Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire, and Race in the European Project w/ Hans Kundnani, Miriam Ticktin & Audrey Celestine

Hans Kundnani, associate fellow at Chatham House, will speak about his book, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, in conversation with Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center) and Audrey Celestine (NYU).

Lunch is served at 12:00pm
Talk begins at 12:30pm

Write to [email protected] to attend in person, or join the event via Zoom. Advance registration is strictly required.

About the book:

The European Union is often seen as a cosmopolitan rejection of violent nationalism. Yet the idea of Europe has a long, problematic history—in medieval times, it was synonymous with Christianity; in the modern era, it became associated with ‘whiteness’.

Eurowhiteness exposes the EU as a vehicle for imperial amnesia. Narratives of European integration emphasise the lessons of war and the Holocaust, but not the lessons of colonial history. The EU is about power as much as peace—and civic ideas of Europe are being displaced by ethnic and cultural ones.

Since the 2015 refugee crisis, whiteness has become even more central to European identity—a troubling new turn in Europe’s long civilisational project. It is time to confront the relationship between ideas of Europe and ideas of race.

About the speakers:

Hans Kundnani is an associate fellow and former Europe programme director at Chatham House, and the author of Utopia or Auschwitz; The Paradox of German Power; and Eurowhiteness, all published by Hurst. Hans writes regularly for The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman and Foreign Affairs, among others.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She came to the GC in 2022 from the New School for Social Research, where she was Chair of Anthropology from 2016-2018, Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

Audrey Celestine is a Maître de conférences at the Université de Lille and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.