Thursday, June 27, 2013
A1.18C (Oudemanhuispoort)
Cultural and religious alterity, as associated with postcolonial and labour migrants and their descendants, has become an increasingly critical matter of contention in the Netherlands. Paradoxically, however, the country lacks an explicit race discourse, and racism is broadly perceived and represented as non-existent. While culturalist and nativist discourses abound, antiracism is marginalized as missing the point. The ascent and normalization of culturalist nativism puts on the table new questions concerning Dutch racial history, present and future. In this paper I focus on the interplay of public and political discourse and policy making on the one hand and everyday life on the other. Drawing on ethnographic field work in a popular neighborhood in Amsterdam, I examine the relationship between culturalization as a symbolically powerful discursive process, institutionalized and embedded in ethnopolitical rhetorics and forms of governmentality on the one hand, and the everyday perspectives that people weave out of these frames and categories. This makes possible a focus on the intimate politics and somatic materiality of nativist culturalization in the Netherlands. A focus on symbolic behavior, agency and affect makes it possible to investigate how culturalist discourses are staged on and between bodies, and take shape as an interpretive frame for the guiding of perception, the structuring of feeling, and the organization of social action. Such an approach begins with an understanding of political discourses as sites of meaning production, fantasy and emotional investment, in which a common sense, taken for granted life-world is composed.
