Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies, argues for new visions of the future and new narratives of Europe’s past in the volume “Undeutsch”.
Europe’s current stumble from crisis to crisis reveals the consequences of a one-sided reappraisal of history, the author says.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-fascist and post-socialist narratives were combined to form a Western capitalist success story, while at the same time the country’s own colonial past remained unnoticed.
Fatima El-Tayeb illustrates the effects of this process using the example of German identity: “Regularly racialized groups-especially blacks, Roma, and Muslims-are produced as ‘un-German,’ as groups that not only do not belong to the national community but endanger it by their presence.”
Book description of the publisher
Fatima El-Tayeb 2016: Undeutsch. The Construction of the Other in Postmigrant Society. transcript: Bielefeld.
If you don’t have a bookstore worth supporting near you, you can also buy the book from the alternative non-profit online bookstore links-lesen.de, which supports political projects with the profits. The link to the book is: http://www.links-lesen.de/article/978-3-8376-3074-9