Europe in Black and White: Immigration, Race, and Identity in the ‘Old Continent'

The essays in Europe in Black and White offer new critical perspectives on race, immigration, and identity on the Old Continent. In reconsidering the various forms of encounters with difference, such as multiculturalism and hybridity, the contributors address a number of issues, including the cartography of postcolonial Europe, its relation to the production of "difference" and "race," and national and identity politics and their dependence on linguistic practices inherited from imperial times. Featuring scholars from a wide variety of nationalities and disciplinary areas, this collection will speak to an equally wide readership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781841504452

Book preview

Europe in Black and White

Immigration, Race, and Identity in the ‘Old Continent’

Edited by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Fernando Clara,

João Ferreira Duarte and Leonor Pires Martins

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Europe in black and white : interdisciplinary perspectives on immigration, race and identity in the Old Continent / [edited by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches … et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-84150-357-8

1. Cultural pluralism--Europe. 2. Nationalism--Europe. 3. Postcolonialism--Europe. 4. Europe--Race relations. 5. Europe--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. 6. Europe--Civilization. I. Sanches, Manuela Ribeiro.

HN380.Z9M84356 2010

305.80094--dc22

2010039543

Cover illustration: Francisco Vidal, Segredos em Língua Materna,

Illustrated diary, 2004. Courtesy: Galeria 111.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Emma Rhys

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-357-8 / EISBN 978-1-84150-445-2

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Europe in Black and White

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches

PART I:  The Problem with Europe

Chapter 1:    The Culture Wars in Translation

Robert Stam & Ella Shohat

Chapter 2:    Nations Re-bound: Race and Biopolitics at EU and US Borders

John D. Márquez

Chapter 3:    New Maps of Europe by Some Contemporary ‘Migrant’ Artists and Writers

Francesco Cattani

Chapter 4:    Beware Behalfies! Contradictory Affiliations in Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This Line

Ana Cristina Mendes

Chapter 5:    A Cape Verdian View of Europe: History and Geography Revised in the Writings of G. T. Didial

Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues

Chapter 6:    On the Periphery of the Universal and the Splendour of Eurocentrism

Inocência Mata

Chapter 7:    Opportunities, Politics and Subjectivity in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon’s Non-governmental Organizations

Susana Durão

PART II: Building Walls: Race and Difference

Chapter 8:    Technologies of Othering: Black Masculinities in the Carceral Zones of European Whiteness

Uli Linke

Chapter 9:    Reverses of Modernity: Postcolonialism and Post-Holocaust

António Sousa Ribeiro

Chapter 10:  White Resentment – The Other Side of Belonging

Vron Ware

Chapter 11:  ‘Mestizaje’, ‘Mestiçagem’, ‘Métissage’: Useful Concepts?

Capucine Boidin

Chapter 12:  Studies in Brown: Seductions and Betrayals of Hybridity in Richard Burton and Gilberto Freyre

Anna M. Klobucka

PART III:  Language as Contact Zone or the Disavowal of Empire

Chapter 13:  Old Empires, New Cartographies: Problematizing ‘Lusophone Categorizations’

Elena Brugioni

Chapter 14:  Spectacles, Lenses and Magnifying Glasses: Critical Approaches in the Definition of the Canon of African Literatures in the Portuguese Language

Livia Apa

Chapter 15:  Literary Responses in Postcolonial and Post-Imperial Europe: The Literatures of Diaspora in Portugal and Britain

João Cosme

Chapter 16:  Voices in Shades of Grey

Phillip Rothwell

Abstracts and Biographical Notes

Index

Europe in Black and White

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches

‘Black and White’

Une négresse qui buvait du lait

Ah ! se disait-elle, si je le pouvais

Tremper ma figure dans mon bol de lait

Je serais plus blanche que tous les anglais

Un Britannique devant son chocolat

Ah ! se disait-il, et pourquoi ne pas

Tremper ma figure dans ce machin-là

Je serais plus noir qu’un noir du Quénia

Une intellectuelle qui buvait du thé

Ah ! se disait-elle, si je le pouvais

Tremper ma figure dans ma tasse de thé

Je serais plus jaune que les filles du Gyang-Tse

Un Américain qui buvait du sang

Ah ! se disait-il, si j’avais le temps

De tremper ma figure dans mon bol de sang

Je serais plus rouge qu’un Mohican

(Gainsbourg 1968)

The concept of Europe has been much discussed, both lauded and contested, with its ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes. The present volume aims at exploring precisely these ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes, including the various shades of grey that lie between ‘black’ and ‘white’. Thus, its deliberately provocative title lends itself to diverse and polysemic readings.

These, however, can hardly include another ‘Europe in black and white’; or, more precisely, a ‘Europe in print’ or a ‘Europe for the press’, as mentioned in a web page created by the European Union (EU) to host press articles written in its multiple official languages and intended to bear witness to a ‘continent’ defined as the site of an oxymoronic, unified diversity (EC 2009).

Unity connotes identity and difference, processes of inclusion and exclusion; in sum, borders – a tacit concept of Europe that ultimately defines itself against hybrid spaces. The concept of hybridity is significantly absent from Eurocratic discourses, which tend to promote an idea of diversity understood as the addition of new ‘cultures’, rather than an innovative way of thinking about and living with difference (Bhabha 1994). Meanwhile, discourses on hybridity have permeated the academe, paving the way for a hasty celebration or disapproval of the concept, although both sides rarely consider the tensions that characterize the diverse and contradictory uses to which such signifiers are subject. Moreover, the sometimes conflicting concepts of multiculturalism and hybridity do not exclude ideas of ‘difference’ based upon notions of culture that insist on defining it as a homogeneous, discrete whole, ignoring exchanges and contacts that have always characterized cultural practices (Gupta & Ferguson 1992).

‘Europe in black and white’ may also connote dichotomic ways of thinking, dividing and opposing by way of simplistic ‘racial’ binaries, thus questioning a concept of a multicoloured Europe, another designation used to evoke multicultural diversity. To what extent does a concept of Europe composed of multiple distinct cultures, nations, regions and ‘ethnic minorities’ in fact challenge processes of exclusion and hierarchies that have characterized national and transnational histories?

By the latter, we understand not only recent processes of mobility within a unified Europe and their connections to globalization tendencies in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the uneven consequences of Europe’s colonial histories. Immigration to many European countries still follows patterns set by former colonial and imperial connections and interdependencies. More recent immigration, such as from sub-Saharan Africa or Eastern ‘Slavic’ Europe, replicates former hierarchies, in which the ‘racializing’ of difference and processes of exclusion play a decisive role. One only has to consider the new fortresses and walls erected against a free and mobile European Schengen space and the refusal to grant rights to those who are retained in detention camps or captured in boats before they attain the shores of a ‘continent’ that insists on defining itself as the cradle of secularism, enlightenment and human rights (Balibar 2004, Benhabib 2005, Chambers 2008). Immigration policies and controls inside the EU are increasingly reminiscent of former distinctions between the fully human and the less than human, as if the security of a ‘civilized Europe’ would have always to depend on the exclusion of the ‘barbarians’ within it.

This also indicates how official and academic discourses on diversity and hybridity may fail to comply with what is actually going on in Europe. For example, Muslims are constructed as fundamentalists, a process through which distinctive elements – from attire to skin colour, and, more recently, architecture – are mobilized to produce difference (Gupta & Ferguson 1992). African immigrants, while not rejected on explicit racial grounds – although their phenotype is a major factor in processes of exclusion – are rendered subhuman by their illegal status (Chambers 2008), deprived as they are of the right to have rights (Arendt apud Balibar 2004: 119). New forms of apartheid emerge, alongside forms of racism or cultural fundamentalism (Stolcke 1995) that have characterized the post-cold war Europe, replicating fissures and dividing lines inherited from colonial times (Balibar 2004, Gilroy 2005). No recent forms of hybridity or multicultural diversity seem to counter the idea of the homogeneous nation – another recent European invention that equated one language, one culture, one history and one literature – that still echoes in EU discourses on a Europe of diversity, despite appeals to and the recognition of other regional or ethnic identities. Therefore, rethinking Europe also requires rethinking the nation, not by considering its obsolete character, but, rather, by taking into account its distinct, although interdependent, configurations that still replicate the connections to former imperial spaces. These still resonate in an albeit increasingly interconnected (Tomlinson 1999) globalized world, which nevertheless tends to erect new borders and forms of exclusion within and outside its borders.

‘Europe in black and white’ can, therefore, be associated to new forms of racism (Balibar 1991, Gilroy 1990), dividing once more what had already become syncretic or hybrid, thus ceding again to, or reproducing, a racialized thinking rejected by the old continent after 1945. The shaping of Europe after the Second World War was determined by the notion that the bastion of civilization had bred what since then has been considered the most odious crime against humanity ever committed. But, in 1950, Aimé Césaire already dared question this revisionism, stating that the condemnation of Nazism and the Holocaust had only led to the irreversible rejection of genocide because it had affected ‘white’ Europeans, thereby silencing colonialist practices (Césaire 1955). This may seem a radical argument when considered from a postcolonial perspective, but a similar contention emerges in a recent text by Talal Asad (2002), involving a reflection on what Europe is and how it still defines itself. Europe, the cradle of civilization and secularism, emerges as a continent amongst others, and its secularist practices are ultimately considered not only as the result of religious conflicts – a classic argument – but, most importantly, as the reworking and readjustment of religious beliefs and divisions in distinct ways. According to Asad, Muslims cannot be represented in Europe unless they assimilate (in the case of France) or integrate (in the case of the UK); that is, unravel the links that tie them to their beliefs, while Europe is tacitly allowed to cling to its Judaeo-Christian values (Asad 2002). Hence, Europe is able, has, to include Germany, despite the fact that it was the site and emblem of the worst that Europe could produce, therefore creating the means through which the continent’s regeneration could be initiated, resetting its role as example for the rest of the world. Thus, the Holocaust could become a lieu de mémoire for Europe, perhaps more on an institutional than on an everyday level, as virulent forms of anti-Semitism, not only among radical Muslims, continue to manifest themselves.

Accordingly, our departing question is the need to rethink contemporary Europe, an invented ‘continent’ faced with diverse challenges. We are not primarily concerned with the redrawing of European boundaries following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing geostrategic shifts. What we want to address – and this certainly relates to the location where it was conceived, Portugal – is the need to rethink Europe’s present from a perspective that recognizes how the colonial past still determines the way in which the present is approached and the future envisaged, as is to be derived from the connections established between present migration policies and former colonial histories.

Identities are formed not only by historical processes, differently narrated and evoked, but also by geography. The location where theory is thought, published, read and developed is, as well, decisive (Said 2000: 1–72). This is the topic of the essay by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat – the first essay of Part 1 The Problem with Europe – in which they propose a translational approach to multiculturalism, taking into account different historical and (trans)national contexts. How does one translate, not only in a figurative but a literal sense, theories and concepts that retain their distinctive uses and connotations, betraying at the same time old and new imperial rivalries? What can globally circulating theories offer in the form of transnational alliances?

Geography can also be considered from an alternative point of view – that is, in its relation to the exercise of power – through a precise and complex mapping of space. Cartographies of empire can thus be considered as sites of enunciation and deployment of power (Said 1994), particularly as regards the immobilization of deterritorialized immigrants, incarcerated and fixed in their difference in a metonymic freezing (Appadurai 1988: 36) of their ‘race’ or ‘culture’, as explored in John D. Márquez’s essay in Part 1 of this book. Such processes are at the same time intimately linked to the modern definition of the nation state with its invented traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), which would have been impossible without an ‘overseas’, the more or less immediate presence of which shaped European history from the Age of Enlightenment onwards. These issues become more complex when framed by the intricacy of globalization processes, the consequences of which are subject to contradictory interpretations. This was further complicated in the aftermath of September 11 with the widening of the gap between the West and the rest, alternatively interpreted as a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996), or as another instance of global (post-colonial or imperial; Hardt & Negri 2000) interdependencies. The latter may still be seen as influencing the way in which literary canons are created and defended, who is to be included or excluded from them, thereby prolonging narratives of ‘universalism’ that even some post-colonial approaches are unable to destabilize. This is the rule as regards African literatures and their dependencies from Eurocentric discourses; namely, those developed in former metropolitan spaces, as stressed by Inocência Mata in Part 1 of this volume.

Further articles and essays collected in Part 1 address the issue from other, various, disciplinary perspectives or geographical locations, stressing diverse contexts and intertwined histories (Said 1994: 1–72). Hence, national imagined communities (Anderson 1991) are related not only to the metropolitan space, but also to the ‘overseas’ territories (Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues) in the form of representations of ‘otherness’ as the constitutive outside (Hall 1996: 3–4) of an homogeneous national space. But there are other forms of designing, imagining space and places (Susana Durão), considering diverse cartographies and the construction of borders and boundaries in different post-imperial and temporal contexts, and their possible transgression through artistic practices and literature (Francesco Cattani, Ana Cristina Mendes).

If deterritorialization has constituted a major concept in postmodern and (some) postcolonial theory, this tendency to overemphasize the nomadic and the migrant has also coexisted with the territorialization of difference, when one considers immigration policies in ‘Fortress Europe’ and in European nation states. Such policies ultimately reiterate the racialization of cultural and religious difference, thus legitimating practices that are intimately linked to processes of exclusion (Balibar 2004), as an intrinsic part of modernity in its connection to colonialism.

The essays included in Part 2 (Building Walls: Race and Difference) address the topics already considered in the previous part, but now adding to them more precise contexts and experiences, considering not only the ways in which difference plays a decisive role in processes of exclusion, but also the historical contexts in which they have emerged and developed until the present. From the close association between anti-Semitism and racism (António Sousa Ribeiro) to processes of incarceration of ‘race’ in the literal or metaphorical sense, such as its commoditization in visual culture (Uli Linke) and the defence of ‘whiteness’ grounded on resentment (Vron Ware), the texts consider diverse ways of drawing boundaries, naming difference, postulating more or less hybrid identities and analysing contradictory ways of determining who belongs to, or is to be excluded, racially or culturally, from a Europe defined predominantly as ‘white’.

With a variety of perspectives that range from cultural studies or anthropology to close readings of narratives of the ‘exotic’ or the racially ‘hybrid’ (Anna Klobucka), the gathered texts point to the complexity of the questions addressed, and propose diverse responses to them. Such diversity can, ultimately, be understood as context dependent, as illustrated by Capucine Boidin’s text, which analyses diverse ways of thinking about race, difference and the ways in which these concepts are differently deployed in national political debates – consequently, adding other elements to Shohat and Stam’s text in Part 1. The concept of hybridity is thus given a different emphasis and put to different uses, in contexts ranging from the Portuguese to the British and French, thereby illustrating that, regardless of the diversity of colonialism’s cultures (Thomas 1994) and discourses, it has nevertheless retained its subjugating role.

Postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy 2005) stems from the incapacity to mourn the loss of empire, and so making it possible for repressed memories to return, be it in the form of the incapacity to accept the limits and challenges of a renewed Europe or to consider other forms of (nationally) imagined communities (Anderson 1991) beyond those inherited from colonial pasts. This is evident in the persistence of imperial/neo-colonial narratives in language policies or in the canonization or definition of ‘postcolonial’ literatures in former metropolises. The association between one nation, one language, one culture does not only relate to European and Western modernity, but also reveals its links to imperial histories.

The essays included in Part 3 (Language as Contact Zone or the Disavowal of Empire) address the topic of language and literature in a postcolonial context, with a special emphasis on the uses of Portuguese, but within a comparative framing. How does empire reiterate its will to power through language, or language policies, in diverse contexts (Elena Brugioni, Livia Apa, Phillip Rothwell), from former metropolises to independent nations or diasporic communities (João Cosme)? How are such borders contested by literature written in former colonies? What are the differences and parallels between these diverse experiences, all more or less related to former European empires? One should also underline the fact that the later essays depart from reflections on the status of African literatures written in Portuguese. Notwithstanding the relevance of the inclusion of this less visible field in global debates on the postcolonial, this common trait also signalizes how much postcolonial approaches still tend to be mainly associated to non-European spaces, therefore deprioratizing the need to apply them to the questioning of the nation in Europe, thus occluding the intimate links between nation and empire building.

What other forms of imagining cosmopolitan forms of communities are there beyond local and neo-imperial monolinguisms? How can these local, less visible debates contribute to an enriching of global debates on postcolonial Europe and its nations? The circle closes with a return to the issues raised by Stam and Shohat in their text on the need to translate – that is, to use a cautious reading of theories and concepts in order to ensure their travel (Said 2000) – and the ensuing transnational alliances, including those on the academic level.

The recent financial and economic crisis and its effects on patterns of migration and processes of globalization also points to new tendencies, reinforcing the dislocalization of Europe and the West in renewed ways, particularly since the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States and the emergence of new world powers in the East and the West. These tendencies have not, however, changed the way Europe insists on reproducing its ‘others’, renewing and radicalizing its policies and policing, on a national and transnational level, those who belong and those who are to be excluded. This amounts to saying that thinking about these issues involves beginning again and again. In his book Beginnings, Edward W. Said (1997) offered decisive insights into the issue of starting a work, introducing a topic, defining a problematic, thus questioning the idea of an absolute beginning, i.e., an original foundation. Rather than addressing the question of the end of grand narratives, as posited by discourses on the postmodern, our approach intends to emphasize the need to be attentive to other forms of subjectivity and multifaceted identities made possible by a colonial past and the challenges of an ongoing postcolonial process. The unfinished moment of the latter – namely, the need to address complex multiple histories, fraught with disavowals and contradictory versions – is still present in debates on the ‘idea of Europe’.

While addressing some of these complex issues, this volume does not intend, however, to offer definite answers; rather, it presents partial, located analyses of them. The readings are various, sometimes even conflicting, according to location, experience, theoretical background or the more or less interdisciplinary fields that frame the approaches. This also may explain the difficult task of building a coherent corpus out of such varied and localized readings, in spite of all globalizing tendencies in the academe. But it is precisely this disparity that emphasizes the need to pursue a sustained reflection and ongoing dialogue on the complexities of what Europe was, is, and is supposed to become.

If difference and its multiple uses are the result of social and discursive constructions, on a national level, the same applies to an idea of Europe that still requires urgent critique. This is one more attempt to foster discussion. Gainsbourg’s ‘Black and White’ lyrics, in their apparent simplicity, point not only to this constructedness, but also to the conflicts, violence, dreams and hopes; that is to say, the ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes inherent to Europe. The answer to these contending issues, if there is only one, does not reside in a ‘human nature’ that would guarantee equality, but, rather, in the capacity to question one’s ‘nature’, ‘colour,’ culture or nation by stepping into the skin of another, thereby obtaining the required distance to observe ‘our’ heritage from outside. This certainly also demands, as Said would put it, the worldliness of the academe and its theories; in other words, an effective critical theory.

The present volume is the result of the Conference Europe in Black and White held in Lisbon at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon in May 2008 and which is part of the project I coordinate at the Centre for Comparative Studies DISLOCATING EUROPE: Postcolonial Perspectives in Literary, Anthropological and Historical Studies (PTDC/ELT/71333/2006) funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. I want to thank the Center for Comparative Studies, the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and the Rectorate of the University of Lisbon. This publication would not have been possible without their sponsorship. I also want to thank all participants in the Conference; even if not all contributions could – for diverse reasons – be included, they all were decisive for this final outcome. My thanks also to the British Council in Lisbon, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD) and the Program in Comparative Studies (PEC, Programa em Estudos Comparatistas) at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon for sponsoring the conference.

Finally, my special thanks go to Leonor Pires Martins and Caterina Lugliè for their help in the invisible tasks, which are decisive for a successful event.

References

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Appadurai, A. Putting hierarchy in its place. Cultural Anthropology, 1988, 3(1): pp. 36–49.

Asad, T. Muslims and European identity: can Europe represent Islam? In: A. Pagden, ed. The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: pp. 209–27.

Balibar, E. Is there a ‘neo-racism’? In: E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, eds. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. C. Turner, trans. London & New York, NY: Verso, 1991: pp. 17–27.

Balibar, E. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. J. Swenson, trans. Princeton, NJ & Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Benhabib, S. & Post, R., ed. Another Cosmopolitanism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bhabha, H. K. The Location of Culture. London & New York, NY: Routledge, 1994.

Césaire, A. Discours sur le Colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955.

Chambers, I. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

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Gainsbourg, S. Black and White. On: Initials B. B. France: Philips Records (Mercury Records/Universal Music Group), 1968.

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Part I

The Problem with Europe

Chapter 1

The Culture Wars in Translation

¹

Robert Stam & Ella Shohat

This essay will explore the various ways in which U. S. American, Brazilian and French intellectuals have formulated the critical race and multicultural debates – and what we can learn from these diverse formulations. The debates, we argue, must be seen in transnational terms, within a relational framework that transcends the confines of single national geographies. And, while the postcolonial debates have tended to privilege the Anglophone world, we hope to engage other locations: Latin America, Western Europe and the Middle East. We propose what we call, in the wake of Mikhail Bakhtin, a multichronotopic approach, which sets the culture wars against the broader backdrop of the history of an Atlantic world shaped by the violent ‘encounter’ between Europe and indigenous America, by the exploitation of African labour and by the evolving attempts to go beyond master race democracy towards more egalitarian social formations.

No single term adequately evokes all the intellectual work related to what we have called the ‘seismic shift’, whose goal was to decolonize culture, politics and scholarship. Rather than a single discourse, we find a constellation of discourses, practiced under very diverse rubrics: critical race theory, radical pedagogy, revisionist history, border theory, polycentrism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, transculturalism, alter-globalization, subaltern studies, diaspora studies, multicultural and transnational feminism, post-colonial theory, minor transnationalism, the modernity/coloniality project and so forth. Many of these terms have become sliding signifiers onto which diverse hopes and anxieties, utopias and dystopias, are projected. But, to our mind, it is not a question of overly investing in a single term, but, rather, of participating in the overall drift of an antiracist and anti-imperial project. Each designation, while problematic, casts a distinct light on the overall project. The very fact that the terms do not always ‘fit’ equally well into diverse national spaces is, itself, a symptom of the border-crossing nature of the debates.

Critical work is performed by hundreds, if not thousands, of scholars in many locations. While this work ‘flies’ under very diverse banners, and while there might be tensions between and even within their diverse modes of critique, they all share a common element: a transdisciplinary interrogation and critical engagement with the legacies of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, racism, Eurocentrism and neo-liberal globalization. They all try to destabilize the naturalized and even unconscious norms of white supremacism and Eurocentric epistemology. Our goal is to orchestrate a polylogue, as it were; an intellectual networking embracing cognate strands in different sites.

It would be wrong to think that these struggles began in the 20th century. While terms such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘post-colonial’ might go in and out of fashion, the issues to which they point remain burningly pertinent. The contemporary projects inherit and transform struggles traceable at least as far back as 1492. The issues raised now were present, in germ and under different names, when Jews and Muslims experienced the Reconquista and Inquisition campaigns; when indigenous people fought against the European Conquista, and voiced their criticism of European social hierarchical systems (as did the indigenous Tupi in France, as registered by Michel de Montaigne). The debates were present in the 16th-century Sepúlveda–de las Casas Controversia de Valladolid about the humanity of the ‘Indians’ – a debate staged almost verbatim in the recent Jean-Claude Carrière play The Controversy of Valladolid – and are still hauntingly resonant today. The debates were present when Renaissance travellers and Enlightenment philosophers talked about ‘freedom’ and ‘natural goodness’ and the master–slave dialectic. They were present when French revolutionaries debated Caribbean slavery, when American revolutionaries debated the ‘federal ratio’ (the ‘Three-fifths of all other persons’ clause of the US Constitution) and when philosophers, such as Denis Diderot, and novelists, including Jonathan Swift, denounced colonialism. The issues were also present when dislocated Africans fought enslavement and diasporic black people fought against racism. The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism and imperialism, we argue, have been present and ‘available’ for a long time. Contemporary debates thus form ‘revised’ editions of those earlier debates, reinflected and reaccentuated for new circumstances.

Towards a multichronotopic approach

Our work towards a multichronotopic frame forms part of a wider movement manifested linguistically in the currency of such words as ‘transnational’, ‘exilic’, ‘diasporic’ and ‘transcultural’, as well as in aquatic metaphors such as Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), circum-Atlantic performance (Roach 1996) and tidalectics (Brathwaite 1992). For us, it is not a question simply of comparing cultures and debates, of placing distinct and separate intellectual histories side by side, but, rather, of discerning linked analogies and subterranean affinities, of accentuating the common currents flowing through them, highlighting the ways histories, texts and discourses interfecundate and mutually illuminate one another. Although ideas and debates have, in a sense, always travelled, in a globalized world, the very production and reception of ideas is itself transnational, with multiple locations and terminals, with many itineraries and points of departure and arrival and transit.

Throughout, our analysis is concerned with the ways that debates move back and forth across borders, the ways that they are translated, both literally and figuratively. We pose the following questions: What anxieties and hopes are provoked by words such as ‘race’,