Fatima El-Tayeb – författare

European Others offers an interrogation into the position of racialized communities in the European Union, arguing that the tension between a growing nonwhite, non-Christian population and insistent essentialist definitions of Europeanness produces new forms of identity and activism. Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe. Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

Un/German is a powerful intervention in the ongoing debates over national identity, migration, and collective memory in Europe. Against the backdrop of the 2015 "refugee crisis," Fatima El-Tayeb argues that Europe's internal fractures were deflected through recurring crises, casting racialized populations as the external menace against which the continent could unite. First published in German in 2016, the book critically examines how Germany's reaction to the arrival of nearly one million refugees—initially framed as a "culture of welcome" but one that rapidly turned to hostility—was not an anomaly but part of a broader European pattern.Drawing on public memory and its material expressions in post–1989 Germany, Un/German brings into sharp relief the disparities in how Europe remembers its fascist, socialist, and colonial pasts. El-Tayeb highlights Black, Muslim, and Roma artists and activists who disrupted public commemorations intended to reinforce dominant narratives, arguing that these disturbances brought to the fore unresolved tensions in German collective memory. In doing so, El-Tayeb reveals the limits of Europe's self-conception as pluralistic and progressive, while also opening the door to new, more inclusive ways of imagining European identity.

Un/German is a powerful intervention in the ongoing debates over national identity, migration, and collective memory in Europe. Against the backdrop of the 2015 "refugee crisis," Fatima El-Tayeb argues that Europe's internal fractures were deflected through recurring crises, casting racialized populations as the external menace against which the continent could unite. First published in German in 2016, the book critically examines how Germany's reaction to the arrival of nearly one million refugees—initially framed as a "culture of welcome" but one that rapidly turned to hostility—was not an anomaly but part of a broader European pattern.Drawing on public memory and its material expressions in post–1989 Germany, Un/German brings into sharp relief the disparities in how Europe remembers its fascist, socialist, and colonial pasts. El-Tayeb highlights Black, Muslim, and Roma artists and activists who disrupted public commemorations intended to reinforce dominant narratives, arguing that these disturbances brought to the fore unresolved tensions in German collective memory. In doing so, El-Tayeb reveals the limits of Europe's self-conception as pluralistic and progressive, while also opening the door to new, more inclusive ways of imagining European identity.