Heike Raphael-Hernandez - Blackening Europe: The African American Presence

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Blackening Europe: The African American Presence

Edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Edited by

Heike Raphael-Hernandez

With a Foreword by Paul Gilroy

ROUTLEDGE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2004 by

Routledge

29 West 35th Street

New York, NY 10001

www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane

London EC4P 4EE

www.routledge.co.uk

Copyright 2004 by Taylor and Francis Books, Inc.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group.

Printed in the United Stated of America on acid-free paper.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raphael-Hernandez, Heike.

Blackening Europe: the African American presence / Heike Raphael-Hernandez.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-415-94398-1 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-415-94399-X (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-136-07202-4 (ePub)

1. BlacksEuropeSocial conditions. 2. EuropeEthnic relations.

3. EuropeRace relations. 4. African American jazz musiciansEurope.

5. BlacksEuropePublic opinion. I. Title.

D1056.2.A7R36 2003

305.89607304dc21

2003009695

Part II: Accompanying Europe into the Twenty-first Century

15 Make Capital Out of Their Sympathy: Rhetoric and Reality of U.S. Slavery and Italian Immigrant Prostitution along the Color Line from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century

Many people showed their genuine interest in the fundamental ideas of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence and participated with challenging discussions at many different sites and occasions. I owe thanks to all of them. Because it is not possible to include all, I would like to name some in particular whose ideas contributed to the final product in very different but wonderful ways. Graham Hodges encouraged me to (actually insisted that I) turn an idea into reality. Denise Sokolowski, head librarian at the University of Maryland University College in Europe, has been awarded the title Research Wizard for locating material that seemed to be unlocatable. Pirjo Ahorkas established the initial contact with Pekka Jalkanen in Finland. Lene Johannessen, Roy Goldblatt, Anastasia Stefanidou, Mara Fras, Maria Sternkvist Proitsaki, Jaroslav Kusnir, Elisabetta Marino, Peter Gardner, and their students participated in a longer discussion about the European-wide MTV impact on youth culture. Many people read parts of the manuscript, but I would like to thank in particular Susan E. Tomlison, Frank Lay, Rocio Davis, Heide Weidner, and Thomas DeFrantz. Rares Beuran offered several pictures from his rich collection of contemporary Roma life. Vikram Mukhija, Jaclyn Bergeron, and Karen Wolny were a great team to work with at Routledge.

My biggest thanks goes to my homefrontDon and Markus, Jakob, and Jonathanan incredible bunch full of humor, support, and love. That this project is realized is also due to them.

PAUL GILROY

In the mid-1950s, Aim Csaire examined the condition of Europe amid the aftershock of the 193945 war and in the grip of anticolonial conflicts. He pronounced a grim and memorable judgment: European civilization was decadent and dying. In failing to answer the reasonable demands made by its colonial peoples for liberation, it had

Our judgment may be less categorical than his. It must necessarily be more alive to the ludic, cosmopolitan energy and the democratic possibilities so evident in the postcolonial metropolis. However, it is true that the big issue which we must now address in order to evaluate the health of Europes cultural and political institutions, has arisen right at the intersection of the items that composed Csaires inventory. Race and class have been articulated together, and profound questions concerning the depth and character of European democracy and unity are being posed by nationalist and racist responses to the claims of old settlers, new migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. That list of aliens has been recently supplemented by the addition of other shadowy, infra-human figures: bodies without rights or recognition detained exceptionally in the course of the ongoing war against terror.

Very few of these vulnerable people were postcolonial settlers. New inflow from those quarters had been shut out long ago. Simple exclusionary mechanisms have ensured that Europes twenty-first-century retirement benefits will be paid for by Poles and Slovaks rather than Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Somalis. Happily, in some places, the grandchildren of the 1950s settler-citizens are negotiating their right to belong with some success, and not all of the latest incomers are actively racialized though many are, of course, demonized as Islamic terrorists in waiting.

This welcome volume rests upon the implicit demand to consider what the supposedly intrusive presence of strangers and the correspondingly punitive treatment dished out to them by various governments suggests about the condition of European civilization. It stands today, militarized once again and heavily fortified against the encroachments by its proliferating enemies, within and without. The war against asylum seekers, refugees, and economic migrants offers a chance to consider not just changing patterns of governmentality, commerce, and labor but to examine the cultural and ethical contours of Europe where the notion of public good and the practice of politics seem to be in irreversible declineundone by a combination of consumer culture, privatization, and the neoliberal ideology.

This collection affirms that the peculiar synonymity of the terms European and white cannot continue. And yet, against a wealth of detailed historical and cultural evidence, all across Europe, identity, belongingand embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration, barred to asylum-seeking, and willfully deaf to any demand for hospitality made by refugees and other displaced people.