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Archive for June, 2010

An article I wrote at the time of the last World Cup in 2006 which resonates with racist nationalism as it is being played with respect to this year’s championship.

What is there left to say about Zinedine Zidane’s already infamous head-butt in the last minutes of the finals of the 2006 World Cup? Articles, blogs and bar room conversation have hashed and rehashed the French captain’s act. He has been damned a traitor and hailed a hero. He has been condemned, understood and forgiven. But the symbolic impact of his charge of rage, his head ramming into the chest of the Italian Matterazzi, “like a bull” (Liberation, July 11), is yet to be fully felt in France.

Many commentators have spoken about Zidane, the son of poor Algerian immigrants from La Castellane in the council houses of Marseille’s Quartier Nord. He is said to be understated, generally humbled by his stardom, unsure of what to do with the adulation that his football prowess has earned him. It is this that endeared him to everyone in France, except of course the supporters of the Front national’s Jean-Marie Le Pen who has repeatedly condemned the make-up of France’s ethnically mixed tricolor national team. The majority even forgive him for not singing the national anthem when it is played at the beginning of matches. He has been, until Sunday’s crucial trespassing, a symbol of all that liberal France hopes for the sons and daughters of the immigrants from the quartiers difficiles (literally the “difficult neighbourhoods of the ill-famed banlieues). He was held up as an example for the kids whose dream it is to become the Zizous of the future: keeping his head down and making a positive contribution to the Republic, rather than burning its schools and jeering at its police. Read the rest of this entry »

You can now listen and watch ‘Post-race, post-politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism’, a paper I recently gave at the University of Toronto in Berlin Conference on “Post-Secular Society as a Transatlantic Model? Migration, Religion and Class in Comparative Perspective” by visiting the Media page.

Judith Butler turning down the Civil Courage Award at the Berlin Pride June 19 2010

I must distance myself from this racist complicity

Press Release by SUSPECT on the events of the 19th June, 2010

As Berlin Queer and Trans Activists of Colour and Allies we welcome Judith Butler’s decision to turn down the Zivilcourage Prize awarded by Berlin Pride. We are delighted that a renowned theorist has used her celebrity status to honour queer of colour critiques against racism, war, borders, police violence and apartheid. We especially value her bravery in openly critiquing and scandalising the organisers’ closeness to homonationalist organisations. Her courageous speech is a testimony to her openness for new ideas, and her readiness to engage with our long activist and academic work, which all too often happens under conditions of isolation, precariousness, appropriation and instrumentalisation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Crises of Multiculture? (Zed Boks 2011) which I am co-writing with Gavan Titley will be prresented at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin on July 15 with a response by award-winning journalist, Gary Younge.

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. Muslims have been the chief beneficiary of this discredited epoch; licensed by its delusions, they have been left unsupervised, and the proliferation of ghettos, extremism and illiberal excesses is the troubling result. Read the rest of this entry »