Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project

On Oct. 24 and 25, 2023,  the Center for European Studies at Rutgers, New Brunswick hosted a small symposium inspired by Hans Kundnani’s new book: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project.

On Day One, the then director of the Center, Sadia Abbas, gave opening remarks, an edited version of which is pasted below. The main event of this day was a conversation between Rutgers professor and author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era, Emily Marker and Hans Kundnani.

On Day Two, CES hosted a roundtable, moderated by Belinda Davis (Rutgers) in which Marker, Kundnani, József Böröcz (Rutgers), Peo Hansen (Linköpings University), Megan Brown (Swarthmore) and Abbas participated.

Given the current European situation, this was an important gathering and I&F is proud to be able to present it.

Opening remarks: Postcolonial Studies and Europe

Last semester I was approached by Emily Marker, who I’m happy to say has just joined the Advisory Board of the Center for European Studies and am even more thrilled to announce that yesterday I learned that her book Black France, White Europe has won the. American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer prize for best book European International History since 1895.  She suggested that I invite Hans Kundnani to discuss his forthcoming book, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project.  I am a lateral entry, as interlopers who don’t take the very competitive exam to get into the colonially derived Pakistani civil service are called, in European Studies and had not heard of Hans, but it seemed like an interesting book, and I have tremendous respect for Emily.  Then I met Hans in London and started reading his book while in conversation with him and I realized we had a tremendous intellectual opportunity and I, entirely opportunistically, decided to seize it and turn the book talk into a symposium.  What I realized as I started thinking more about Eurowhiteness and Emily’s Black France, White Europe together is that a certain subgrouping of European Studies, which connects European integration to colonialism and the racializations, including of geography so central to it, had coalesced into an intellectual formation, marked most recently by these two books as well as Megan Brown’s, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France and the European Union.  Central to it are Gurminder Bhambra’s impressive body of work dating back to the early part of this century. As well as Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson’s stunning Eurafrica: The Untold Story of European Integration and Colonialism.  Megan and Peo will be joining us tomorrow and we have hosted Stefan and Gurminder at Center events.

It also became clear to me that if this formation marks a distinct emergence in European Studies, it should also be recognized as a branch of what is called postcolonial studies.   I use the term, postcolonial, with the caveats, caution and scare quotes to which it is frequently subjected in these days of its ostensible obsolescence.  At the same time, declaring my own unfashionableness here, I think the term remains necessary for it speaks to the imbrication of important strands in colonial modernity: racialized capitalism, colonial extraction, inadequate and sometimes outright failed political decolonization, the contradictions of the emancipated nation-states, the political destabilization of these nation-states by the West often in the proxy engagements of the Cold War, migrant identity and racializations of migration from the former colonies to the former colonial metropoles of Europe, indeed the racialization of all relations, and the unrelenting economic war waged on the former colonies in continued extraction but also in the form of the economic policies of the World Bank, IMF and within Europe as Greece experienced during the debt crisis, the European Central Bank.  Of these policies structural adjustment, which is often pulled under the rubric of neo-colonialism, comes back to Europe, the colonial centre, in the form of an unforgiving and brutalizing neoliberalism, for which, of course, the moralizing term is austerity. It is worth pointing out here that Frantz Fanon actually used the term, neoliberal, in Wretched of the Earth.[1]  These are old structures that continue to re-present into the now, and yet continue to surprise and why that surprise is still possible is one of the questions that we as thinkers have to address seriously, for it speaks to the very issue of whether and what change is possible.

At the same time, it must be said that postcolonial studies has always been European Studies whether European studies knows, or wants to acknowledge this.  Indeed, some would say: too much so.  At the same time, I realize I am ascribing agency to European studies and not just to its practitioners, but I do think there is structural logic to the methodological orientation of European studies which tends towards policy, political science and the more Eurocentric attitudes of the social sciences.  Indeed, a recent, egregriously lazy review of Eurowhiteness in Foreign Affairs, by a scholar of European integration, performs all this, in the process completely erasing the scholarship on race, empire and the European integration that has emerged in the last couple of decades.   At European Studies Centers, we are particularly prone to these orientations, and part of what we are trying to do at our Center here is cross the various disciplinary divides and make policy and the humanities talk to each other.  It is a conversation that critical theorists, comparatists and postcolonialists have long undertaken, witness, for instance,  RA Judy’s essay “Reflections on Straussism, Antimodernity, and Transition in the Age of American Force,” on the neoconservatives, or Edward Said’s wonderfully sardonic, “The Clash of Definitions,” about Samuel Huntington’s Foreign Affairs essay which went on to become what Said called, with perhaps too much optimism, the “ponderously ineffective” book, The Clash of Civilizations.  Apropos our themes today, it is worth recalling also that in that same essay, Said positions Martin Bernal’s seminal Black Athena against The Clash of Civilizations.

            What do I mean when I say postcolonial studies has always been European Studies? There is, of course, most strikingly, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal, transformative and now unavoidable for Europeanists’ 2007 Provincializing Europe.  However, I speak also of other constitutive work and thinking: Gayatri Spivak has repeatedly said that she is a Europeanist who teaches French, German and English literature and philosophy, as well, of course, as Bengali literature. Edward Said it must be remembered was trained as a scholar of English literature and his first book was on Conrad, whom he also quotes in “The Clash of Definitions.” He also wrote the really fine Beginnings. Moreover, his study of Orientalism, not just in the eponymous book, but also in The World, The Text and the Critic, one of my personal favourites, engaged French and English, but not, as many complained, German Orientalism.  One might say, then, that what distinguishes people who are called Europeanists and those who are called postcolonialists is that the latter engage Europe’s life in the colonies and also often, at their best, take what Said would have called a “contrapuntal” approach that puts colony and metropole in reciprocal tension.

Yet this European emphasis can be limited, as there has also been a largely Commonwealth orientation with some secondary attention paid to France in a great deal of postcolonial studies. In my view, this is what needs to be expanded and rethought, and I’m eager to see the Center for European Studies play a role in this reorientation.  Moreover, we need not only to pay attention to European integration and colonialism but also focus on the national colonialisms such as Dutch, German, Belgian, Italian that get less attention.  In particular, for various, fairly obvious reasons, I think both Germany and Italy’s erasures of their colonial past need to be taken up systematically and rigorously by postcolonialists. It would also appear that the study of those national colonialisms is increasingly bound to the study and fate of the European Union and the idea of Europe, and those entanglements need to be examined carefully, especially as the issue of migration becomes a site for the convergence of all the European contradictions even as ethnonationalism and ethnoregionalism, to use Hans’s term which he will explain soon, flourish and grow.  As I step down as director, I am keen to launch this strand and hope to continue to play a role in developing it as a member of the advisory board and hopefully through a grant we have just received.

Let me lay out a bit of a genealogy that puts our conversation today in some overlapping circles before I turn to Eurowhiteness and then transition into our main event.  Around 2002, Stuart Hall published an essay, “In but not of Europe:  Europe and Its Myths,” which took up the question of European unification and the attendant imagined need for a unifying cultural mythology for Europe.[2]  The title was taken, Hall wrote, from C.L.R. James where he had said of Europe he was “in but not of it.”  James, as quoted by Hall also said, “those people who are in western civilization, who have grown up in it but yet are not completely a part [of it], have a unique insight, something special to contribute.”  Hall went on to write, modestly, that although he wasn’t sure of his own contribution “in but not of Europe accurately captures the ambivalences that haunt my own identification.  Much of this ambivalence is situational: I confess to feeling most aggressively “European” in America, most aware that I can never really be “European” when in Europe (375).”  Going on to read David Scott’s reading of C.L.R.  James’s reading of the Haitian revolution and of Touissant’s reading of the Enlightenment philosophes in Black Jacobins, Hall picked up Scott’s phrase “conscripts of modernity” and adapted its object.  He wrote: “I believe all of us who, in CLR James’s terms, are “in but not of Europe—who live our intimacy with Europe as well as its impossibility as “fate” are Europe’s … conscripts (376).”

Hall was addressing an ostensible European need felt for a unifying cultural myth of Europe—I’d call it an origin story—after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union when countries from Central and Eastern Europe started being brought into the EU. Invoking Benedict Anderson as well as Homi Bhabha, he suggested that the search for such a myth was an attempt to impose “a unifying vision, a common framework of intelligibility, on highly diverse societies whose histories have dramatically diverged over the centuries; a story, perhaps, which could lend depth and texture to the relative cultural “thinness” which the emerging spectre of the new Europe, or the European Union presents” (377).  He cautioned against the need for such foundational myths because he argued the myth of Europa with its reliance on Greek antiquity, a teleological civilizational stance and emphasis on civilizational distinction, could do what all foundational myths do bind “the disconcerting discontinuities, brutal ruptures, grim inequalities and unforeseen contingencies of Europe’s real history into the telos of a consoling circular narrative whose end is already foreshadowed by its beginnings” (377).

Against this foundational myth of Europe, Hall positioned the myth of the Promised Land which he said had provided consolation for Jews subjected to centuries of pogroms and massacres in Europe, but had also led Puritans to the Americas, and had been appropriated by black slaves in a way of metaphorically expressing their profound desire to be “led out of slavery and into freedom,” but at the same time he argued that the myth’s lineage did not guarantee its liberatory potential or “meaning.”.  And he invoked the condition of Israel and Palestine as illustration.

In an excoriating indictment of European mythmaking, he wrote: “Is there a myth that can help us to encompass in a single narrative the obscenity that was Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto and the obscenity that is Ramallah and the Jenin refugee camp today?… By what historical equation did it come about that the destruction of European Jewry—a cataclysmic event as endemic within European history and culture as Plato or the siege of Troy—came to be expiated by the native inhabitants of the West Bank. It remains to be seen whether Europe against the background of its troubled, divided past has something significantly different to say about the vale of tears that is Gaza today or whether it’s content to remain His Master’s Voice (the US) writ small” (384).  If the attempted resolution of Europe’s racialized and genocidal contradictions on the bodies of Palestinians was one of Hall’s examples of the challenge to the idea of Europe, the other was of migrants “hurling themselves at the Eurostar trains at the mouth to the Channel Tunnel” (384) as Europe lowered its internal borders while raising its external ones (Remember this 2002 not 2015 or 2023).  He suggested, at the same time, that the fascism that had led to the genocide of Jews in Europe could well happen again.  This time, he wondered, if the storm troopers “would be wearing Armani suits?”  Twenty years on, he seems prescient. Indeed, very recently Hans has explicitly argued about the possibility of a far-right EU.

About six years prior to Hall’s essay, Simon Gikandi had published Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, which had addressed a different crisis of unity and identity, that facing post-imperial Britain.  In the first paragraph of the preface, he wrote about questions that had been troubling him since the 1980s as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, I will quote him at length.  He said he had wondered:

“Why was it that here in Great Britain, in the heart of civilization itself, the nature and destiny of the country were being discussed in terms previously reserved for the former colonies? Why was it that here in Edinburgh, in the center of the imperial religion that had controlled and shaped my family’s destiny for three generations, I found myself attending forums on the crisis of Scottish identity, the problems of underdevelopment on the Celtic periphery, and the nature of usable pasts in the context of contested histories? And why was it that here, in the place where—as far as my families and neighbours back in East Africa were concerned—civilization began, the most popular book at that time was titled the Breakup of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism. For someone like myself who had come of age in the shadow of colonialism, the notion of a British state in twilight, or even of English nationalism in crisis, was hard to countenance” (ix).[3]

Gikandi wrote that he turned to the past to understand the crisis because he could not quite deal with this present. His book, of course, leads us to re-map Englishness through the lens both of its colonial engagements in the nineteenth century and its reconstitution by its migrants from its former colonies in the twentieth.  Although in this opening Gikandi mentioned Tom Nairn’s, The Breakup of Britain, there is an earlier book by Nairn, The Left Against Europe?  published in 1973, produced by Penguin and the New Left Review, that takes us back to the British Left’s skepticism about Europe in the 70s.  And these resonances, references, and concerns connect Gikandi’s text to Hall as well as to Eurowhiteness, a book that connects neoliberalism to questions of race, colonialism and migration, and the Greek debt crisis.  Eurowhiteness is a book that takes on the crisis of Europe in the form of the crisis of the eurozone, the possibility of the EUs turn to the far right as well as what a British left Euroskeptical position could look like, that is one that does not concede the debate about Brexit to the British far right.

Yet, I want to suggest that in relation to some of the postcolonial connections I have just laid out, Eurowhiteness,is a postcolonial event that exceeds the sum of the arguments presented therein, which is in no way to diminish those arguments, many of which I find entirely compelling.  What interests me as a postcolonial literary and cultural critic and theorist are a series of aporias or spaces of paradox, contradiction and invisibility or erasure that the book makes available in its frame and performance as well as in its liminal status as a particular kind of nonfiction book that makes an incontrovertible conceptual academic contribution in putting forth the concept of “ethnoregionalism,” among other contributions, while also crossing into policy and public realms where academic work circulates reluctantly in a sometimes mutual disdain between academics, or at least progressive ones with humanities orientations, and policy people.  I would call it not a popularizing book, precisely, but a particular kind of public facing one, which circulates in realms where more conventional academic work is frequently illegible.  Moreover, it traverses these disparate realms with ease and economy.  Indeed, I’d say its economy is what makes it so effective, even as one might want to hear more about any one of its strands depending on one’s preoccupations.

As a literary critic, I am interested in its status and shape as a narrative.  What strikes me as extraordinary, is the way it brings together a series of bibliographies and archives, putting disciplines and arenas of thought and action in dialogue while narrating a story that is persuasive but also necessary.  It is not an ordinary journalistic book; its relationship with scholarship and footnotes is too respectful and its citational politics are admirable.  There is translation across arenas without reduction, a connecting of narratives across different spheres. I find particularly intriguing as a critic, the hybridity of Eurowhiteness’s form as well as of its address which summons a series of audiences and reconstitutes them into a collective or possibly a group in dialogue from EU and policy studies to European intellectual history to postcolonial and British black studies.

Hans opens with a brief biographical orientation which provides some political coordinates and enables various directionalities of thought because we can see it as a book motivated by a fundamental theme in postcolonial studies: the role of migrant identity in the constitution of the former metropole.

Here’s how he begins:

“This is a rather personal book. It is written from a particular perspective—or, perhaps, from several particular perspectives at the same time. My father was Indian and my mother is Dutch, and I was born and grew up in the United Kingdom. My personal relationship with European identity and with the European union has therefore been shaped by the influence of an upbringing in a country on the geographical periphery of Europe with a notoriously semi detached relationship to it and, in addition to my British identity, a secondary sense of belonging to one country that is an EU member state—one of the original Six–and to another that is outside Europe and the EU but was colonized by Britain.

This has meant that although I have always felt European to some extent—in fact I may have felt more European than some British people without a parent from another EU member state—I did not feel “100 per cent European” as I have heard some other people proudly describe themselves.  While the idea of being European captured part of my identity, it could never capture all of it. In particular, in addition to being European, I also saw myself as being Asian in a sense–not least because that was the usual way of categorizing people in the UK with ancestors from the Indian subcontinent. Put simply, I have always had a sense of being partially but not completely European.”

The hinge for me here is the question of what precisely European as identity designates.  Identity becomes, as in my view it always should when we are thinking about racialized colonial modernity, a space of paradox.   It is precisely the relation between identity and belonging (who gets to be European) as slippage between heritage and habitation, personhood and political being or subjecthood, that is at stake here (Indeed, for a moment, I am speaking about this from the perspective of my current work).  In that sense, the politico-personal tension or aporia Hans lays out in biographical terms is at the heart of the European contradiction.  But then one might even say it is at the heart of all forms of what Gayatri Spivak has called nation-thinking, to which we might, following Hans, add region-thinking which is really ethno-region thinking.  How belonging works in a political arrangement like the EU is one of the big questions right now for all people who live in the EU but also for migrants and those seeking asylum.  The overlay of two governmental structures:  national and regional, in perpetual tension becomes a particular space of conflict and contradiction—popular sovereignty, democracy in the nation, and neoliberal bureaucratic oversight pull violently at each other—as Greece found out during the debt crisis.  And let’s not forget the Greeks, too, were racialized in that confrontation, or that there is a long genealogy of that racialization.

At the same time, the problem of belonging, identity and habitation is a problem for all of us everywhere anyway. Because all the sealants of identity and belonging in structures of governance in modernity (papers, passports, censuses) also rather paradoxically ensure the ease of their sundering and dissolution in both nation and region. In other words, what makes populations belong—ethnicity and identity, usually inflected by race—is also what makes populations movable, or, more precisely, re-movable.  For non-white, non-Christian people, mobility is always paradoxical in racialized colonial modernity.  Who gets to be where is both an epistemological question and a governmental one.  Hannah Arendt knew this when she discussed the postwar transfers of populations in the Origins of Totalitarianism.  Moreover, in a bureaucratic structure like the EU, which appears increasingly to be entirely incompatible with popular sovereignty, the epistemological challenge is more perplexing.  Post the establishment of the EU, it’s a problem that’s both national and regional, although inflected by the different contours of national and regional bureaucracy.  I am thinking of the Dublin Regulation, which requires migrants and refugees to be processed in the country of arrival and how it affects the European South and of the challenges to free movement within the European Union that have arisen since 2015.  Arendt, it is worth remembering, saw bureaucracy and race as twinned weapons of imperialism.

At the same time, by starting with his own location and biography, Hans gives us a different window into Britishidentity, asking us to revise what Gikandi called maps of Englishness almost 30 years ago and it his beginning that sent me back to the opening of Gikandi’s book I read you earlier, which I had not read in years. (An aside for my undergraduates:  remember good books take you back to their antecedents which may well be created in the process of their writing. And for me one of the gifts of reading Eurowhiteness has been the way it has returned me to my library—it has caused bibliographic, bibliophilic, mayhem, on my desk, which, of course, I love!).

So, what I am calling the hinge of Hans presentation of his mixed identity, helps us think about, think toward, a necessary reorientation of the commonwealth emphasis, or circumscription, in a great deal of Anglophone-oriented postcolonial studies. In other words, it invites postcolonialists to remember colonialism as a Europe wide phenomenon. Although the entwinement of the epistemic and political are a crucial and necessary object of postcolonial study, Europe can sometimes be only a cipher in postcolonial studies, a sort of token of whatever phenomenon associated with colonialism we postcolonialists are talking about and as a metonym for an epistemology, which latter is, of course, one way in which Europe presents itself while it erases the fabrications embedded in and underpinning it.  And the idea of Europe that is woven into this epistemology usurps, mystifies and invisibilizes actually existing European reality, sometimes for its critics as much as its proponents.

Eurowhiteness is thus a postcolonial book because it deals with migrant identity and because it reorients some of the central issues facing the Commonwealth as well as Europe—the Commonwealth in relation to Europe—through the thematic of colonialism and race, which in my view cannot be separated.  There’s more to say here about the relationship between race, culture and economics, but that will have to wait for another day—or perhaps just tomorrow.

At the end of the book, Hans suggests that maybe Brexit will lead to a more serious and sustained engagement with the Commonwealth in the British state and that the left should think about how to position itself in relation to that possibility. So, one might say, that there is a series of antinomies in the book: Britain versus Europe, Brexit versus integration, EU versus Commonwealth, which are not resolved and perhaps cannot be. One wonders whether the British state can become more leftist outside Europe given its current political configuration. Given the fate of Greece in the debt crisis, it certainly seems that it can’t become more progressive within the European Union. At the same time, given the current political players in ascendance on both right and left in Britain, the possibility of viable and necessary progressive change seems hard to imagine. But then of course that is the task of all progressive political thinking, to continue to try to imagine that which seems inconceivable, particularly in moments of extreme political duress.

  As I hand over the conversation to Hans and Emily, I would like to say that all the critics and theorists I’ve mentioned are secular, some fiercely so.  Perhaps the paradox when we think of Europe is how thoroughly, ostensiblysecular Europe’s discursive and ideological frame is permeated by Christianity and also intra Christian conflict.  Post-reformation contestation is, of course, central to the formation of modern nation states and to Westphalia, and fundamentally dependent upon the Protestant return to the Old Testament. This is implicit in Hall’s invocation of the Promised Land, but also there, as I have suggested in print, in Faisal Devji’s wonderful Muslim Zion, a book about the Pakistani state, which yet reminds us of the dispersal of the European frame and the afterlife of European religious strife across the world.

Thus, when we think about Europe and its claims, we must also think about the way in which Europe both relies on this particular element of post-Reformation division and conflict and erases it.   And it is here I think that Emily’s book makes one of its signal contributions, for it reminds us of the very complex presence of Catholicism in France’s self-constitution. A Catholicism that is both erased and assumed, that can be erased because it is so thoroughly assumed. A certain kind of post reformation contradiction is I think fundamental to French laicite, which is nonetheless bound to the emergence of the French colonial state’s becoming more European and white, as Emily shows.  I cannot do justice to Emily’s book today for it not our prime focus and we’ve already hosted a discussion focused on the book. Having said that, I think, that this meticulously detailed and argued book has to be engaged very seriously and very thoroughly. Its archival range and detail will, I suspect, provide projects for many graduate students in the years to come. At the same time, in keeping with my emphasis on paradox and contradiction and aporia today, I think one intriguing thing for me linguistically and conceptually is the antinomy Emily poses between an African France and a European one as the country decolonized. For what precisely an African France would have meant, in the context of decolonization, but also in the context of colonialism sets out, I think, a series of possibilities, and elicits a bunch of questions about what it would mean to reimagine Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world.   What, also it would mean to reimagine the world itself outside the geo-epistemology that has governed our imaginations for far too long in racialized capitalist modernity.

Given what’s happening in the world, this might sound idiotically optimistic, but there are moments in time, and I believe our climate crisis determined world has given us one such moment, when what once seemed utopian is merely a necessity of species  survival.  As a liberal president asks for a 100 billion dollars to fortify our Southern borders and give nations money to buy bombs and phosphorus, survival seems far from the necrosis that seems to be governing the political imagination, which is why we have to think even more about opening our imaginations to different ways of thinking and being.  Here in the university, we have to be committed to life in the future and to the future of life.  That is our duty to our students, who are inheriting our mess but cannot also be burdened with our despair.

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József Böröcz is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author, most recently, of the book The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical Economic Analysis, published in English and Magyar. Member of the public corporate body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he served as founding director of the Rutgers Institute for Hungarian Studies (1995-2007) and founding President of the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Analysis in Budapest (2015-2022). His recent paper titled ”’Eurowhite’ Conceit and ’Dirty White’ Ressentiment: ’Race’ in Europe” has been named a ”most cited paper” by Wiley, the publisher of the Sociological Forum.

Megan Brown is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Swarthmore College, with a focus on 20th-century France, European integration, and empire. She is the author of The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard, 2022). Her teaching and research interests include post-World War II politics, decolonization, the history of France and Algeria, and questions of citizenship. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Belinda Davis is professor of history at Rutgers University and author or co-editor of five books, including the coedited Social Movements After ’68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond (2022); The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962-1983 (forthcoming with Cambridge). She is currently completing work on Voices of the Organized Poor: Learning from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign’s Everyday Struggles for Survival and Alternative Futures and an environmental history of modern Europe. From 2018 to 2022, she directed the Rutgers Center for European Studies.

Peo Hansen is professor of political science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. Currently, he is Simone Veil Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence. Peo Hansen’s research examines both the historical and contemporary trajectory of European integration. His books include A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (Agenda Publishing, 2021); and Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (co-authored with S. Jonsson, Bloomsbury, 2014), which was published in French last year: Eurafrique: Aux origins colonials de l’Union européenne(La Découverte).

Hans Kundnani is a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University and an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop fellow. He was previously the director of the Europe programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, a senior Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of three books: Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst, 2023); The Paradox of German Power (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014), which has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish; and Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009). He tweets @hanskundnani.

Emily Marker is an Associate Professor of European and global history at Rutgers-Camden and a member of the graduate faculty in history at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She is also currently a fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, a member of the Executive Committee of Rutgers’ Center for African Studies and sits on the advisory board of Rutgers’ Center for European Studies. She is the author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era, which came out with Cornell University Press in 2022 and has received honorable mentions for the Society for French Historical Studies’ David H. Pinkney Prize and the French Colonial History Society’s Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize. Dr. Marker is the president of the Camden chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the rising president of the Western Society for French History.

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 97

[2] Stuart Hall, “In but not of Europe”: Europe and its Myths” in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, eds Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021): 374-285.

[3] Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York : Columbia University Press, 1996)