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Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.
“The book is certainly an original contribution to studies of race and racialization. Through the comprehensive analysis of how crisis is entangled in political discourses, rhetoric, and affective experiences of everyday life authors convincingly illustrate what crisis does to contemporary formations of racialization, nationalisms, and national identities.” • Anthropos
“This is a praiseworthy publication. Based on ethnographically rich case studies it provides several snapshots that reach deep down into the heart of the constitution of European societies. They show the diversity and complexity of issues related to identity, social inclusion and exclusion, democratic ideals, the welfare state, mobility and security, cultural fears and certainty, hegemony and legitimacy.” • Anthropological Forum
“The book makes a novel contribution to scholarship on post-integration European identity politics and is crucial reading for scholars interested in crisis and crisis narratives, the anthropology of the state, migration and border politics, and everyday racisms.” • Social Anthropology
“An impressive study on a very timely topic.” • Jeremy MacClancey, Oxford Brookes University
“The contribution to research-based understandings of "crisis talk", "being in a state of crisis", the growing tension between legal and moral obligations, and the intersection of economics and morality is intriguing, critical, urgent, and comes precisely at the right historical conjuncture. The volume is a welcome and thoughtful effort to disentangle what is going on.” • Peter Hervik, Aalborg University
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Kristín Loftsdóttir, Andrea L. Smith, and Brigitte Hipfl
Chapter 1. Wise Viking Daughters: Equality and Whiteness in Economic Crisis
Kristín Loftsdóttir and Helga Björnsdóttir
Chapter 2. “Latvians do not understand the Greek people”: Europeanness and Complicit Becoming in the Midst of Financial Crisis
Dace Dzenovska
Chapter 3. Fairness and Entitlement in Neoliberal England, 2005-2015
Steve Garner
Chapter 4. Debating Refugee Deservingness in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
Shay Cannedy
Chapter 5. What is a Life? On Poverty and Race in Humanitarian Italy
Andrea Muehlebach
Chapter 6. Policing Crisis in Austrian Crime Fiction
Brigitte Hipfl
Chapter 7. Crisis France: Covert Racialization and the Gens du Voyage
Andrea L. Smith
Chapter 8. Navigating the Mediterranean Refugee “Crisis”: Alter-Globalization Activism and the Sediments of History on Lampedusa
Antonio Sorge
Epilogue: Declining Europe
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Index