A paper give by Alana Lentin at the Institute for Cultural and Society, Western Sydney University and at REMESO Linkoping University, 2015.

1. POSTRACIAL SILENCES
ALANA LENTIN
Institute for Culture & Society Seminar Series 17.09.15

4. – Joseph Pearson, The Needle
“I think many Germans have thought long and
hard about this warning, and years of this kind of
moral education (esp. in former West Germany)
makes itself visible on weekends like this past
one. It is at least a foundation on which to build
public engagement and sympathy for the world’s
weak.”

5. BASED ON…
• ‘Postracial Silences: The othering of race in Europe,’
Racism and Sociology (2014)
• ‘What Does Race Do?,’ Ethnic & Racial Studies (2014)
• ‘Racism in Public or Public Racism: Doing antiracism
in ‘postracial’ times,’ Ethnic & Racial Studies
(forthcoming 2015)
• ‘Eliminating Race Obscures its Trace’, Ethnic & Racial
Studies (commissioned article, under review)

6. – Barnor Hesse, 2014
“Racism is more objected to than understood in
sociology. In the objection to a thing, the meaning
of the objectionable thing does not pre-exist the
objection. It is created in the act of objection. When
the meaning of the objection becomes the
condition of possibility for the interpretation of the
thing itself, it is as if the objection becomes the
thing. Any sociological theory of racism needs to be
aware of the historical and conceptual predication
of racism’s meanings upon the political objections
to it.”

7. POSTRACIAL COMFORT

9. –Racism in Public or Public Racism?
“Frozen racism serves its concomitant motility
because, by freezing so-called ‘real racism’ in
historical time, we allow discrimination and abuse to
continue polyvalently under the guise of purportedly
postracial arguments about cultural incompatibility,
secularism versus religion, or sovereignty and security.
Racism thus becomes debatable, not because the
racisms of the past are called into question, but
precisely because by fixing ‘real’ racism solely in
historical events, the continuities between racisms past
and present are made undecideable..”

10. ELIDING, NEGLECTING OR
DENYING RACE
“Being attentive to the significance
of race does not necessitate asking
the more commonplace questions
of the type, how could the
Holocaust happen in Enlightened
Europe? It might rather lead to
asking questions such as, by what
mechanisms were logics for the
systematic control and/or
annihilation of Europe’s
constitutive others, established in
the process of colonial expansion,
implemented within Europe?”
Postracial Silences

11. THE OTHERING OF RACE IN
EUROPEAN MEM RESEARCH

12. THE OTHERING OF RACE IN EUROPEAN
MEM RESEARCH

14. –Adrian Favell, 2008
“Post-colonial theories of race, ethnicity and
multiculturalism that clutter the shelves of
bookstores and the pages of syllabi in the Anglo-
American-dominated field of ‘ethnic and racial
studies’ are also ineffective and largely irrelevant
in relation to these new movements in Europe.”

15. –Adrian Favell, 2003
“European nations are obviously at different
stages of development in their internal debates,
but in most cases academic thinking is now
moving beyond purely denunciatory work on the
negative consequences of immigration (such as
studies of racism) into the conceptualization of
practical integration solutions and trajectories of
multicultural social change.”

16. “As it turns out, I was right, however, in my general observation
that the excessive focus on race/racialisation in the Anglo-
American literature would decline as different tools of analysis
and concerns arose through comparative and transatlantic
(im)migration studies. You can take a lofty view from the point of
view of critical race theory about that field of work, but I
personally see very little in the abstract social theory driven
critical race theory that you prefer to help with the kind of
empirical, comparative institutional and historical analysis of
nationalism, citizenship and migration, and the difficulties of
American-European asymmetry and ‘methodological
nationalism’ that are at the heart of my concerns. But there is
certainly room for both, and I do read and appreciate critical
authors like Winant, De Genova or Schinkel, Rumford (who you
don't mention), while guarding against analytical moves which
reduce all forms of differentiation, exclusion, border-drawing,
othering of foreigners or ‘minorities’, etc to ‘racialisation’.”

17. RACE AND MAYBE NOT RACISM
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

18. –Fatima El-Tayeb, 2008
“Europe continues to imagine itself as an
autonomous entity, simultaneously part and
whole of the dialectic of progress, untouched by
“race matters,” occasionally wizened but
fundamentally unchanged by its contact with
various Others who remain forever outside; a
colorblind continent in which difference is
marked along lines of nationality and ethnicized
Others are routinely ascribed a position outside
the nation, allowing the permanent
externalization and thus silencing of a debate on
the legacy of racism and colonialism. .”