Race and Racism: Putting Switzerland on the Map

International Conference, University of Fribourg

This international conference historicizes and contextualizes Switzerland’s participation in European racist ideas and practices, at home and abroad. By spotlighting a country with a long-held proud idea of neutrality and humanitarianism, Switzerland affords an opportunity to look at a particular mode of racism: one that James Baldwin characterized as “innocent” in his 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village.”

Hence, putting Switzerland on the map of race and racism studies allows for an interpretation that makes racial innocence visible. Racism, in its antisemitic and varied forms, toward Jewish, Indigenous, African, Black, Latinx, Asian, Mixed, Muslim, Migrant, Roma, Sinti, and Yenish communities is a daily experience for many in Switzerland and beyond. Intersecting in many forms with class, ability, age, gender, sexuality, religion or nationality, this racism is rooted in Western European ideas and practices forcefully projected on to the human world, and the planet, since the 1400s.

In the French and German anthology Un/Doing Race that spawned this international conference, the editors and contributors situate Switzerland within the paradoxes of cherished racial innocence and whiteness in this small landlocked country. This Swiss-specific conversation is broadened through this conference, that is also an invitation to those born human, but acculturated into whiteness, to participate in dismantling whiteness and racism.

Deadline for Participation: 22 May 2022.

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