Cross-fadings of racialisation and migratisation: the postcolonial turn in Western European gender and migration studies

Abstract

Looking at feminist and anti-racist approaches situated in or focused on Western Europe, especially Germany, this article investigates how racism and migration can be theorised in relation to each other in critical knowledge production. Rather than being an article ‘about Germany’, my intervention understands the German context as an exemplary place for deconstructing Europe and its gendered, racialised and sexualised premises. I argue that a ‘postcolonial turn’ has begun to emerge in Western European gender and migration studies and is questioning easy assumptions about the connections between racism and migration. Discussing examples from academic knowledge production and media debates, I suggest to think of migratisation (the ascription of migration) as performative practice that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and works in close interaction with racialisation. In particular, drawing on postcolonial approaches, I carve out the interconnection of racialisation and migratisation with class and gender. I argue that equating racialisation with migratisation carries the risk of whitening understandings of migration and/or reinforcing already whitened understandings of nation and Europeanness. To make discrimination ‘accessible’ to critical knowledge production, I engage in an epistemological discussion of the potentials and challenges of differentiating analytical categorisations. With this, this article engages with ascriptions, exclusions and abjectifications and attempts to formulate precise conceptualisations for the ever shifting forms of resistance we urgently need in transnational feminist activism and knowledge production.