Racism and transnationality

“When you are in Europe, people say to us, you are not European, you are African.

And when we are in Africa, African people say to us, you are not African, you are European.”

The above quote is from an interview with a young woman who was born in the West African country Benin and moved to France with her family. She has been living in France since the mid-1980s and identifies herself as a Frenchwoman and a Beninese. On the European continent and in Africa, the young woman (as well as many others like her) experiences denial: her belonging to Benin and Africa as well as to France and Europe is denied her. She is not treated as an equal. In France, skin color is the marker of denigration: “people show you, you are not really French, you are African - I am black.” In Benin, it is her sporadic visits to her country of origin that lead to a denial of belonging. This case demonstrates the dominance of a kinship and decent principle (jus sanguinis) based on the idea of race: Being French is associated with fair skin color. In this context, dark-skinned people are considered non-French. The light skin color is a place of structural advantages and privileges (Pokos, 2009, p. 113) as well as a dominant culture which negotiates who supposedly belongs to a country and who does not. Globalization, with its attendant increase in movement, has simultaneously intensified and normalized strangeness, raising normative and subjective questions of belonging and exclusion (Anthias, 2008).

Racism and nationalism

We understand race as a “cultural category of difference that is contextually constructed as essential and natural” (Silverstein, 2005, p. 365). Racism is the practice of distinguishing between people and groups of human beings by ascribing actual or construed differences to an alleged diverse biological ancestry of humans and/or assumed cultural differences (Rommelspacher, 2009). The binary group construction results in a hierarchy that elevates one group and devalues the other as inferior. In the case example, the skin color of the young woman is highlighted while all other characteristics are faded out. The skin color is associated with the colonial notion of belonging to African countries and a non-belonging to France. Etienne Balibar (1992, p. 49) sees nationalism as a precondition for the emergence of racism. Nationalism assumes a quasi-natural and homogeneous national structure and exaggerates the assumed‚ own national belonging. Anchors of nationalism are the faith in a common lineage, culture and history as well as the attachment of this lineage to external and/or cultural features (Dikötter, 2008, p. 1479). The example of the young woman shows that nationalism is fluid. Characteristics (such as skin color) are used in one country to construct non-belonging while they have different or no connotations in other contexts: “Who counts as ‘black’ and who as ‘white’ differs from one place to another, as too do specific meanings attached to the designations and their placements” (Goldberg, 2009, p. 1275; see also Grosfoguel, Oso, & Christou, 2015, p. 636–637).

The “Black Atlantic” as transnational space of experiences

While nationalism sees homogeneous and static national cultures as a given, Sociologist and literary scholar Paul Gilroy (1993) emphasizes that cultures have never been self-contained units: “cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off heretically from each other” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 2). In contrast to a reified and essentialist understanding of culture, he develops an explicitly transnational perspective (Gilroy, 1993, p. 15). Within the framework of his concept of the “Black Atlantic,” he focuses on the biographies of Black Intellectuals whose fields of action and experience traverse Europe, Africa and America and lead to transnational exchanges and translation processes: “Notable black American travelers […] went to Europe and had their perceptions of America and racial domination shifted as a result of their experiences there. This had important consequences for their understanding of racial identities” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 17). Gilroy does not attribute resistance and political movements to a “common African origin” or external features but to shared experiences of discrimination and resistance among the “Black Atlantic” (Costa, 2012, p. 153). The significance and strength of Gilroy’s work lies in the theoretical as well as empirical revelation of homogenous national cultures as a construct and an ideology. As early as the 1990s, Gilroy spoke out in favor of a “transnational reading” of racism and resistance with the aim to decipher the construction of nationalist as well as resistant cultures across nation-state borders.

Reading history of racism and resistance transnationally

In the 1990s, there were but a few publications establishing a connection between racism and transnationality in perspective. Not until the beginning of the twenty-first century do we see a slow increase in transnational approaches. Goldberg (2009) notes a dominance of international comparative studies on racism, but criticizes that racism is not an exclusive “state experience” (p. 1272), but is fed by transterritorial concepts and ideas (p. 1279). In his relational approach, he pleads for making translocal entanglements transparent and to analyze them. In the meantime, especially Historians re-evaluate historical events by means of a “transnational perspective” (see Wendt, 2009). Sandra Holtin (2001), for example, studies an anti-racist network of abolitionists which consisted of Black activists and White sympathizers. Applying a transnational perspective enables her to grasp the network’s relationships between North America, African countries and Great Britain in a differentiated way. Another example is the work of Claudia Bruns: Bruns (2011) pleads for a transnational view of racism, putting anti-Semitism and colonial racism in a context. Using the example of the German anti-semite Wilhelm Marr, she points out how he transferred categorizations of colonial racism into a derogatory construction of Jewish people: “Marr was influenced by his travels in North and South America, which contributed to the fusion of religious anti-Semitism and colonial racism in his modern anti-Semitic ideology” (Bruns, 2011, p. 126). Also, Black Studies analyze historical (and contemporary) events transnationally: The path-breaking anthology “Transnational Blackness,” edited by Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (2008), reveals the consequences of colonialization and Apartheid as a transnational problem.

Extreme right-wing parties and racist violence worldwide

Racist interpretive patterns and slogans can be found by looking at current events covering right-wing extremist parties in many countries around the world (e.g. Front National in France, Alternative for Germany in Germany, Freedom Party in Austria, Party for Freedom in the Netherlands). The rejection of refugees and attacks on refugee accommodations in Europe has generated political discussions and received lots of media attention. In the US, ongoing discussions about racism and the discrimination of African-Americans have been recently fueled by fatal shootings of African-Americans by policemen. In order to understand these processes, a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to racism is needed. Relevant studies are far and few between. For example, Taş (2017) examines the activities of the right-wing extremist Party of the Nationalist Movement (MHP), also known as “Gray Wolves,” in the transnational space between Turkey and Turkish migrants and their descendants in Germany. With the help of highly developed communication technologies, MHP succeeds in transporting its nationalist and racist patterns of interpretation to Germany thus exerting influence in Germany (Taş, 2017, p.735). Also, the anthology “The Globalization of Racism” by Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari (2005) aims to capture contemporary forms of racism which manifest themselves across borders and range from the rise of right-wing parties to the global phenomenon of a homogenous construction of Muslims as terrorists. Clearly there is a need for more research and this focus topic intends to fill in the gap.

Researching racism transnationally

We plead for an analysis of racism which captures spatial effects and movements beyond nation-state boundaries in addition to showing path dependencies and transformation processes. Racism is a worldwide problem even though it may manifest itself in different ways in different localities and nation-states (Dikötter, 2008, p. 1478). The authors of this focus topic shed light onto entanglements from different perspectives. By using ethnographic methods, qualitative interviews and afropolitan novels, they investigate how racisms move, interact with different categorizations of difference such as gender and religion, transform themselves, conceal themselves – but also how they meet with resistance.

In her contribution “Between ‘Western’ Racism and (Soviet) National Binarism: Migrants’ and non-Migrants’ Ways of Ordering Russia’s Exclave of Kaliningrad,” Rita Sanders exposes a research field which has met with little interest thus far – the research about racism in Russia and the former states of the Soviet Union. By example of the Russian enclave Kaliningrad in Europe she exposes “where Soviet national binarism meets ‘Western’ racial discourses and where Russians are at once previous colonizers and stigmatized ‘others’ by the rest of the previous colonizers.” Sanders works ethnographically. She lets people in Kaliningrad speak with their own voices. In her analysis, she goes beyond the dichotomization of “Black” and “White” disclosing the (re)production, movement, and power of islamophobic discourse.

Sara Bonfanti, like Rita Sanders, chooses an ethnographic approach. She documents racist discourses in Italy and India exposing how Italian Punjabis in Italy become victims of racism while they simultaneously racify others and devalue people who’ve been marked as being Black. Bonfanti understands race as “a possibly transnational cultural discourse, interdicted yet resumed, and racism as a multiscale, resilient practice of social discrimination in a world going plural but nonetheless [remaining] unequal.”

The interdependence of cross-border lifeworlds with their existing inequalities is also topic of the paper “The Post-Migrant Generation Between Discrimination and Transnationalization” by Erol Yildiz und Marc Hill. On the basis of qualitative interviews with descendants of the so-called guest workers in Germany, the authors reconstruct the problem of racist ascriptions. Respondents were born in Germany and Austria and migrated to their parentsʼ country of birth. This “post-migrant generation” is perceived as foreign in Germany. As a strategy of resistance, they search for belonging in their parentsʼ country of birth: For this generation, a certain “double distance” to the unchallenged normalities here and there is part of their everyday lives and at the same time should be seen as a form of resistance. This enables them to position themselves as members of a majority group in their parents’ home of origin. The cases are illustrative of the tendency by those with access to transnational social spaces to balance their lack of privilege in one country by actively seeking it out in another place (Purkayastha, 2012).

Hicham Gourgem introduces a critically discussed literary-scientific topic with his contribution “Afropolitanism: The Other Side of the Coin.” He understands “Afropolitanism” as a specific form of construction and articulation of “African identities” in novels of the twenty-first century. Gourgemʼs thesis is that the novels he researched reveal Africaʼs interconnectedness with the world, but (re)produce imperialist discourse and consolidate Western cultural hegemony at the same time. The novels would prefer “narratives about the experience of Africans with/in the West over the experience with other African or non-Western cultures.”

All contributions illustrate racism as a world-wide and effective discourse which must be viewed both in a historic and spatial context. Racism creates ambivalent spaces of discrimination and simultaneous racialization (racializing as well as being racialized) and resistance. It is a central interdisciplinary task of scientific discourse against racism, to grasp and reflect upon these ambivalent processes with the ultimate goal to deconstruct essentialist and naturalizing positions thereby facilitating belonging and participation on a transnational level. This includes bringing together a wide range of perspectives continually and to enter into a transnational inclusive dialog. We would like to point out that we – through the selection of authors, our own professional and personal backgrounds, the language of this focus topic (English) and the habitual codes of science – have created our own view on the subject (and possibly excluded others). Ultimately, we need to reflect upon this viewpoint as well and have to constantly expand our point of view.

We wish you inspired reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.