Introduction: Decolonizing the metropolis

ABSTRACT

Debates over borders and belonging in the post-imperial age have focused on the nation-state, with identifications and rights situated in a national sphere of citizenship. The unsettledness of contemporary European societies that has developed not only against, but also through colonial and imperial endeavours reveals the incapacity of national framings to fully make sense of plurality, including both the structural constraints on and the agency of minoritized populations in Europe. In this introduction to the special issue, Decolonizing the Metropolis: Crisis and Renewal, the editors Becker and Everett turn to the level of the metropolis in order to investigate contestations over belonging in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. During colonial and imperial endeavours, ‘metropolis’ was used to signal the economic core of empire. Here they instead invoke the post-imperial metropolis as the cultural core, in which lived experiences, including conflicts and solidarities, are negotiated by urban denizens who strive to transcend the failures of the nation-state to foster belonging. The twenty-first-century European city emerges as a place both of enclosure and openness, de-and re-racialization: a site of renewal amidst parallel crises of cohesion, coherence and democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• decolonizing
• metropolis
• crisis
• renewal
• Europe
• Paris
• London
• Berlin

Notes

1 Caroline Howarth and Eleni Andreouli, ‘“Has multiculturalism failed?” The importance of lay knowledge and everyday practice’, Institute of Social Psychology Research Paper, London School of Economics and Political Science Publications, 2012, available on Semantic Scholar at https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:45347385 (viewed 30 October 2023).

2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso 2016).

3 ⁣⁣Paul A. Silverstein, Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic (London: Pluto Press 2018); Abdelmajid Hannoum, The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021).

4 Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxon.: Princeton University Press 2013); Elisabeth Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste and Contention in Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2021).

5 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’, in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1997), 1–58; Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Buchet/Castel 1957).

6 Ferruh Yilmaz, How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2016); Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 2012); Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2005); Stephen Castles, ‘Guestworkers in Europe: a resurrection?’, International Migration Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2004, 741–76.

7 Ayhan Kaya, ‘Individualization and institutionalization of Islam in Europe in the age of securitization’, Insight Turkey, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, 47–63.

8 Encounters ORA Joint Research Project, ‘Muslim-Jewish encounter, diversity & distance in urban Europe: religion, culture and social model’, Executive Summary, October 2023, available at www.mmg.mpg.de/1166979/2023-Encounters_Executive-Summary.pdf (viewed 2 November 2023); Fatima El-Tayeb, Undeutsch: die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2016).

9 Norton, On the Muslim Question; Georg Simmel, ‘The stranger’ [1908], trans. from the German by Ramona Mosse, The Baffler, no. 30, 2016, 176–9.

10 Werner Schiffauer, ‘Enemies within the gates: the debate about the citizenship of Muslims in Germany’, in Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou and Ricard Zapata-Barrero (eds), Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (New York and London: Routledge 2006), 94–116.

11 Rogers Brubaker, ‘Beyond ethnicity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 37, no. 5, 2014, 804–8; Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis.

12 ⁣⁣Salman Sayyid, ‘Introduction: BrAsians: postcolonial people, ironic citizens’, in Nasreen Ali, Salman Sayyid and Virinder Singh Kalra (eds), Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co. 2006), 1–10 (5).

13 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London and New York: Routledge 2004).

14 Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence: des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré (Paris: Seuil 1999); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, revd edn (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2009).

15 Norton, On the Muslim Question; Kimberly A. Arkin, ‘Historicity, peoplehood, and politics: Holocaust talk in twenty-first-century France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, 968–97; Anya Topolski, ‘The race-religion constellation: a European contribution to the critical philosophy of race’, Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 6, no. 1, 2018, 58–81.

16 Irit Dekel and Esra Öyzürek, ‘The logic of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in three cultural shifts’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 56, no. 2/3, 2023, 157–87; ⁣⁣Esra Özyürek ‘Export-import theory and the racialization of anti-semitism: Turkish-and Arab-only prevention programs in Germany’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, 40–65; James Renton and Ben Gidley (eds), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story? (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017); David Feldman, Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe Today: Is There a Connection? (Berlin: EVZ/ London: Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism 2018).

17 Karsten Grabow, ‘Pegida and the Alternative für Deutschland: two sides of the same coin?’, European View, vol. 15, no. 2, 2016, 173­–81; Gabriel Goodliffe, The Resurgence of the Radical Right in France: From Boulangisme to the Front National (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012); Richard Hayton, ‘The UK Independence Party and the politics of Englishness’, Political Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 3, 2016, 400–10.

18 Emmanuel Nathan and Anya Topolski (eds), Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter 2016).

19 Renton and Gidley (eds), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe.

20 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memory unbound: the Holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, 87–106 (103).

21 Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1994).

22 Steven Vertovec, ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2007, 1024–54 (1028); Nancy Foner, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Philip Kasinitz, ‘Introduction: super-diversity in everyday life’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2019, 1–16.

23 Vertovec, ‘Superdiversity and its implications’, 1025; Steven Vertovic, Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity (London and New York: Routledge 2023).

24 Paul Spoonley, ‘Superdiversity in settler societies: toward a decolonial superdiversity’, in Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona and Steven Vertovec (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023), 465–80 (477, citing Katie Higgins).

25 Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ and Chichester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press 1998).

26 Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace 1968).

27 Gilroy, After Empire.

28 Achille Mmebe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 2001); Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer (eds), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 1999); Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2011).

29 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso 1993); Nadine El-Enany, Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2020); Kojo Koram, Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (London: John Murray 2022).

30 For debates over the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, for example, see Jeremiah J. Garsha, ‘Expanding Vergangenheitsbewältigung? German repatriation of colonial artefacts and human remains’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 2020, 46–61; and the conference ‘International Symposium: Art and Decoloniality (Practice, Theory, Paradigm)’, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, 26–28 October 2022.

31 Anne Clerval, Paris sans le peuple: La gentrification de la capitale (Paris: Editions La Découverte 2013); Rowland Atkinson, ‘The hidden costs of gentrification: displacement in central London’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 15, no. 4, 2000, 307­–26; Defne Kadıoğlu Polat, ‘“Now the German comes”: the ethnic effect of gentrification in Berlin’, Ethnicities, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, 155–76.

32 Shana Cohen, ‘Assessing the impact of interfaith initiatives’, in Mohammed Abu-Nimer and Renáta Katalin Nelson, Evaluating Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue: Methods and Frameworks (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter 2021), 197–220; Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias (eds), Juifs et Musulmans: Retissons les liens (Paris: CNRS Editions 2015); Sultan Doughan, ‘Jews, Muslims, and the human of citizenship’, in Ben Gidley and Samuel Sami Everett (eds), Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 13: Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (Leiden: Brill 2022), 46–70; Samuel Sami Everett, ‘Interfaith dialogue and faith-based social activism in a state of emergency: laïcité and the crisis of religion in France’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 31, no. 4, 2018, 437–54; Armin Langer, ‘Die Salaam-Schalom-Initiative: Ein Bündnis von Juden und Muslimen’, PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien: Muslim-Jewish Dialogue, vol. 22, 2016, 195–8; Elisabeth Becker, ‘Commitment without borders: Jewish-Muslim relations and the making of a cosmopolitan habitus in Berlin’, in Giuseppe Giordan and Andrew P. Lynch (eds), Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 10: Interreligious Dialogue: From Religion to Geopolitics (Leiden: Brill 2019), 201–18; Abdullah Sahin, New Directions in Islamic Education: Pedagogy & Identity Formation (Markfield: Kube 2013).

33 Jean-François Bayart, Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization, trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 2007).

34 Sandra Huning and Nina Schuster, ‘Social mixing or “gentrification”? Contradictory perspectives on urban change in the Berlin district of Neukölln’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 4, 2015, 738–55.

35 Victor Collet, Nanterre, du bidonville à la cite (Marseilles: Agone 2019).

36 Benoît Bréville, ‘Why Parisians fear and loathe Saint-Denis’, trans. from the French by George Miller, Le Monde Diplomatique, 1 August 2022, available at https://mondediplo.com/2022/08/10stdenis (viewed 1 November 2023); Camille Canteux, ‘Sarcelles, ville rêvée, ville introuvable’, Sociétés & Représentations, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, 343–59.

37 ‘Mayor Sadiq Khan launches #LondonIsOpen campaign’, London government press release, 18 July 2016, available at www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayor-sends-welcome-message-to-the-world (viewed 2 November 2023).

38 Sadiq Khan, ‘An ode to London’, The Standard, 7 February, 2019, available at www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/an-ode-to-london-by-sadiq-khan-a4058951.html (viewed 2 November 2023); Kevin Dixon and Tom Gibbons (eds), The Impact of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games: Diminishing Contrasts, Increasing Varieties (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

39 Vassil Girginov, ‘Governance of the London 2012 Olympic Games legacy’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, vol. 47, no. 5, 2012, 543–58.

40 Toni Erskine, ‘“Citizen of nowhere” or “the point where circles intersect”? Impartialist and embedded cosmopolitanisms’, Review of International Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2002, 457–78; Rahul Rao, ‘Citizens of nowhere’ (blog), 28 November 2016, available on The Disorder of Things website at https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/11/28/citizens-of-nowhere (viewed 1 November 2023).

41 For notions of how cities are 'acted upon' among those charismatic personages of postcolonial urban space, see Thomas Blom Hansen and Oskar Verkaaik, ‘Introduction—urban charisma: on everyday mythologies in the city’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 1, 2009, 5–26.

42 On counter-knowledge, see the work of Jin Haritaworn, such as ‘Shifting positionalities: empirical reflections on a queer/trans of colour methodology’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 13, no. 1, 2008, 162–73.

43 Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018).

44 Katherine ⁣⁣Pratt Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2008); Mayanthi L. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2014); Sennett, Building and Dwelling; Mette Louise Berg, Ben Gidley and Anna Krausova, ‘Welfare micropublics and inequality: urban super-diversity in a time of austerity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 42, no. 15, 2019, 2723–42; Samuel Sami Everett, ‘Une ambiance diaspora: continuity and change in Parisian Maghrebi imaginaries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 62, no. 1, 2020, 135–55; Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis.

45 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. from the German by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999), 542 (R3, 1).

46 Jan Willem Duyvendak, Menno Hurenkamp and Evelien Tonkens, ‘Culturalization of citizenship in the Netherlands’, in Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia and Simon Reich (eds), Managing Ethnic Diversity after 9/11: Integration, Security, and Civil Liberties in Transatlantic Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2020), 233–52.

47 Foner, Duyvendak and Kasinitz, ‘Introduction: super-diversity in everyday life’.

48 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge 1992), 178.

49 Gilroy, After Empire; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press 2005).

50 Samuel Sami Everett, ‘From Les Petites Jérusalems to Jerusalem: North African postcolonial racialization and orthodoxy’, AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, 113–30; Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (Newbury Park, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage 1991); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil 1952), 239. On de- and re-racialization, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2008); Sarah Mazour, ‘A white race blindness? Abstract universalism and the unspeakable making of race’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 2, 2021, 116–35; Illana Weizman, Des Blancs comme les autres? Les Juifs, angle mort de l’antiracisme (Paris: Stock 2022).

51 Richard Sennett, ‘The open city’, in Tigran Haas and Hans Westlund (eds), In the Post-Urban World: Emergent Transformation of Cities and Regions in the Innovative Global Economy (New York and London: Routledge 2017), 97–106.

52 Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016), 283; Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2004); Ben Gidley, ‘Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life: researching everyday multiculture in an inner city estate’, Identities, vol. 20, no. 4, 2013, 361–76; Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar, Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2017).

53 Esra Özyürek, Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2015); Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘Refutations of racism in the “Muslim Question”’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 43, no. 3/4, 2009, 335–54; Abdelmalek Sayad, L'Immigration, ou, Les paradoxes de l'altérité: L’illusion du provisoire (Paris: Raisons d'agir 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Becker

Elisabeth Becker is a Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University. She is author of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe (University of Chicago Press 2021), and has published extensively on religion, race and ethnicity in, for example, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Cultural Sociology and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, specifically focusing on Jewish and Muslim experiences in the context of Europe. As a public scholar, she also runs Inscribing Plurality (supported by the Landecker Foundation) and writes for mainstream publications such as the Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Tablet Magazine. She is co-editor of Patterns of Prejudice. Email: Elisabeth.[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7010-5957

Samuel Sami Everett

Samuel Sami Everett is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University Southampton and the Iméra Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille University. He is an anthropologist and the co-editor of Jewish-Muslim Interaction: Performing Culture between North Africa and France (Liverpool University Press 2020) and the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 13: Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (Brill 2022). Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7268-2651