Postracial Europe

This talk draws from a larger project that traces Europe-wide forms of racialization and translocal strategies of resistance to them. The latter originate (in) a queer of color identity and activism shaped by transnational movements, central among them U.S. women of color feminism and HipHop, but also rooted in very particular configurations of race, religion, colonialism, sexuality, nation and “Europeanness.” These configurations situate racialized communities in a “queer” space and time constellation that in turn provides the source for a particularly European queering of ethnicity. Fatima El-Tayeb briefly sketches this larger framework, then explores the spatio-temporal queering of communities of color through a neoliberal restructuring of the city, in which the symbolic inclusion of the white LGBT community is dependent on the exclusion of people of color and on the erasure of queer of color positionality.

Fatima El-Tayeb is associate professor in the departments of literature and ethnic studies and associate director of critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her most recent publications include European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (University of Minnesota Press 2011),  “‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the neoliberal European City,” in European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2011, and “‘The Forces of Creolization.’ Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe,” in Françoise Lionnet, Shu-mei Shi (eds), The Creolization of Theory, (Duke University Press 2011).