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

Colonial bordering

Twenty-first-century Europe sits at an uncertain crossroads, one characterized by deepening sociopolitical cleavages and plural populations facing the delimitations of supposedly ‘failed’ multicultural projects.¹ These fraught realities have long been framed in terms of the nation-state and its borders­—in both material and cultural terms—including certain groups and communities while excluding others, fostering a sense of ‘we-ness’ that not only coheres but also divides.²

Nation-states lie at the centre of the colonial and imperial projects that sought to extract for and expand European societies, while violently disrupting the sociocultural orders of innumerable societies across the globe, bolstering longstanding structural inequalities while creating others. East and West, North and South, imperial claims reshaped not only geographies, but also imaginaries of belonging, erecting and maintaining inequalities over the last 200 years.³ Whereas imperialism entailed a politics of expansion, colonialism extended this vision to include direct rule and settlement. In both types of state projects, however, hierarchies were established across intersecting, ‘knotted’ categories of religion, ethnicity and race that divided the civil (European) from the uncivil (‘natives’, indigenous, non-Whites and ethnoreligious Others in imperial contexts and colonies).⁴ Yet, as Albert Memmi’s portraits taught us on the eve of decolonization, in erecting such boundaries around notions of civility, the ‘non-European’ was in fact integrated into both imaginaries and material instantiations of what constitutes modern Europe; that is, Europe came to define itself largely against the colonial and imperial populations in its geographical peripheries, while it was also very much constructed through them.⁵

Many of those who migrated to Germany, France and the United Kingdom after the Second World War were Muslims, but not initially labelled as such. Instead, they were collectively framed first in terms of enduring foreignness, such as Gastarbeiter or indigène, and then, a generation on, once they settled in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, in ethnicized terms, such as Turken or maghrébin.⁶ The labelling of these populations as Muslim largely occurred at the end of the twentieth century, a framing extended with the increased securitization of Muslims.⁷ Fatima El-Tayed argues that the silence around German colonialism has furthered Muslim Othering through a de-historicization of Germany’s politics of global expansion, whereas in other contexts (such as France and the UK), Muslim Othering is explicitly linked to national colonial projects. In all three country cases that this special issue covers, however, ambivalent relationships with the colonial and imperial past translate into the unsettled positionalities of Muslims (and also other minoritized groups, including Jews) in the contemporary context.⁸

Until the Holocaust, the ‘Jewish question’ was the dominant inflection point for the cultural borders of European identities, with Jews seen as insider–outsiders, ‘strangers’ in the Simmelian sense of partial belonging.⁹ Following the Nazi project of Jewish annihilation, Jews have come to occupy an uncertain position in European societies, whereas Muslims have risen as the new internal Other (‘enemies within the gates’) in the postcolonial period.¹⁰ The labelling and categorizations of these plural populations are, however, also lasting legacies of the colonial/imperial orders that instated racial, ethnic and religious distinctions as a means to maintain power and control over both peoples and geographies.¹¹ That is, twenty-first-century Europe remains shaped by the myriad forces—cultural, political, social and economic—of imperialism and colonialism that gave way to hierarchical categories of belonging and citizenship, albeit in shifting terms. In Salman Sayyid’s words, ‘the “post” in post-colonial remind[s] us that we have not arrived at something that can have its own name’.¹² That is, the past has not really passed, its afterlives visible in the European metropolis.

Turning towards the city

This namelessness, which is itself symptomatic of a broad social unsettledness that moves beyond the borders of any single nation-state, has resulted in a dual sense of urgency and uncertainty. At the same time, numerous questions can be raised about a postcolonialism/postimperialism order: its shifting contours and its plural possibilities. What and who constitutes a (hyphenated) post-colonial temporality in Europe? How is (unhyphenated) postcolonialism/ postimperialism part of societal projects and subjective projections? And where can the enlivenment of new societal configurations, renewal amidst the crises of empire, be experienced and seen?

Intersecting experiences of religious, ethnic and racial differentiation have characterized the period ‘after empire’ in Europe, where, as Paul Gilroy argues, conviviality contrasts with enduring melancholia, a yearning for the (imagined) past. These experiences have themselves migrated from—and transformed within—the European core.¹³ At first glance, this appears related to the trajectory and settlement of migrant populations, largely seen as temporary denizens when they relocated in the mid-twentieth century from the supposed colonial/imperial margins to the so-called European core.¹⁴ Today, it instead relates to the representation and incomplete inclusion of plural post-migrant populations, who have permanently settled in Europe, accessed legal citizenship and yet are still Othered on account of their religious, ethnic and/or racial labelling: forms of cultural exclusion that endure in spite of legal inclusion.¹⁵ At the core of this urgent uncertainty, the incomplete belonging of certain groups—Muslims, Jews, migrants and refugees, in particular—cuts across national borders and speaks to the continued unsettledness of European societies in this postcolonial age that has no name.

Numerous instantiations of this uncertainty have emerged in mainstream culture and politics. These include the nominalization and problematization of a ‘new’ antisemitism that has taken hold. This is the idea that there exists an antisemitism ‘imported’ by Muslim migrants and refugees, falsely externalizing such racism from Europe.¹⁶ At the same time, across European societies, it remains a question as to whether Muslims and/or Islam can really, fully belong, as evidenced by the regulation of symbols such as the headscarf, institutions such as mosques and political movements (such as Pegida, Alternative für Deutschland, the UK Independence Party, and the French Renconquête! party) that contrast European societies with Islamic/Muslim societies.¹⁷ In fact, as Anya Topolski and Emmanuel Nathan argue, the idea of a Judeo-Christian Europe has been used to position Europe against Muslims, an ostensible Jewish inclusion that entails new social and cultural divisions.¹⁸

This politicization of Muslim and Jewish belonging, at times together and at others apart, does not resolve societal tensions, but rather exposes their continued saliency across numerous European societies, functioning beyond the borders of any single nation-state.¹⁹ In response, some scholars have come to critique the monopolized social, cultural and political authority of European nation-states. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, for instance, challenge ‘methodological nationalism’ in their work on collective memory, shifting from nation-state-bound to cosmopolitan memory that transcends national borders.²⁰ And Yasemin Soysal theorizes a postnational order of citizenship that displaces the primacy of nation-states in fostering both institutional and imagined communities of belonging.²¹ Levy, Sznaider and Soysal all cast their gazes outwards towards a global order that dissolves national sovereignties. In this special issue, we instead cast our gazes inwards, to the grounded level of the metropolis, nested within—while still distinct from—both nation-states and the broader European imaginary. In so doing, we seek to address the enduring unsettledness, uncertainty, namelessness of today’s Europe by tracing decolonizing processes in the metropolis as a condensed site of experience: a site of crisis but also renewal shaped by the very groups accused of unsettling Europe’s borders and order. These processes include reaching into the past to better grapple with the present, rethinking heritage in light of imperial shaping of the urban landscape, and adopting ancestral practices.

We are not alone in turning towards the city as a site of/for interrogating the emergence of new subjectivities in the aftermath of empire. Scholars across the social sciences have theorized the city as a site of multiculture and ‘superdiversity’, one in which various ‘dimensions of differentiation’—including but not exclusively those that are ethnic and racial but also religious, gendered and spatial—characterize postcolonial/post-imperial European societies, and urban metropoles in particular.²² Superdiversity has increasingly been employed as a means to make sense of, that is, to name this era in which ‘the diversification of diversity’ leads to new subjectivities in the European metropolis, as well as new dialectical lenses for interrogating these subjectivities.²³ It has, however, been critiqued by scholars of decoloniality, who argue that the notion of superdiversity is deeply embedded in, and imbued with, Eurocentric assumptions about modernity and progress. Paul Spoonley confronts this critique by articulating a ‘decolonial superdiversity’ through his study of settler societies, calling on scholars of decoloniality to develop reflexive accounts of superdiversity. These, he argues, can speak to deep and enduring structural inequalities, the role of diversity management strategies in framing difference across urban spaces, and various forms of Othering that persist across time.²⁴

Our intervention: decolonizing the metropolis

The modern metropolis emerged at the nexus between early and late modernity, at various points in time across Europe. Carl Schorske explores the city as an idea that arose before its materialization in European thought. Idealistic visions of the metropolis included those of Voltaire, who described nineteenth-century London as a place to transcend social hierarchies and embody enlightened values, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who explicitly described the German city as a civilizing force for/in the nation.²⁵ Yet, as Hannah Arendt exposes in her writings linking industrialization and imperialism, the dark side of the modern metropolis has also always been present: expressed locally in the exploitation of lower classes and globally in the exploitation of colonized societies.²⁶

We understand decolonizing the metropolis as an at-once theoretical and empirical process of deconstructing imperial/colonial metropoles that seeks to constructively make sense of urban centres as fostering social vitality while confronting sociocultural and economic crises in the aftermath of empire. This conceptualization moves beyond the colonial/postcolonial temporal dichotomy to a sphere of action and agency vis-à-vis a critical rethinking of the contemporary metropolis as a simultaneously lived and imagined place shaped from below. It thus gives voice to the plural stories that have contributed to the making of urban Europe, incorporating economic understandings into a more holistic understanding of the metropolis as a hub of sociocultural power, potentiality and transformation.²⁷ Attuned to the lasting constraints of structural hierarchies on migration to urban European centres, we draw from Achille Mbmebe’s theorizations of postcoloniality as a time–space of dialectic tension between agency and power, and (as per the work of Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer) to the parallel dialectic tension between globalization—entailing ongoing and shifting configurations of the socioeconomic and sociocultural—and relational and dynamic ways of identifying. In so doing, we highlight the activation of autonomy in spite of continued regimes of subjectification.²⁸

In this special issue, we showcase the metropolis as a place of renewal, where crisis meets possibility and diversity in the postcolonial age. Today, empire, a supposedly once noble ideal that kept colonial violence at arms’ length from the economic centre of the metropolis, is divided as much by dominant cultural memories as by borders and seas.²⁹ Its material remnants are being debated in contestations over the space/place for colonial objects and art, and its human afterlives in contestations over the space/place for truly multicultural belonging.³⁰ Its material consequences, on the other hand, can be seen in processes of economic exclusion, with gentrification that has pushed minoritized groups to the physical margins of the city. The modern metropolis is a place of connectivity to and across cultures, where ethnic enclaves have faced economic struggle, in emblematic sites of European gentrification such as the intensive redevelopment projects of Paris and London. Since the 1980s, these emerged first north of central Paris (from Barbès to Porte de la Chapelle) and now exist on the periphery-focused Grand Paris project (to extend beyond and break down the Haussmanian boundaries of Paris intra muros). In London, Canary Wharf and the East London docks are highly concentrated and visible sites of gentrification. And, in Berlin, gentrification is diffused but no less potent, restructuring neighbourhoods and arguably the city as a whole, a city once seen as an affordable exception among Europe’s capitals, but now facing rising rents that push those of lower and middle incomes out of the city centre.³¹ Yet while structural processes of redevelopment threaten to steamroll subaltern urban histories, new life—specifically the children and grandchildren of migrants—reshapes taken-for-granted boundaries on cities’ material and imagined grounds. From the Brandenburg Gate to Place de la République and Trafalgar Square, we have witnessed activism that demands religious freedom and equality for minoritized communities, many of whom self-identify as Muslim; activist and political movements that expose, making legible, cities’ Jewish pasts, for example in Paris’s Belleville, London’s Brick Lane and Berlin’s Kollwitzkiez; and new social projects rooted in education and civic solidarity that build bridges across religious, ethnic and racial lines.³²

The cases in this special issue—Berlin, Paris and London—together illuminate these challenges, while reorienting to the unexpected reshaping of subjectivity and space instigated by global projects of domination.³³ At the same time that European imperialism and colonialism shattered social orders, they fostered solidarities. Thus, in all three cases, solidarity, cohesion and creation (renewal) has come to coexist with fracturing, fragmentation and destruction (crisis).

Berlin—the first metropolitan site to which our authors move—rises as a city at the crossroads of eastern and western Europe. Revitalized by guestworkers after the Second World War, it is a place where the vestiges of empire collide with highly localized notions of belonging. In Berlin, the Kiez (neighbourhood) is seen to give shape to highly decentralized social experiences, and areas of Turkish settlement (Neukölln and Kreuzberg) thus sit at the centre of debates over multicultural promise and disappointment.³⁴ The very liveliness of the German capital reborn juxtaposes, however, with a cityscape marked by collective memory and trauma: where east–west division and the devastation of the Holocaust loom large in memorials and still-standing, commodified fragments of the Berlin Wall. The remnants of the Soviet imperial project, including economic struggle, are further visible in the east of the city, not least its striking, grand avenues the likes of Karl-Marx-Allee, facades behind which dilapidated apartment blocks proliferate. At the same time, the western side of the city struggles as a site made plural by migrant settlement from Turkey, once imperial-partner and foe.

Our second and third cases, Paris and London, are both synecdoches for the imperial creation of the nation-state through the erection of monuments, and entire neighbourhoods constructed with colonial capital. Le métropole or the ‘mother city’, in the imperial vernacular, once referred to France as the progenitor of all its colonies. Paris, where we next turn, epitomizes these spatial, racial and imperial connections across time. On the metropolitan periphery, les banlieues are urban high-rise social housing estates either purposely built for predominantly postcolonial North African migrant labour and repatriated populations, or to which they were pushed from contingent shantytown (bidonvilles) areas such as Nanterre.³⁵ Such banlieues are exemplified by specific neighbourhoods in Seine St Denis or Sarcelles in the Val-d’Oise.³⁶ These urban regions are signifiers of postcolonial (re)connections.

Finally, we turn to riverine London, which continues to project its past as a global maritime power, supposedly impervious to the ideological dynamics of ‘the continent’ and concerned only with trade. The paradox of post-Brexit Britain is that London—which is ‘open for business’, to cite the motto of twice-elected city mayor Sadiq Khan—continues to be at once Britain’s most powerful centre and most viscerally attached to a European political and cultural project.³⁷ Four in ten Londoners were born outside of the UK, and it has long been part of the city’s ‘brand’ that it is ‘the world in one city’, as in the slogan used by Khan’s predecessor Ken Livingstone in his winning bid to host the 2012 Olympics in a post-industrial zone of East London.³⁸ The cosmopolitan narrative about the Olympics—and the massive construction projects and property boom that followed in its wake—speaks to London’s vitality.³⁹ This cosmopolitanism, however, has also figured in English nationalist populist discourses about London (a bastion of the anti-Brexit vote) as home to a rootless ‘metropolitan elite’, ‘citizens of nowhere’, alien to the country at large.⁴⁰ But this anti-metropolitan populism also hides London’s vulnerability to the post-Brexit economic crisis, especially for its migrant and minoritized populations, who often work in precarious roles servicing the financial elite and struggle to find shelter in a prohibitively expensive housing market. It further overlooks the melancholic anti-cosmopolitan resentment of many settled Londoners in the city’s post-industrial margins.

In fact, all of these metropoles have been shaped by, while simultaneously shaping, colonial and postcolonial Europe, as sites of labour-intensive infrastructure, order-making, migration and settlement. Moreover, the movement of bodies that made flesh the enduring reverberations of colonial divisions and hierarchies have instigated and contributed to the processes of decolonization within them.

This special issue thus homes in on the metropolis as a key and often-overlooked locus for research that aims to better understand today’s Europe as material and imagined form. It therefore connects to, while also moving beyond, colonial understandings of the metropole. As an essential part of the unfinished and dynamic project of the postcolonial, we contribute to the taking back of the metropolis, by charting and narrating the stories of urban denizens who make sense of their own positionality in relation to the urban form. By ‘working the city’ into their own subjectivities, as well as the enduring social and economic hierarchies that constrain their lives within and beyond it, they expose its dynamic and innovative faces as not only built, but also lived form.⁴¹ This is articulated in their discourses, actions and also counter-regimes of knowledge that rethink exclusionary histories in relation to exclusionary presents.⁴²

Bringing attention to their social and cultural components, in the papers that follow, our three authors trace interlinked processes of crisis and renewal. These entail loss and revitalization, continuity and change, narratives of longing and hope focused on both future and past. Together, we emphasize the metropolis—and its material and imagined peripheries—as a sociocultural hub in the postcolonial age, a vital space in processes of decolonization, entailing the questioning and enlivenment of identities, communities and understandings of who ‘we’ are. If we are to think about the city in the French intellectual tradition, as Richard Sennett does,⁴³ this issue speaks less to the ville (the built environment of the city) than to the cité (the ways in which we inhabit cities), and yet also always the nexus between them: the building/living in relation to the river that runs through London, the real and imagined wall(s) of Berlin and the peripheral socio-material experience in the outskirts of Paris. It is through action, making, not the urban but urbanism, that we bring to life the metropolis through a decolonized lens, making possible a constructive deconstruction of racialization, space and minoritized histories, attuned to echoes while turned towards new beginnings, and to crisis as the very grounds for renewal.

Scholarship

The European metropolis is both the one-time-nucleus of empire, the representations of which are now in deep crisis, and at the same time a key locus for resistance against it, an active participant in telling alternative histories. The city as grounds for sociocultural analysis has of course long existed in the terrain of urban studies. But it has also come to take its rightful place in anthropology and sociology, the main disciplines that inform this special issue.⁴⁴ It is in fact the decolonial potentiality of the metropolis—as both an empirical and analytical site—suggestive of dynamism and incompleteness, to which the papers in this special issue speak. The decolonial project constitutes a focal point for scrutinizing key colonial constructs of social hierarchy, including their legacies in racialized labels, spatial patterns of class and colour in civic life.

While rooted in sociology and anthropology, by mobilizing a decolonial lens, the three contributions all cut across disciplines, drawing inspiration via numerous intellectual milieus from urban studies to critical race theory and from cultural studies to intellectual history. Our authors turn to the metropolis as what essayist and urban flâneur Walter Benjamin once termed ‘window-mirror’: the spaces and places that both reflect and allow sight into its spatial and cultural form.⁴⁵ In the dual reflections and inflections that follow, we focus on both the processual and analytical lenses of decolonizing the metropolis. On the one hand, we show that decolonization processes are not simply confrontational but dynamic, exposing the reality that European metropoles remain in cultural flux. At the same time, decolonizing the metropolis is an intervention in the social sciences and humanities that aims to rethink structures of power. Together, these two invocations of decolonization allow us to explore Paris, Berlin and London as spaces-places through which we can see into, and reflect upon, processes of metropolitan transformation from the margins or ‘from below’.

These processes are of course embedded in broader social shifts over the past few decades, including the ‘culturalization of citizenship’, in which cultural norms, values and emotions (including their symbolic representations) are used to determine the belonging of individuals and groups, as citizenship has become more than a sociolegal category, and the attendant concept of belonging increasingly conditioned by consequential cultural inclusions/exclusions.⁴⁶ At the same time, notions of belonging are complicated by a ‘superdiverse’ sociocultural reality, suggesting not only the power of cultural cohesion and disruption, but also dynamism rather than fixity, and relationality rather than simply hierarchy.⁴⁷

Intellectual traditions that critique concepts of modernity, progress and order tie these three papers together. They include Zygmunt Bauman’s theory on the dangerous ordering tendencies of modern nation-states, where he draws out the paradoxes of the modern ‘gardening’ state as seeking order at the highest human cost.⁴⁸ Bauman’s perspectives are at once built upon and complemented by an engagement with Paul Gilroy’s theory of social pathology in the postcolonial/post-imperial order where a melancholia for lost empire at once dominates and divides: a theory that, like the culturalization literature, highlights the potent role of emotions in the shaping of social positionalties and experiences.⁴⁹ The macro-theoretical lenses of Bauman and Gilroy are complemented by theories of everyday racialization and racisms, including their intersections with religious and ethnic labelling/identifications, as in the work of Franz Fanon and Philomena Essed, as well as an emergent literature on Jewish and Muslim de- and re-racialization.⁵⁰ And they are further complemented by theories on the city, in particular Richard Sennett’s idea of the ‘open city’ that is continuously (re)made through those engagements between people and place.⁵¹

While more implicit than explicit, the papers are set against the backdrop of decolonization processes: the exact processes that brought not only change to imperial configurations, but also brought migration, pluralism new and old—although now arguably more tangibly present—to the metropolitan European core. Elizabeth Buettner relates these migrants to ‘empires lost’, exposing the multiple moments of fracturing—of colonial/imperial projects and their aftermath—and the colonial/imperial legacies that accompanied these many bodies on their movement across space, as well as their resettlement on often hostile ground. The decolonization process entails a reconfiguration of societal relations both in space and vis-à-vis taken-for-granted hierarchies of citizenship/inclusion: this is the backdrop against which metropolitan reconfigurations, a reckoning with the layers of loss embedded in individuals, collectives and the very ground of the decolonizing city itself take shape.⁵²

Across these cases, racial, ethnic and religious identifications are understood as an integral part of the city. Scholars such as Abdelmalek Sayad, Tariq Modood and Esra Özyürek have traced the conceptualization of difference with regard to racialized understandings of postcolonial and guestworker migrants and their kin.⁵³ Whether non-white bodies that moved from the imperial fringes to its core, or white city-dwellers who struggle with the loss of an imperial imaginary, the papers in this special issue emplace lived struggles over identification in relation to continued processes of ordering and labelling reconfigured in the contemporary urban centres of Europe. In two of the articles, the authors specifically focus on Muslim and Jewish experiences, in which the intersection of religion, ethnicity, race and cultural distinction can be seen: groups that are juxtaposed with the ideas and ideals of a (post)Christian Europe, while also—always—an integral part of its core. In the third, the author turns to the flip side of this complex intersection to re-interrogate notions of whiteness, in confronting new configurations of the metropolis after empire.

What’s in the issue

This special issue consists of three papers centred on metropoles in Germany (Berlin), France (Paris) and the United Kingdom (London). Our aim is not to compare, but rather to draw out the tensions and intentions of these metropoles in conversation, as well as to draw into conversation scholars who root their work in these cities, in order to explore the intermingling of crisis and renewal that characterize the postcolonial/post-imperial age.

 We begin in Berlin, move to Paris and end in London. Across these three cases, the geopolitical configurations of Europe’s past loom at the grounded level of the metropolis. In Berlin, our author Elisabeth Becker focuses on vital opportunities for self-realization in spite of the constraints that Muslims, Jews and migrants face in being seen as not entirely part of Europe. Becker introduces the concept of ‘cityzenship’ to grapple with how those who feel excluded from national societies—in this case, Turkish German Muslims in Berlin—foster belonging in and through the city. She explores how her interlocutors come to identify as Muslim Berliners, not only in but ‘of’ the city they call home. Becker draws on sociologist Richard Sennett’s utopian conceptualization of the ‘open city’ to expose the Berlin metropolis as both physically and culturally open to encounters between strangers, and thereby a place where deep solidarities may be fostered in spite of, and yet always cast under the long shadow of, the ambiguities and unsettledness of the German capital.

In Paris, our author Sami Everett hones in on the configurations and reverberations of race for North African Parisians in everyday life. Employing critical race lenses foreign to French state categories in order to interrogate notions of belonging and periphery, Everett moves outside of the city’s centre to the town of Sarcelles, a predominantly migrant area. There intersections of Jewish and Muslim Maghrebi identification produce common and differentiated racialized experiences that inform patterns of settlement, perspectives and behaviours towards the Other. The monikers given to the town of Sarcelles demonstrate how Everett’s interlocutors are haunted by the echoes of empire, exposing the fraught positionality of the Arab and the Jew in the postcolonial urban periphery, which is shot through with intergenerational concerns for social justice and repair.

And finally, in London, our author Ben Gidley illuminates the divide between official and felt categories of belonging. Gidley leads us through the cultural-geographical terrain of London shaped by imperial hauntings in the city’s east: sentiments of loss among white Londoners, who long for the lost empire, that coexist with a fragile pluralism. Gidley captures the nostalgia for Neverland in riverine London (that is, the land beyond visible boundaries), and also for the pastoral past from the vantage point of the postcolonial metropolis. He gives both voice and texture to the entwining of loss and hope among white Londoners in encountering the new, plural faces of the postcolonial order. Melancholia emerges as a shared framework for this collective longing in a distinct quest for belonging in and through the metropolis.

Whether ‘open’, that is, able to accommodate critical encounters challenging superimposed categories and hierarchies, or turned towards an unsettling nostalgia for the imperial past, the physical and emotional manifestations of belonging in this postcolonial age emerge in the written and urban terrains of these papers. Across the three European capital cities, our authors map collective experiences and affinities on to the geography of the city and show neither the division nor the collapsing, but rather the overlaps between present and past, in moving beyond a colonial/postcolonial binary. What results is, ultimately, a collection of articles that speak to the unfinished project of the metropolis as a vital site of and for European societies: pulled between the local and the global, the present and the past, in difficult and still-partial processes of decolonization, as well as where the agency of long disenfranchised groups is not only witnessed, but deemed vital to any future at all.

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

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).