwardthat you do not even have theinformationto know that … [she rephrases her point of view]’. The male student leans forward, agitated facial expression promising an explosive response. As the facilitator of the discussion my spontaneously quick intervention directed at the young woman...

From late January well into March 2006, media outlets from all over the world, whether right, left or centre, whether print, broadcast or virtual, from CNN News to theFiji Daily Post, and from radical journals to personal blogs of various persuasions, were inundated with reports, interviews, opinions, photographs, reproductions and maps, as well as cartoons, on the subject of the ‘Danish cartoon war’. The conflict, which came also to be known under a variety of other names, like the ‘Muhammad cartoon controversy’, the ‘cartoon jihad’ or the ‘cartoon intifada’, was sparked in September 2005 by the publication of twelve...

To the observer, particularly the foreign one, the image of France is that of a country in a time warp, incapable of reforming, resolutely turned towards the past and a mythical golden age, as sometimes cited in the expression coined by economist Jean Fourastié, the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (the thirty golden years), the years 1945 to 1975. For other observers, especially those in France itself, the country has entered a period of historical decline or even decadence, an age of crisis that is periodically subject to spasms of violence. One illustration of this were the urban riots in the autumn of...

In Tanzania in January 2005, Britain’s Chancellor and future Prime Minister turned his thoughts to the British Empire: ‘I’ve talked to many people on my visit to Africa’, Gordon Brown told theDaily Mailbefore adding, in a tellingnon sequitur, that ‘the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over…. And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history – tolerance, liberty, civic duty – that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world’.¹ Leaving aside his curious assertion that...