It’s been such a long time since I last blogged. Over the last few months I have been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin during which time I co-wrote a book, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age with Gavan Titley. Pending readers’ reviews which we are waiting for at the end of November, the book will be out on June 9 2011.

During my time in Berlin, we organised a workshop at the ICI on the book’s theme and were delighted to have Guardian journalist Gary Younge join us. The whole workshop is available to watch online.

Since returning to Brighton, I have been back teaching at the University which is facing an onslaught from the government’s draconian spending cuts, of which more in another post soon. On Wednesday, November 10, join us in a demonstration of staff and students against the cuts in London.

I have also chaired a lecture by Ilan Pappe and Ben White on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in which Pappe categorically assessed the situation as an anticolonial struggle against an occupying power, and not an even-sided process of negotiation as those who still believe in the ‘peace process’ would like to believe.

Next week, on November 16 I will be giving a talk on race, neoliberalism and the crisis of multiculturalism at the University of Coimbra, Portugal of which more when I return.

Upcoming, I am participating in a conference on Democratization and Cultural Diversity at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras at Chennai (December 13-15) and in a Conference on  Pluralisme et radicalisations : regards croisés sur les expériences canadiennes et françaises at the University of Montreal (Janary 7-8). I am super excited about all of these. Please check back for recordings of these events.

I have also begin my own channel over at Vimeo where yo can watch lectures and papers given and have begun a group on Race Critical Theory where you are invited to upload relevant videos of your own.

Ciao for now and more soon.

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.

This 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. Instead, what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a rejection of lived multiculture. In documenting this mainstream racism and the anxieties that inform it, Lentin and Titley argue that the crisis is a projection of neoliberal societies’ disjunctures, a projection now obvious in fantastical discourses of integration. Combining theory with a reading of contemporary events, it examines the transnational, mediated nature of crisis, and argues that it provides activists with a chance to transcend the limitations of culturalised politics for an internationalist commitment to a resurgent anti-racism.

The upcoming book will be presented by Alana Lentin (University of Sussex/ICI) and Gavan Titley (National University of Ireland Maynooth)

Response: Gary Younge, Award-winning journalist for the Guardian and The Nation and author of Who are We – and Should it Matter in the 21st Century?

Followed by a discussion

Time: Thursday, 15 July 2010, 15:00

Location: ICI Berlin

In English

http://www.ici-berlin.org/event/2010-07-15-the-crises-of-multiculture-63/

Sorry for the silence on this site due to the birth of my daughter Noam on 27 November 2009. After a heady 4 months I am back to work.

From April to July 2010, I am on study leave from Sussex and shall be a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. If you are in Germany, please check back here soon for details of seminars and conferences I will be giving during this time in both Berlin and Bremen. I shall also be giving a seminar on 5 May 2010 at 17h00 in Paris in the seminar ‘La racialisation en question: Constructions nationales et circulations transnationales’ organised by Didier Fassin, Eric Fassin and Pap Ndiaye at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales.

During my stay in Berlin, I shall be working on a book entitled The Crises of Multiculture? which I am co-writing with Gavan Titley for Zed Books. More details of the book can soon be found on the multiculturality website.

“Lentin’s book is not only an accessible survey of scholarly writing on the nature of racism but is also a powerful intervention in its own right.”

Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations, and author of the excellent The End of Tolerance, has written a thoughtful review of Racism: A Beginner’s Guide here.