Archive for publications, July 2011

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[ecrea] New book on racism and multiculturalism in Europe

Sat Jul 09 17:42:59 GMT 2011




Dear friends,

Please find attached some information on my new book with Alana Lentin, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (Zed Books).

The website for the book/project can be found here: http://www.multiculturecrisis.com/ and the preface for the book, by Guardian journalist Gary Younge, is available here: http://tinyurl.com/3sdd6c6


best, and good summer to all,
Gavan


    New Book Announcement

The Crises of Multiculturalism
Racism in a Neoliberal Age
Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national 'ways of life' and universal values. This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by challenging the existence of a coherent era of 'multiculturalism' in the first place. The authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a projection of neoliberal anxieties onto the social realities of lived multiculture. Nested in an established post-racial consensus, new forms of racism draw powerfully on liberalism and questions of 'values', and unsettle received ideas about racism and the 'far right' in Europe. In combining theory with a reading of recent controversies concerning headscarves, cartoons, minarets and burkas, Lentin and Titley trace a transnational crisis that travels and is made to travel, and where rejecting multiculturalism is central to laundering increasingly acceptable forms of racism.

Praise for the Book

'Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley offer a powerful and persuasive account of how multiculturalism has been sentenced to death. Drawing on a vast array of sources, voices and examples, they show how laments on the failure of multiculturalism create a political and affective landscape in which racism is simultaneously repudiated and reproduced. A necessary and important book.' - Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College

'This book provides a rich and scholarly analysis of the multiple forces at play in the construction of the 'death of multiculturalism' as a flexible and potent political discourse. Incisive and provocative in it's analysis; it is uncomfortable reading for those on both the left and right in politics. This is necessary reading for anyone concerned with the complex masking of racism within the rhetorical dance of national identities and globalized neo-liberal ideologies.’ - Professor Charles Husband, Centre for Applied Social Research, University of Bradford.

'The Crises of Multiculturalism critically examines the entanglements inherent in the broad range of European multiculturalisms today, their "loud" rejection and yet a melancholic neediness expressed in their bemoaning. The analysis is especially incisive about the ways in which an "era of integration," as multiculturalism's contemporary expression, seeks insecurely to assert authoritative control and security in the face of threatening and fearful expressions of a burgeoning multiculture supposedly marking European nations. The authors reveal how the politics of multiculturalism continue to structure, reproduce, and render less visible contemporary racisms.Those concerned to understand the synchrony of multiculturalism, integration, and revitalized racisms across the European landscape would do well to consult this book.' - Professor David Theo Goldberg, University of California

'Neoliberalism is deeply connected to racism: austerity, exclusion, the restriction of rights and withdrawal of freedoms -- hallmarks of both these despotic phenomena -- all mark their congruence and indeed interdependence. But in Europe and elsewhere as well the new racist regime has employed the seemingly benign and tolerant trope of ‘Multiculturalism’ to mask its malevolence. Lentin and Titley's fierce critique of this strategy provides a much-needed critical analysis of multiculturalism's ineffectuality in opposing the racism rising in Europe today. The Crises of Multiculturalism points out how racism cannot be understood as a matter of cultural difference. This book exposes the repressive assumptions that shape the politics of multiculturalism and that place the burden of inclusion on those seen as "different" and "other," rather than on the regimes of privilege and hierarchy that target immigrants, Muslims, and blacks in their effort to maintain a white "fortress Europe." The smiling rhetoric of tolerance, we learn here, is still produced by sharp white teeth. Highly recommended!' - Howard Winant, UC Santa Barbara, Director, University of California Center for New Racial Studies

Table of Contents

Preface, by Gary Younge
Introduction and acknowledgments
1: Recited truths: the contours of multicultural crisis
2: Let's talk about your culture: post-race, post-racism
3: Free like me: the polyphony of liberal postracialism
4: Mediating the crisis: circuits of belief
5: Good and bad diversity: the shape of neoliberal racisms
6: On one more condition: the politics of integration today
References and bibliography

Published:  July 2011
Pb ISBN 9781848135819  £15.99 / $27.95
Hb ISBN 9781848135802  £70.00 / $125.95
256 pages, 216mm x 138mm
www.zedbooks.co.uk/the_crises_of_multiculturalism


Dr Gavan Titley
Lecturer in Media Studies
Doctoral programme coordinator, Media Studies
BA Media Studies coordinator

School of English, Media and Theatre Studies
Iontas Building 0.23
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Ph: 00-353- 0 1-7086422

Vice-Chair of the 'Diaspora, Migration and Media' section
European Communication Research Association - ECREA


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