Content area
Full Text
Abstract
The perceived crisis triggered by the current refugee influx highlights the contradiction at the heart of human rights discourse. Modern humanity has been constructed as both European and as universal; the racialized "Other" against whom the "modern human" disturbs this construction by laying claim to human rights from the very heart of Europe. The sexualized violence reported in Cologne on New Year's Eve fed into racialized fears of refugees and immigrants promoted by groups on the radical right, even as racialized fears returned to mainstream discourses. Critical responses to the racism of the radical right unfortunately also participate in racialized discourses by resorting to "Europe" or "European values." This analysis suggests the need to consider Europe as a field of power, one in which the contestation over what Europe is or should be results in concrete, racialized disparities in access to social mobility, education, or public agency. A project for racial, gender and economic justice requires the thinking of Europe as an ongoing project of world-making. The call to revisit or reclaim "European" values cannot succeed here. Nor can a response to the new right (or the newly normalized racism of the center) allow the new right to determine the parameters of debates about possibilities for the future.
Keywords
racism in Europe, refugees, Islam, Islamophobia, Cologne, sexualized violence
Introduction
In the weeks following the New Year's Eve sexualized violence reported at the Cologne train station, two images appeared in the German press that pointedly demonstrate the ways in which this violence played into racial- ized fears of the Muslim "Other." In the first, most widely circulated image, the magazine Focus published a cover image with black handprints depicted on the naked body of a blonde woman with light skin. Despite widespread criticism in social media and in other print media, the Focus editor defended the cover image by saying that "we have represented what unfortunately happened."1 A second image appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as a smaller illustration advertising the special section on the Cologne violence. In this cartoon-like illustration a black hand reaches up between the legs of a white woman's body. An editor for this newspaper provided a brief apology on Facebook, but the image remained online.
These images, appearing in...