ABSTRACT Based on a broad understanding of institutions, the question of institutional racism concerns not only specific authorities, but also political fields established through formal and informal rules and norms. Since 9/11, the so-called prevention of Islamist extremism, shaped and regulated by various state and non-state institutions, has developed as an independent field of work in many western countries. Thus, it is not surprising that critical security researchers have increasingly addressed the question of the potentially stigmatizing effects of this work on Muslim minorities. However, initial findings from our research project on the nexus between the prevention of Islamist extremism on the one hand, and racism in Germany on the other, show that the connections between the two are far more complex than assumed. Certain prevention practices, such as the specific targeting of Muslim individuals and communities, seem not only to have stigmatizing effects (racism through prevention), but also to (re)produce anti-Muslim racism. At the same time, the study also shows that racist ideas in society can hinder the implementation of prevention measures (racism within prevention). In this light, Gaspar and Kirchgässner argue that the prevention of Islamist extremism must be understood as an (institutionalized) political field that not only has stigmatizing effects but also operates within existing racist structures. To understand these structures better, they argue for a stronger theoretical link between critical security studies and research on racism.

ABSTRACT Modjeska Monteith Simkins was one of the most significant voices in the struggle for African American rights in South Carolina during the twentieth century. For a decade, starting in the mid-1960s, that voice was heard most Wednesdays on the black-oriented WOIC-Columbia radio station. Ward’s article uses Simkins’s career as activist and broadcaster to revisit the complexities of black female leadership in the South, particularly during the transition from the nominally ‘civil rights’ to the nominally ‘black power’ phase of the freedom struggle. In so doing it extends debates about ‘periodization’ and ‘nomenclature’, and reveals the challenges of adequately theorizing the protean qualities of much black female leadership. By mapping Simkins’s attempts to navigate the competing demands of intersecting racial, gender, religious and class imperatives while trying to promote a viable participatory politics among, and greater opportunities for, the black masses, it suggests new, more fluid ways of thinking about the dynamic complexities of black leadership.

ABSTRACT Although the demography and economy of Florida in the mid-twentieth century diverged sharply from the rest of the former Confederacy, the political elite of the state resisted the efforts of desegregation about as firmly as the leadership of the rest of the South did, though perhaps more subtly. What made Florida so singular was its appeal to tourists and migrants, an openness that also made the state more vulnerable to outside scrutiny and pressure than more isolated states in the region. That is why, in 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Martin Luther King, Jr picked St Augustine to highlight the persistence of legally enforced white supremacy, when the city sought to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its founding. As in Birmingham, as in Selma, the SCLC chose wisely, because the vehemence of local white leadership exposed so dramatically the violence and cruelty that permeated Jim Crow. The crisis attracted outside attorneys like Alvin J. Bronstein to protect the rights of protestors and, even more importantly, drew in the Miami-based Tobias Simon, a key lawyer for progressive causes in the state. The conflict educated a federal judge named Bryan Simpson, whose sympathies the Freedom Struggle achieved in enlisting. Whitfield’s article shows that the crisis in St Augustine that spring and summer served as the inescapable backdrop for the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) that changed the South, and therefore the nation.

ABSTRACT Linhard’s article shows how the imaginary worlds of German pulp author Karl May (1842–1912) appear in the memories of Jewish and anti-fascist refugees who found asylum in the Americas. Yet the refugees were not the only ones who had once been avid readers of May’s fictions: his novels were just as appealing to supporters of fascism, even, some claim, to Hitler himself. May’s novels are built on racialized and gendered imaginaries that made them equally suitable for those who saw indigenous cultures in the Americas as ultimately inferior and in need of guidance from the European characters, and those who brought with them romantic visions of still racialized, yet benevolent and noble natives. These visions bear no relationship to indigenous cultures in Latin America and instead are transposed from beliefs and tropes about the ‘Indians’ featured in the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Writers forced into exile, among them Leo Spitzer, Klaus Mann, Gertrude Duby and Egon Erwin Kisch, wrote about the ways in which reading May shaped how they once saw the Americas. The traces of May’s influence in the writings of displaced Jews and anti-fascists reveal a certain blindness to colonial racism that, while characteristic of the times when these authors came of age, was still part of world-views that many were not ready to challenge. Understanding the impact of the work of a man who called his novels ‘travel narratives’ (even though he never visited the places he claimed to be writing about) brings us one step closer to understanding more about the inner lives of Holocaust refugees in the colonial world.

ABSTRACT In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia—a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige—and conviviality—the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city—as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is this more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them, upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, the structure of feeling includes two elements in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings; and a fragile emergent form of convivial coexistence that finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. Gidley’s article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the southern shore and with Barking on the northern shore of the Thames.

ABSTRACT Ervedosa’s article demonstrates from a cultural perspective that the categories ‘Südländer’ (Southerner) and ‘südländisches Aussehen’ (Southern looks) in German police reports are discriminatory since they challenge the central principles of the German constitution. They infringe the fundamental right in Article 3.3, that is, the right not to be racially discriminated against, the fundamental rights of human dignity (Article 1.1) and human equality (Article 3.1), as well as the constitutional right to be a German citizen regardless of one’s skin colour (Article 116). It argues that the terms are a form of skin-colour racism in that the police carry out their work—investigations, searches, inquiries and so on—on the basis of the perpetrator’s racialized phenotype. The categories basically stand for ‘Mediterranean looks’—even referred to in the past as the ‘Mediterranean race’—and phenotype: dark hair, dark eyes and so-called ‘skin type IV’, that is, ‘olive or brown skin’. They are the product of a tradition of racialized, exclusionary thinking that collides with the humanistic and democratic values of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law).

ABSTRACT In this article, Wolin attempts to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the philosophical grounds of Heidegger’s support for National Socialism. Much of the previous literature has assumed that Heidegger, as an exponent of Existenzphilosophie, opposed Nazism on epistemological grounds. Heidegger’s defenders maintain that, since the Nazi world-view was predicated on ‘biological racism’, and since Heidegger was an inveterate critic of modern science, an unbridgeable gulf separated his Denkhabitus from the Nazi credo. However, careful scrutiny of the basic tenets of Nazi race doctrine indicates that it had very little in common with ‘scientism’. Instead, race thinking was an inherently ideological construct that emerged in polemical opposition to nineteenth-century positivism. As such, it was saturated with mystical and spiritualist elements. The end result was a confused, yet highly potent, amalgam of German romanticism, fin-de-siècle esotericism (Ariosophy), Aryan supremacism and Bismarckian Machtpolitik. At base, Nazi ‘race science’ was a contradictio in adjecto, a paradigmatic instance of modern political myth. As ‘myth’, it was untethered by the customary empirical and disciplinary constraints of the ‘logic of scientific discovery’. Moreover, Heidegger’s views on race thinking were far from unilaterally negative. In the Black Notebooks II–VI, he praised ‘race [as] a necessary and mediate condition of historical Dasein’. Fundamentally, there are very few qualitative differences between Heidegger’s defence of ‘spiritual racism’ and the understanding of race thinking propagated by Nazi ideologues such as Hans F. K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. According to the philosopher and Heidegger student Karl Löwith, Heidegger ‘was not merely a distinguished representative of the “German revolution”; he was so in a manner much more radical than Ernst Krieck or Alfred Rosenberg.’

ABSTRACT Germany’s Covid-19 protesters and members of the far right have tried to appropriate two key historical figures associated with the German anti-Nazi resistance, Sophie Scholl (1921–1943), who distributed anti-government leaflets, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907–1944), the mastermind of the failed coup of 20 July 1944. Neumann places these attempts in the context of the afterlives of Scholl, Stauffenberg and aspiring Hitler assassin Georg Elser (1903–1945). First, he argues that the far right’s attempt to claim Stauffenberg should not be read as a move to deny the Holocaust, nor to reject Germany’s responsibility for it, but rather to distance itself from Holocaust deniers and shift public discourses about German identity and history. Second, he argues that Covid-19 protesters have identified with Scholl because she has been considered the quintessential ‘good German’, she cannot be located on a left–right political spectrum and she represents German resistance as well as victimhood. Finally, he suggests that the success of these attempts to appropriate historical figures points to a lack of knowledge not about Nazi Germany’s victims, or about Scholl and Stauffenberg themselves, but rather about the nature of the Nazi regime.