Join us for the Islamophobia Beyond Borders Workshop, in The Sir Duncan Rice Library, to discuss the international context, repercussions, and consequences of modern Islamophobia. Hosted by Professor Nadia Kiwan of the University of Aberdeen and Dr Jim Wolfreys of King's College London, inviting a host of prominent academics and civil society stakeholders to discuss and share.
Fraser McQueen – University of Bristol, UK: ‘Literature and the Mainstreaming of Islamophobia’
While attempting to measure the political ‘impact’ of cultural production is notoriously difficult, there is reason to believe that novels have contributed to mainstreaming Islamophobia in France. A tradition of what I call ‘literary great replacements’, meaning novels depicting the so-called ‘Islamisation’ of France, can be traced to at least the late nineteenth century. One of the most famous novels depicting the racist fantasy of ‘race replacement’, Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des saints (1973), has cult popularity among both a French and international far right. Indeed, some of Éric Zemmour’s earliest publications were novels. Renaud Camus, who coined the term ‘le grand remplacement’, made his name as a novelist. Vincent Berthelier has demonstrated that Camus’s written style, which has over time evinced an increasing fixation with maintaining the linguistic ‘purity’ of the French language, is indissociable from his obsession with a putative racial ‘purity’.
Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015) provides a case study of how the prestige associated with French literary fiction can lend mainstream credibility to racist discourses. Soumission depicts the so-called ‘Islamisation’ of France. However, its narrator describes this, in some respects, as a positive outcome. Despite Houellebecq’s history of Islamophobic comments, several reviewers therefore accepted the author’s claim that his novel should not be labelled Islamophobic: a reading that only holds if one accepts that a majority of French Muslims would support a so-called ‘great replacement’. Houellebecq’s novel thus, even if only temporarily and within the confines of literary criticism, normalized the idea that it is reasonable to project such an outcome, implying that such claims only become Islamophobic when presented as harmful to France. While the long-term impact of this discursive shift is difficult to measure, Soumission thus provides a case study of literature shifting the boundaries of the ‘sayable’, helping to further normalize Islamophobia in France.
Kawtar Najib, University of Liverpool, UK: ‘From Global Islamophobia to the criminalization of spaces of resistance in France’
Islamophobia is a global phenomenon that can be observed in various parts of the world. The spread of this form of racism – more than open and normalized – is impressive and glocalized in the sense that it projects a reality connecting the macro-space of the globe to the micro-space of the body. Indeed, Islamophobia is a spatialized phenomenon demonstrating that global Islamophobia impacts the everyday lives of local Muslims living in a specific context. In France, it also describes a multi-dimensional process since it affects all sectors and places (be it education, workplace, politics, media, justice system, the street, etc.). This country has become an extreme example after crossing many red lines as evidence by significant abusive closures, repressions, intimidations and expulsions. Islamophobia is not only accepted and legitimized in France; it is also legalized as it is legally enshrined in anti-Muslim laws (anti-hijab, anti-niqab, anti-separatism, etc.). French-style Islamophobia is mainly state-run, and therefore any attempt to combat it is incriminated or even destroyed, to the point that we can wonder what spaces against Islamophobia remain in France.
Jim Wolfreys, Kings College London, UK: ‘Shibboleths of Frenchness’
This paper examines the role of laïcité in the escalation of Islamophobic reaction in twenty-first century France. Following Jacques Chirac’s 2002 presidential victory, Republican secularism was recalibrated as a cornerstone of a radicalising mainstream right. This, in turn, allowed the Rassemblement National to exert an influence in repurposing laïcité as an element in the ‘civilisational conflict’ threatening the West. Like the Prevent agenda in Britain, laïcité has been used to create public compliance with discriminatory processes. But it has proven more effective than Prevent as a means of identifying ‘values’ that establish the nation state as both the source and the judge of the public good, values that may also be deployed to distinguish between those who demonstrate fidelity to the nation and those who are unable or unwilling to do so and must therefore be excluded. The radicalisation of laïcité along reactionary lines has prompted many to argue that its ‘true’, progressive meaning has been obscured and needs to be retrieved. Such accounts tend to forget some of laïcité’s basic features, notably its role in bolstering the authority of the state as the producer of religious subjects and the final arbiter of the meaning of signs, and the part played by colonial conquest in shaping the forms taken by laïcité in metropolitan France. The analysis developed here is based on an understanding of laïcité as a set of processes and values that has never been characterised by ‘neutrality’, an understanding that helps illuminate its role in shaping authoritarian trajectories in contemporary French politics.
- Venue
- The Sir Duncan Rice Library, Meeting Room 224
- Contact
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- Booking
- Online booking available