Culture | ukwatch.net

Seeing the bigger picture

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:53:12 +0000

This might sound hyperbolic, but it is true: there is no longer any part of the globe that remains “natural” in any meaningful sense. Even the apparently pristine ice-clad poles are contaminated by man-made chemicals, many of which concentrate in the food chain – through fish, whales and seals – making the breastmilk of Inuit women so loaded with poisons as to constitute, in effect, toxic waste. Humanity bestrides the planet in a way no single species has ever achieved before: enough now, according to many scientists, to merit our name being applied to a new geological era, the anthropocene.

The rain that falls anywhere on the planet’s surface is different in its chemical constituents from pre-industrial rain; we have doubled the natural flow of reactive nitrogen through living systems, causing enormous algal blooms, not to mention – at the last count – 405 dead zones in coastal waters around the world. There is now a third more carbon dioxide, double the methane and a whole host of artificially manufactured gases circulating in our atmosphere. We have even managed to make the entire global ocean measurably more acidic, a remarkable achievement by any standard.

Our moral and artistic senses have barely begun to comprehend the scale of what is going on. Yes, it is there in black and white for anyone to read in weighty scientific reports such as the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Some of these reports are reasonably readable. Some even have pictures. But works of art they are not, nor are they intended to be. This has a tangible impact: in cultural terms, we still fondly imagine ourselves to be tiny and insig nificant little creatures, beetling about on a vast planet that is relatively impervious to our presence. We terrify and titillate ourselves with stories of natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis – which seem to prove once again how powerless we are against the “great forces of nature”.

This is a false impression: the greatest force of all is we human beings. Our collective footprint now far outreaches anything this planet has naturally produced for tens of millions of years: even the worst imaginable supervolcano would have less of an effect on the biosphere than humble little Homo sapiens so far has.

Artistic representation is integral to us ever developing a true understanding of our new place in the world. Good art bridges the intellectual/ emotional divide, communicating meaning in a way that UN reports cannot. It can help us think about why something hurts that is lost, why any of this matters, and how we might feel differently about it. It can step outside the rationalist discourse of modern scientific environmentalism into a different mental space where freer thinking is allowed and encouraged, and an impressionistic appreciation of changing nature is as valuable as rigorous facts and figures. Art should not be propaganda – but it can change minds. At its best, it is a connecting rather than a dividing force.

This is the difficult and contested territory that a new and visually stunning photographic collection, Vanishing Landscapes, occupies. Some of the images are truly shocking, such as Robert Adams’s pictures of logged redwood trees in the American north-west. No one can flick through these pages and not be appalled at the scale of devastation that humanity has inflicted on the landscape: not only have the trees been cut, but the whole ground has been butchered and vast areas bulldozed over. Stumps the size of houses are upended, thrown together like so much matchwood. In the final picture of the series, Adams’s wife sits hunched against a tree stump, surrounded by discarded branches and rotting timber as if by death itself. The ethereal quality of the images is highlighted by them being printed in black and white, which makes their content all the more stark.

Similarly striking are Edward Burtynsky’s pictures of nickel tailings in Ontario, Canada. Bright red rivers flow through a charred and blackened landscape, reminiscent of volcanic lava flows in both colour and form. Burtynsky puts it well in the introduction: “These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence,” he writes. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success.”

But what of landscapes in which the human impact is less obvious? Walter Niedermayr cleverly juxtaposes the human with the natural in his photographs of Alpine glaciers in Austria: on one side of the page fold sits an apparently natural icescape, and on the other people are emerging – their bright clothes the only colour in the grey-whites of the glacial mass – on duckboards from an ice cave. Other pictures in Niedermayr’s series show people sprinkled over the surface of the ice, like flecks of pepper in a salt-pan. Though the figures appear tiny in comparison to the bulk of the ice on which they are walking, they also dominate it with their sheer numbers when spread out. Thomas Struth contributes photos of intact forests, each named Paradise plus a number: an Australian forest is Paradise 03, a tangled Peruvian jungle is Paradise 31. There is no evidence of human impact at all; indeed, the pictures look as primeval and verdant as the Garden of Eden itself, which I suspect they are intended to evoke.

And yet we know that, even in such landscapes as this, all is not what it seems. As the climate scientist John Schellnhuber says in an interview transcribed in the introduction: “As an image of nature, the landscape can no longer be conceived of as independent of humankind but is always something that we ourselves have created.” We may not know it, but the composition of Peru’s forest in Paradise 31 may be subtly different from how it would have been in a world without human beings. That is not to bemoan our presence on this earth: we have as much right to be here as any other element of the biosphere. But the converse also applies: all the species we are busily wiping out – consciously or unconsciously – themselves enjoy inherent rights of existence. If we can understand and appreciate them more, perhaps we can also learn to respect them.

“Vanishing Landscapes” is published by Frances Lincoln on 18 September (£35)

Coming to a screen near you - me!

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:48:14 +0000

Three years ago, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben made a striking observation: that despite overwhelming evidence of a world-threatening rise in temperatures, our cultural realm seemed unaware of the looming crisis. “Where are the books?” he demanded. “The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” Global warming, he concluded, “hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture”.

How things have changed. Today, bookshops have entire shelves devoted to climate change. Television, too, has belatedly begun to catch up. Which is not to say every contribution has been well-informed or progressive: Channel 4 commissioned a contrarian polemic, The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast in March last year. Directed by the committed anti-environmentalist Martin Durkin, the spectacularly misleading Swindle marked a broadcasting nadir for the number of distortions, errors and misrepresentations that can be crammed into 75 minutes.

On 21 July the broadcasting regulator Ofcom handed down a severe censure, ruling that the programme had breached impartiality guidelines and treated contributors unfairly. This should be embarrassing for a scrupulous public service broadcaster, yet Channel 4 seems to have a higher regard for controversy than for truth.

But, into the intellectual and ethical vacuum that is Channel 4’s environmental programming steps the BBC with a new, two-part TV drama called Burn Up. Screened on 23 and 25 July on BBC2, this thriller surely marks the belated coming-of-age of energy politics as a legitimate topic for popular entertainment. Written by Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter for The Full Monty, and starring Rupert Penry-Jones (from Spooks) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), Burn Up really is thrilling (if you missed the original transmission, make sure you get hold of the download on the BBC’s iPlayer, quickly).

The story finds the young chief executive of a British-based oil company wrestling with his conscience as the deadline looms in global climate-change talks. There’s a fast-talking scientist and a bad-turned-good government apparatchik, both trying to confront the evil axis of oil blobbyists and the US government.

Yet this is not a televised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: there’s sex and murder. I could quibble that, in the interests of gripping drama, the portrayal of climate negotiations isn’t quite as I’ve seen in reality, but I imagine policemen feel the same way about The Bill.

Also well worth watching out for on the cultural front is the upcoming feature film The Age of Stupid, a drama-meets-documentary epic that casts Pete Postlethwaite in the role of “the archivist”, alone in the year 2055 in a specially constructed Arctic museum-cum-fortress, one of the last surviving human beings on the climatic ally devastated planet. The archivist – using his cache of all the world’s broadcast material from past decades – is constructing a digital broadcast for other, future civilisations about why humanity failed to save itself from global warming.

This is where the real documentary comes in. The director, Franny Armstrong, spent years filming people in various countries who illustrate the dilemmas of climate change: an elderly French mountain guide, the chief executive of an Indian low-cost airline and a Shell petroleum geologist who lost his house to Hurricane Katrina, among others. The film is anything but a good guys-versus-bad guys polemic; it is angry but nuanced, despairing but also strangely motivating. Indeed, the hero (in my opinion) – the one who coins the name of the film itself – is none other than the Shell man, who saved dozens of people in his boat in the aftermath of the hurricane, and has clearly done more thinking about the environment than many greens I know.

I should probably mention that I appear in the film (sketching carbon-emissions graphs in the garden shed), and I also had a hand in writing and advising on the scientific content of the script. Armstrong hopes for UK-wide cinema release in October or November this year, and discussions regarding a prime-time television slot are already under way. Watch out for the fast-paced animations and for the peculiarly captivating soundtrack. It seems that, finally, someone is answering Bill McKibben’s lament.

Burning Ice

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:50:51 +0000

Before me is a wall of glacial ice forty-five metres high, slowly, inextricably moving towards Noorderlicht as we navigate the seas just thirty metres from it, at six o’clock in the morning. Another cold grey day is dawning as I project video from the boat, a series of texts onto the glacier face. At times the image is swallowed up, disappearing through aeons of ice and then as we traverse the glacier it is reflected magically back with an electronic edge that gives the texts a living urgency. ‘Sadness Melts’, ‘The Cold Library of Ice’, ‘Burning Ice’: texts that bring into focus the state we are in, as the glacier continues its accelerated path towards total melt and oblivion.

There have been five Cape Farewell expeditions into the Arctic, on which forty-five artists/creators and fifteen scientists have co-habited, sailed, observed, measured and been inspired. The outcome of this collective effort becomes ever more poignant. In this high Arctic of sea, land and ice are three climatic tipping points of such significance that their demise or alteration promises a global effect on our environment:

• The top end of the Gulf Stream or Norwegian Current. Both Cape Farewell’s and other scientific studies indicate that the current’s health appears robust; however, its temperature has increased. At the parallel 78° north the current travels north twenty metres below the surface and is the size of two Amazon rivers.

• The Greenland Ice Cap. The ice cap is undoubtedly melting with increased tempo. To give scale to this melt, on the Greenland mainland, which has a land mass the size of Europe, the ice is over 3,000 metres thick.

• Ice melt at the North Pole. Most worryingly, in the summer of 2007, 25% of the northern ice cap melted and it is predicted that all the summer ice at the North Pole could disappear within a decade. The consequences of this happening would be a rapidly warming sea due to more absorption of the sun’s power, a change that will accelerate the warming of our planet.

Our onboard scientists, from the National Oceanography Centre and the British Geological Survey, measure, analyse and collect data, which adds to a global scientific effort to establish clarity on climate change and the timescale of that change. Importantly, the Cape Farewell artists can witness and absorb the physicality of the science fieldwork – slow, careful and at times laborious. It is up to the artists to bring back stories and emotions on a human scale of these tangible climatic changes that we ignore at our peril. Our warming planet is affecting the natural Arctic balance, a warming that is caused by how we, as a species, choose to live. Some of our most exciting cultural thinkers and practitioners have added their weight to the Cape Farewell project. The changing climate is largely a cultural problem and we need vision to move us out of the dangerous situation that we are in.

This northern magic, this harsh physical place, these climate impacts have become marked into my very being – the Arctic has become part of my emotional force, powerful and addictive. For me, artistically, this emotional force is best expressed in and by the mercurial nature of ice.

Ice is not an object, and it is difficult to view objectively. If you move it, it changes: thousands of hair-line cracks fracture its purity. If you raise its temperature, it ceases to be. If you analyse it, unlike rock it releases its information, its history in an instant; there are no repeats and no reviews. Ice is alive. The wall of ice we engaged with is in the process of dying – 100,000 years of knowledge going, going, gone. It is a non-biological changing force and I can only engage with it subjectively as I would another living form. It has a language that is as clear as words, and understanding it is like dealing with poetry and raw emotion.

Ice is the million-year-old history of our planet. From it we know what the air, temperature and world were like at any given point, just by analysing ice-core samples. Our actions are burning this cold library of ice.

There is no one kind of ice: we have sampled new sea ice, decade-old sea ice, glacier ice, diamond-clear ice, black ice, ice clouds that cause vertical light refractions. There are glaciers that move with speed, whole landscapes on the move, rocks and valleys sculpted by their force, and we have witnessed and nearly been entrapped as the sea froze solid before our eyes. The ice that sits upon waves, causing a sea to perambulate as in a frightening dream: sea and glacial ice that we have had to force a passage through aboard our boat, but which leaves no memory of our passing as it reforms neatly in our wake.

Ice is fascinating to project video onto, and as well as the previously mentioned texts, I have projected a walking, naked and pregnant woman, running feet and a newborn baby. The texts projected onto ice are slogans that appeal for an immediate emotional engagement with climate. The running feet carry urgency whilst the pregnant woman is layered in meaning. I am often surprised just how powerful this image has become and how well it resonates. She epitomises vulnerability and promotes care. She is naked, without the armour and the protection of clothes. Her walk is defiant and in her belly she carries the only possible future for humankind. Her growing baby has a lifespan in front of her/him, yet the image is projected on ice that is disappearing: two future truths colliding in opposing time-planes. If we have it inside us to care for, nurture and protect our children then surely we must also nurture and protect their environment. No other symbol better encapsulates the need for a symbiotic relationship between humans and our habitat.

A Californian artist who has also journeyed with Cape Farewell is Amy Balkin. In the process of making a series of artworks called ‘Public Smog’ she has stated, “We should make our atmosphere into a world heritage site.” We know inherently that to dump waste on a designated world heritage site is wrong. We wouldn’t pollute such a site; but having the same sense of wrong with regard to our atmosphere should be even more of a priority.

Ian McEwan lends his word-craft and wisdom to our BBC film with powerful insights. He also made a ‘word sculpture’, lines of text that were projected onto the outside walls of the Bodleian in Oxford – words physically impressing themselves upon a custodian of our heritage: “The pressure of our numbers, the abundance of our inventions, the blind forces of our desires and needs are generating heat – the hot breath of our civilisation… We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime. Now we are asked to address the well-being of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour.”

The sculptor Antony Gormley collaborated with the architect Peter Clegg to produce a triptych of snow constructions on the edge of a frozen Arctic sea. In temperatures of -35°C they toiled for four days to produce Three Made Places. One Made Place came from an idea Clegg had been working on to demonstrate physically the invisible, odourless greenhouse gas CO2. Clegg has written, “One kilogram of CO2 at atmospheric pressure occupies 0.54 of a cubic metre. That is the volume taken up by ourselves and the space immediately around us – it is roughly the volume occupied by a coffin.” In Canada each member of the population produces 23,000kg of CO2 per annum. In the UK it’s 12,000kg per person.

Gormley made another artwork where he cast himself in ice, Marker 1. It stood on the frozen sea of the fjord until spring and ice melt arrived and the sea reclaimed it.

Each artist who has been part of the Cape Farewell expeditions has found a voice that deals in some way with climate change. Each has added uniquely to a new bank of ideas and imagery that brings the subject of climate change into focus on a human scale. The process of the artists developing their Arctic work is recorded by the director David Hinton in a film we were commissioned to make for the BBC. This film, Art from a Changing Arctic, has been shown worldwide and is part of the Cape Farewell exhibition ‘The Ship: The Art of Climate Change’, which was first mounted at London’s Natural History Museum: sixteen works of art that include a whole-whale-skeleton artwork by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey; a cinema-scale video projection of the demise of an iceberg, The End of Ice; and a work by the choreographer Siobhan Davies entitled Endangered Species in which a virtual dancer dances to extinction in an antique display cabinet. This exhibition is now on a world tour which this year includes Madrid and Tokyo, bringing new and provocative voices and ideas to the issue of climate change.

Science continues to lead our enquiries into climate change. One of the great pleasures for me during the past ten years has been the open dialogue we have with the worldwide climate science community. These are the most rational people I know, and to detect in them a real concern and at times palpable fear that they have for humanity and of irreversible damage being done to our planet is very worrying. They are clear that the window of opportunity for action is short: perhaps just a decade.

Echoing Balkin, the solution is simple: stop polluting our atmosphere with damaging greenhouse gases. But we have a global economy and a lifestyle based on the cheap supply of energy that will require a Herculean effort to reverse. There is, however, the possibility of a cultural shift, as was witnessed in the Age of Enlightenment: a wind of change that embraces all and in doing so secures our, and our children’s future.

Maybe this is the evolving story of Cape Farewell: to rattle the cage and throw some of our best creative minds into the mêlée. To paraphrase McEwan in our film, we’re having to address the needs of people unborn. Even the most idealistic of thinkers on the world stage in the past have only addressed themselves to problems in the present. To bear the weight of the future in this way is both interesting and difficult and runs (probably) counter to our nature.

The Cape Farewell project continues with two expeditions to Greenland in September 2008. A youth expedition carrying 26 students from 8 different countries will be followed by an art/science team furthering the oceanography conducted in the Greenland Sea last autumn. Working alongside the scientists will be an international team of musicians, playwrights, visual artists, architects and academics. It will be possible to track both voyages live on the website and both will be filmed for a forthcoming sequel to Art from a Changing Arctic. www.capefarewell.com

David Buckland is a video artist and Director of the Cape Farewell project. Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change, published by Cape Farewell, is available at £19.99. Tel: +44 (0) 1904 431213 to order a copy.

Mistaken Identity

tim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:44:53 +0000

It is one of the biggest complaints about globalisation: that as market forces sweep across the world, so does Western culture. In the end, many fret, whether you are in New York, Rome, Beijing or Mumbai you will buy the same pair of jeans in the same shopping mall, drink the same overpriced latte in the same coffee shop, and watch the same dreary Hollywood blockbuster. Local culture will be no more.

Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture. A notion that originated in late-eighteenth century Europe, in the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, has today the whole world in its grip. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that its traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism.

We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies.

At the heart of most multicultural philosophies is the belief that an individual’s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American theorist Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival.

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years’. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’.

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that ‘is’ defines ‘ought’.

Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does.

To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.

To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It implies that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it’. For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost’.

But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

If a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. And what you should be doing, for cultural preservationists, is what your ancestors were doing. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’

The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There are echoes here of the concept of ‘type’ that was at the heart of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a pluralist idea of culture.

‘Every society, every nation is unique’, claimed Enoch Powell, the most vocal opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. ‘It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own – dare I use the word – culture.’ This is why, he argued, immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully British. In France the far right has astutely exploited the idea of cultural differences to promote its anti-Muslim message. ‘It is a tragic mistake to want to have communities representing different civilisations live together in the same country’, argued former Gaullist minister Michel Poniatowski. ‘I love North Africans’, Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, ‘but their place is in the Mahgreb’. Through the language of diversity, racism has been transformed into just another cultural identity.

If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion. ‘It is right and proper’, Kymlicka believes, ‘that the character of a culture changes as a result of the choices of its members’. But, he goes on, ‘while it is one thing to learn from the larger world’, it is quite another ‘to be swamped by it’. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native books?

Kymlicka’s warning about ‘swamping’ should make us sit up and take notice. The right has long exploited fears of cultural swamping to promote the idea that Western nations should pull up the drawbridge against immigrants whose cultural difference make them unsuitable. It is an argument that Kymlicka undoubtedly abhors. Yet once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly resist such anti-immigration arguments.

Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have ‘conflicting credos but the same vision of the world’. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples’. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.