Blackening Europe/Europeanising Blackness: Theorising the Black Presence in Europe

Contemporary European History

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 423-439

  Smith, Michelle ^a  

^a NONE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43249164504     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777306003407     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. ‘Die Gasse revoltiert’, Der Tag, 11 Sept. 1928 (translation by the author).
2. By ‘secondarisation’ the author refers to scholarship that tends to treat blacks through a European theoretical lens. ‘African American intellectuals, among them Cornel West and bell hooks, for example, have claimed that Eurocentric theories, particularly Eurocentric (post)modernism, have often “minoritized” and “secondarized” the African American experience and the African American contributions to culture and cultural critique-contributions that enshrine the materiality and specificity of African American life’ (p. 3).
3. Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘Beside the Two Camps: Paul Gilroy and the Critique of Raciology’, boundary 2, 28, 3 (2001), 208.
4. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd rev. edn (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
5. Satya Mohanty offers a realist account of cultural identity by relating experience to identity. Mohanty suggests that cultural identities be treated as ‘theories’ such that they be understood to have an ‘epistemic status’. This would be to argue that ‘our identities are ways ofmaking sense of our experiences. Identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways. It is in this sense that they are valuable’. Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
6. Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism refers to the strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest. See Gayatri Spivak, The Post Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (London: Routledge, 1990).
7. Gilroy argues that both American and British black cultural studies are problematically dominated by ethnocentricism and nationalism. This scholarship's ‘nationalistic focus’ is ‘antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation [Gilroy] calls the black Atlantic’. Rather than demonstrating that blackness be defined in terms of ‘essential’ ethnic or cultural characteristics, Gilroy theorises a ‘counterculture of modernity’ among twentieth-century black intellectuals that emphasises the ‘internality of blacks to theWest’. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., c. 1922).
9. The Book of American Negro Poetry., 49.
10. The German response to the French military's use of black African (French colonial subjects) as occupation troops in the Rhineland.
11. Fred Lindsey, for example, fails to recognise Gilroy's humanism, arguing that Gilroy bases his critique instead on ‘minor genetic developments’ in the natural sciences. Fred Lindsey, ‘Review of Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line’, Black Issues Book Review (September 2000), 56.
12. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 17.
13. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line., 64.
14. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line., 66.
15. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line., 67.
16. The exceptions in the first two parts of the book are C. Didier Gondola, ‘“But I Ain't African, I'm American!” Black American Exiles and the Construction of Racial Identities in Twentieth Century France’, and Alan Rice, ‘“Heroes across the Sea”: Black and White British Fascination with African Americans in the Contemporary Black British Fiction by Caryl Phillips and Jackie Kay’. In the third section of the book, ‘Turning Theory into Europe’, three of the four essays select an aspect of the black experience, such as US slavery, or nihilism among African American Youth and ‘apply’ it to European cases.
17. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
18. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1989).
19. Wendy Brown, for example, argues that a sense of wounded-ness is the basis for identity claims and that the translation of those claims into (liberal) rights claims requires significant regulation by and dependence upon government. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
20. In both Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy cites Du Bois's travels through the diaspora as well as his writings about race that de-emphasise the importance of the US setting for his work: ‘Thinking again about his well-known formulations today, I want to suggest that Du Bois was either ambivalent or a little disingenuous about whether the limits of African American political struggle could be adequately defined through the goal of making “it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” without being abused, and indeed whether the rather modest result in becoming “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” was, in his view, really sufficient to redress the residual wrongs that recently ended racial slavery. The issue of his worldliness returns with these questions’ (Postcolonial Melancholia, 35, emphasis added). I do not entirely disagree with this treatment of Du Bois, but I do wonder what Gilroy would say about Du Bois's significant political agitation on the national scene.
21. Riva Kastoryano offers an account of ‘the modes of organization, mobilizations, and identity demands of the descendants of immigrants and minorities on the one hand, and the official rhetorics, social policies, and institutional dynamics on the other’ in France, Germany and the United States. Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).