Race, Religion, and Citizenship in Modern Europe

Race, Religion, and Citizenship in Modern Europe History 475S: Capstone Seminar, Spring 2014 Tuesday, 10:05-12:35

Professor James Chappel [email protected] Carr 327 Office Hours: Tuesday, 2-4 and by appointment

Although often portrayed as a continent of lily-white flower salesmen, Europe has always been a place of racial difference, immigration, and violence. This course will explore Europe from this angle, preparing you to understand the Europe of the present, a Europe of vibrant and restive immigrant communities, a flourishing arts scene, and a resurgent right wing. We will begin with the “Jewish question” of the late nineteenth century, culminating of course with the Final Solution. We will then turn to post-1945 history, exploring the ways in which the “Muslim question” relates to the Jewish question of the past. We will ask if Europe has learned the right lessons from its violent history—or if any lessons have been learned at all.

Course goals and expectations

This is a capstone seminar, the culmination of your experience as a history major at Duke. This means something to me, and it should to you. The course is your chance to show yourself, me, and your classmates how much you have learned in your time here. There will be a good deal of reading and writing. You're ready for it! The goal of this course is twofold. First, I want you to employ advanced historical methodologies and reading skills. A history major should have certain skills in interpretation, synthesis, and reasoning (specifically the ability to draw connections between disparate times and places). These are skills that should never leave you, and I want you to hone them in this course. Second, and more specifically, I want you to learn about modern European history in a deep way and from an unfamiliar perspective. Most accounts of post-1945 Europe focus on party politics, new wave cinema, economic crisis, and so on. This is all important, but it is not the angle we will take in this class: our goal is to view Europe from the perspective of the excluded “others”: the Jews, Muslims, gypsies, and Africans.

There will be three assignments: two written assignments and one class presentation. The first assignment is a 5-page paper designed to test your skills in using primary sources. It will be assigned on 21 January and due on 4 February. The second assignment is a presentation (which may or may not be a team activity, depending on how many students we have). From weeks 4-9, we will be exploring different regions of Europe, focusing primarily on their post-1945 immigration policies, and the experience of those immigrants on the continent. Your job will be to find a current-events story from that region, within the last 10 years, that shows the legacies of our readings. You will give an 8-12 minute presentation on this topic, introducing us to what you've discovered and what kinds of sources you were able to find about it. You will then lead a short discussion tying this current event to the historical readings we've done for class. The last assignment is a major research paper, of 15-20 pages. There will be multiple components here, including a mandatory meeting with a librarian (these are listed below). This is a seminar, organized around class discussion. As I will lecture very little, the class simply will not work unless you do the readings and come to class prepared to discuss them. I discourage the use of laptop computers in class. I have one ironclad rule about this: if the readings are online, you absolutely must print them out and bring them to class.

Plagiarism: I take plagiarism extremely seriously. It is far better to turn in a mediocre paper than to plagiarize: the former will hurt your grade but, if caught, the latter will jeopardize your academic career. At the very least, you will fail the paper; more likely, you will fail the course as a whole and have your case turned over to university administration. If you have any questions about this—that is, if you are not sure whether or not a certain act constitutes plagiarism—ask me before turning in your paper: you will not be penalized in any way if you check something out with me and I tell you that it needs a citation or a rewording. The basic concept is simple: do not pass off other’s ideas or words as your own. If you got a cool idea from a footnote, from a website, from Wikipedia, or from a conversation with another faculty member, you have to cite it. There is no shame in this: we all get our ideas from somewhere (my dissertation had over one thousand footnotes). Here is an excerpt of the definition provided by the American Historical Association: “Plagiarism includes more subtle and perhaps more pernicious abuses than simply expropriating the exact wording of another author without attribution. Plagiarism also includes the limited borrowing, without attribution, of another person's distinctive and significant research findings, hypotheses, theories, rhetorical strategies, or interpretations, or an extended borrowing even with attribution.”

Grade calculation 20%: Paper 1 30%: Presentation, attendance, participation 50%: Paper 2 (including all of the “process” elements)

Books for purchase (available at the Duke Textbook Store) N.B. All other readings will be available on Sakai. Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1565843592) Matthew Carr, Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent (1595586857) John Bowen, Can Islam be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State (0691138397) Andrew Geddes, The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (0761956697) Pap Khouma, I Was an Elephant Salesman (025322232X)

Course Schedule

Part I: The Jewish Question and the Rise of Racialized Religion (1890-1945) 14 January: A Europe of Nations: Introduction Renan, “What is a Nation?”*

21 January: The Rise of Race: The Dreyfus Affair and the Origins of a Century Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 1-69, 97-107; Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France”*; selection from Protocols of the Elders of Zion*

28 January: The Armenian Genocide: The Dialectic of Race and Religion (I) Roth, “The Bust of the Emperor,”*; Mazower, “The G-Word”*; Cooper and Akcam, “Turks, Armenians, and the 'G-Word'“*; Lewy, “Revisiting the Armenian Genocide”*; Akcam, “Review of Lewy” [skim]*

4 February: Immigration, Christianity and Anti-Semitism in Interwar Europe Steigmann-Gall, “Rethinking Nazism and Religion: How Anti-Christian were the 'Pagans'?”*; Koehne, “Reassessing the Holy Reich”*; Wasserstein, “In the Cage, Trying to Get Out”*; Selection from Rosenberg, Policing Paris*

11 February: The Holocaust: The Dialectic of Race and Religion (II) Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, 123-60; Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality”*; selection from Omer Bartov, Erased*; Michael Meng, “Erasing the Jewish Past”*

Part II: New Waves of Immigration After World War II: Learning from, or Repeating the Past? 18 February: An Islam for France Geddes, “France: Still the One and Indivisible Republic?”; Bowen, Can Islam be French? chs. 1- 4, 6-7 You must meet with a librarian by 4 March

25 February: Black in the Union Jack? Race in Britain Geddes, “Maintaining Fortress Britain”; Stephen Tuck, “Malcolm X’s Visit to Oxford University: U.S. Civil Rights, Black Britain, and the Special Relationship on Race”*

4 March: Confronting Past Traumas, or Not: Race in Germany Geddes, “Germany: Normalized Immigration Politics?”; selection from Günter Wallraff, The Lowest of the Low*; Leora Auslander, “Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State”*

Part III: Hip Hop and Militarized Borders: Europe’s Racialized Present

18 March: The Rise of the Right Françoise Gaspard, “The Irresistible Rise of the Right”*; Diethelm Prowe, “The Fascist Phantom and Anti-Immigrant Violence: The Power of False Equation”* 25 March: African Immigration Khouma, I Was an Elephant Salesman [entire]; Hans Lucht, “Suffering in a Globalized World”*

1 April: Thesis statement and outline workshop

8 April: Scenes from Contemporary Europe Carr, Fortress Europe (selections to be announced); Jay Kirk, “Bartók's Monster”*; Gopnik, “The People who Pass”*; Ickstadt, “Appropriating Difference- Turkish-German Rap”*; Prévos, “Two Decades of Rap in France”*

15 April: Research presentations and trouble-shooting

22 April: Papers due in class. Film screening, My Beautiful Laundrette, lunch provided