Racialisation & Ethnification
Politics and Problems in Cultural Representations
This seminar examines representations of 'race' and issues of racialisation and racism related to societies undergoing profound changes due to recent and ongoing immigration and witnessing eruptions of anti-immigrant and racist practices and politics. It focuses on the politics and problems of representing 'race' – long since recognised to be not a biological 'fact' but a discursive and imaginary construct which, nevertheless, has severe, often violent and exclusionary, effects and consequences in lived reality due to the racialisation it produces.
One of the major challenges for contemporary scholars is to develop a pluralistic critique of the complex relations between power and diversity, not least in the increasingly heterogeneous European societies. A critique that recognises, for instance, that racialising discourses and modes of representation may comprise a whole range of ways of framing and marking the culturally or visibly different Other.
Racialisation is closely linked to racism, but it is a multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be reduced to hostile racist acts, although these are some of its most troubling incarnations. In sociology, the term refers to the processes of ascribing racial or ethnic identities to a social practice or group, i.e. the discursive production of racial identities. It is often born of the interaction of a group with a dominant group thus involving identification of the 'Other' as well as (internalised) self-identification. Moreover, culture is a key aspect of it.
Racialisation, we suggest, should therefore be understood as an encompassing and complex phenomenon involving, among other things, power struggles, hierarchies, subordination, (post)coloniality, dehumanisation, stereotypes and scopic regimes (including 'colour blindness') that construct the difference between self and Other, thereby structuring the way 'we' see (or do not see) racialised Others. As such, racialisation is deeply ingrained in naturalised everyday practices. It pervades popular discourses, mass media and the whole spectrum of political positions, from right-wing nationalism to liberal humanism – basically, any kind of discourse or mode of representation that conceives of individuals or groups in terms of their 'race'.
As a research network for interdisciplinary studies in migration and culture, we also wish to examine how the issues of racialisation relates to popular and academic discourses on migration hitherto dominated by the concept of ethnicity. The seminar thus welcomes reflections on, for instance, how racialisation and racism relate to the widespread resistance to 'non-Western' immigrants (often synonymous with Muslims) and are entangled with an ongoing 'migrantisation' (Regina Römhild) of European citizens of Colour.
At a theoretical level, the seminar aims to deepen the discussion of the interrelationship between representation, racialisation and ethnification. This nexus raises a series of questions, such as the question of whether the concept of racism should be supplemented with concepts such as cultural racism, structural racism and hegemonic whiteness to enable more accurate and subtle analyses of the complex and ambiguous forms of racialising discrimination, exotisation, fascination, fear etc. which pervade Western societies and cultures, yet rarely attract the same kind of critical analysis and debate as the sometimes violent acts of outspoken racism.
The focus of this seminar is distinctly on how racialisation is constructed, contested or negotiated in visual media, visual arts, literature and cultural activist accounts. How can and do these forms of expression, along with inventive forms of academic practice, help us develop new critical approaches to racialisation? Is 'colour blindness' an answer? Is the deconstruction of stereotypes?
The seminar is in English. All are welcome!
Registration: Participation in the seminar is free, but registration is required.
Please sign up with Associate Professor Anne Ring Petersen before 9 March 2015.
Programme
13:15 - 15:00 Moderator - Associate Professor Anne Ring Petersen (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
13:15 Welcome and introduction
Associate Professor Anne Ring Petersen (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
13:30 Sticky Objects, Sticky Histories: Colonial Aesthetics, Stereotypes, and the Trouble of Contextualization
Mathias Danbolt, Postdoc (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
This paper takes the recent debates about racial stereotypes and colonial aesthetics in Danish domestic commodity culture as a starting point to discuss how different politics of contextualisation and historicisation shape the objects under debate. By bringing Homi Bhabha's seminal discussion of the stereotype in colonial discourse in dialogue with Sara Ahmed's concept of sticky objects, this presentation seeks to discuss how divergent understandings of "context" and "history" inform the public debate.
14:00 Performing Otherness: Pitfalls, Problems, Potentials
Kjetil Rødje, Postdoc (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen)
Taking as my starting point Thomas Pynchon’s 1964 short story ”The Secret Integration,” I will focus on the political and aesthetic potentials, as well as pitfalls and problems, associated with racial appropriations by artists and performers identified as ‘white’. Theoretically, the paper will discuss the balancing act identified by two separate ideas in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: on the one hand, the indignity of speaking for others, and on the other, the various struggles towards becoming-other. At the same time, the paper will address conflicting strategies identified by what I label as respectively the critical and the affirmative pole in current affect theory.
14:30 Racialisation and the Mediated Threat of Terror
Asta Smedegaard Nielsen, Part--time Lecturer (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen)
The presentation examines news material on the threat of terror against Denmark, with a particular focus on how bodies are depicted. Departing from Sara Ahmed’s (2004) notion of ‘the spatial politics of fear’, it is argued that the threat of terror works to regulate and organise space along racialised lines in the news.
15:00 Coffee and tea
15:45 - 16:45 Moderator - Frauke Wiegand, PhD Fellow (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
15:45 (E)racing difference
Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Postdoc (Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University)
The paper explores the appearance and disappearances of race in the depictions of postcolonial violence in the films by Mahamet Saleh-Haroun, exploring the relationship between nationalism, racialization and conflict in a the cinematic representation of a fragile state.
16:15 Towards a racialised future? Afrofuturist speculations
Associate Professor Erik Steinskog (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
The term afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dery in 1993 as a term defining "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture." Before this definition, however, Dery asks why there are so few African Americans writing science fiction, a question still crucial for Ytasha Womack, in her 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-FI and Fantasy Culture. This question is not only related to the writers and readers of sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction, however, but should be extended to also include the content, that is to say, the question about the presence of racialised subjects in the (imagined) futures. Are the future post-racial, in the sense that racialised subjects do not exist? Would this mean that "the race-problem" has been solved? And if so, how? Taking these questions as point of departure, the presentation will via the discourse of afrofuturism discuss racialisation of the future and some possible effects for the present.
16:45 Short break
17:00 Roundtable with all speakers
Moderator - Associate Professor Moritz Schramm (Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark)