Abstract
Just prior to the start of our research programme on ‘The Culturalization of Citizenship’, one of us published a book on issues of autochthony, citizenship and exclusion in Africa and Europe which touched on many of the themes addressed in this volume (Geschiere 2009). The title of that book, Perils of Belonging, expressed considerable distrust towards what the author called ‘a global conjuncture of belonging’—the convergence, roughly since the end of the Cold War, of various global trends combining to fuel a preoccupation with local belonging, and this in a world that was supposedly ‘globalizing’. Looking back at the findings of our programme, some of which are presented in this volume, an obvious question is what has changed in the meantime. To what extent is it still possible to speak of a ‘global conjuncture of belonging’? Have we witnessed the emergence of new issues and preoccupations?
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Notes
- 1.
For the organization of the Rabat conference we were lucky to work with the Netherlands Institute in Morocco in the same city.
- 2.
After the conference Geschiere and Guadeloupe wrote a letter to the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad (8 October 2012) protesting against the intention to tie development cooperation to a country’s collaboration in the extradition of undocumented migrants—to doubtful effect. Nevertheless, the event—especially the unexpected content of the ambassador’s speech—revealed how difficult it is for researchers on these topics to remain aloof of binary oppositions in power and geopolitics.
- 3.
The Dutch words are blunt: poot is a rude term for gay and rammen a crude term for beating someone up. Buijs et al. (2009) conclude that Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch youths are over-represented in their sample of gay bashers (relative to their proportion of the Dutch population) but that other groups are also well represented, notably young autochtonen.
- 4.
The Netherlands is not exceptional in this respect. In 2005 Baden-Württemberg, a semi-autonomous Land in Germany, introduced homosexuality into its new citizenship exam: ‘How would you react if your son told you he was a homosexual?’ A negative reaction would tend to disqualify an immigrant for citizenship. A common reaction in the German press was that many Germans would also risk failing such exams (Geschiere 2009: 164).
- 5.
Compare Judith Butler on the new acceptance of homosexuality in North Atlantic countries: ‘One might say that the advances that are sought by mainstream liberal activists (inclusion in the military and in marriage) are an extension of democracy and a hegemonic advance to the extent that lesbian and gay people are making the claim to be treated as equal to other citizens with respect to these obligations and entitlements, and that the prospect of their inclusion in these institutions is a sign that they are at present carrying the universalizing promise of hegemony itself. But this would not be a salutary conclusion, for the instatement of these questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose possibilities for sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement. The naturalization of the military-marriage goal for gay politics also marginalizes those for whom one or the other of these institutions is anathema, if not inimical’ (Judith Butler quoted in Penney 2002: 10). For these other styles of doing sex that are repressed, see Strongman (2008).
- 6.
- 7.
See Awondo (2010) on the many ways in which homosexuality is politicized in Africa.
- 8.
See also his After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (2004) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010).
- 9.
Luckily, our colleague Amade M’Charek—head of a research project on ‘Dutchness’ (see M’Charek 2013)—was willing to step in as discussion leader.
- 10.
But compare also the music of Moroccan-Dutch rappers like Appa (alias MalcolmX, or ‘Je suis liever Bob Marley’ (www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u1W0Iiphpvc) or Ali B. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5l0rVsY52A) who explicitly appeal to marginalized youths beyond race distinctions. Ali B.’s clip—based on his cooperation with the Senegalese-American rapper Akon—connects discrimination in the Netherlands to the ghetto in New Jersey, the Navaho reservation in Arizona, and Paris.
- 11.
Chajua highlights C.L.R. James’ early elaboration of this basic idea. Recall that James had written as early as 1938: ‘The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [is] an error only less grave than to make it fundamental’ (quoted in Chajua 1998: 57). Race and class are decentred concepts that contextually shade into each other without losing their specificity.
- 12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa2VTsm0dg4. The early essays of the Jamaican born theorist Stuart Hall foreshadowed the Dream, positing the black identity marker as one around which oppressed migrant groups in Britain could base their struggle: ‘Politically this is the moment when “black” was coined as a way of referencing a common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance among, groups and communities, with, in fact, very different histories, traditions, and ethnic identities…. “the black experience” as a unifying and singular framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities, became “hegemonic” over other ethnic/racial identities—though the latter of course did not disappear’ (Hall 1996: 442).
- 13.
- 14.
NRC Handelsblad, 27 Sept 2003: 7. Philipse is often mentioned by Hirsi Ali, the prominent politician and opponent of Islam, as her ‘mentor’ who taught her ‘how to think’. The implication of culturalist oppositions as the one Philipse makes—other authors refer to an opposition between ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ cultures (two other notions from the toolkit of classical anthropology)—is that there is a radical contradiction that is almost impossible to surmount.
- 15.
Cf. Benedict (1934) and her famous quote from an elderly Native American chief in California: ‘In the beginning God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life…. They all dipped it in the water… but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away.’ Such a concept of culture (every group having its own cup) had progressive implications in the 1930s to protest against cultural evolutionism and Western ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism was clarifying in those days and still is. But the image of culture as a cup with a specific form (essence) that risks being broken is not very helpful to understand the cultural dynamics and processes of hybridization that mark processes of globalization, now as well as in earlier times.
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Geschiere, P., Guadeloupe, F. (2016). Conclusion: Post-script on Sex, Race and Culture. In: Duyvendak, J., Geschiere, P., Tonkens, E. (eds) The Culturalization of Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53410-1_10
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