After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech

✍ Scribed by Gavan Titley; Des Freedman; Gholam Khiabany; Aurélien Mondon (editors)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 322
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

As the world looked on in horror at the Paris terror attacks of January and November 2015, France found itself at the centre of a war that has split across nations and continents. The attacks set in motion a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance, and have fuelled the resurgence of the far right across Europe and beyond, while leaving the left dangerously divided. These developments raise profound questions about a number of issues central to contemporary debates, including the nature of national identity, the limits to freedom of speech, and the role of both traditional and social media.
After Charlie Hebdo brings together an international range of scholars to assess the social and political impact of the Paris attacks in Europe and beyond. Cutting through the hysteria that has characterised so much of the initial commentary, it seeks to place these events in their wider global context, untangling the complex symbolic web woven around ‘Charlie Hebdo’ to pose the fundamental question – how best to combat racism in our supposedly ‘post-racial’ age?

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Endorsements
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. The contested republic
1. Charlie Hebdo, Republican secularism and Islamophobia
2. The meaning of ‘Charlie’: the debate on the troubled French identity
3. After the drama: the institutionalisation of gossiping about Muslims
4. A double-bind situation? The depoliticisation of violence and the politics of compensation
Part II. The long ‘war on terror’
5. The whiteness of innocence: Charlie Hebdo and the metaphysics of anti-terrorism in Europe
6. The visible hand of the state
7. Symbolic politics with brutally real effects: when ‘nobodies’ make history
8. Extremism, theirs and ours: Britain’s ‘generational struggle’
Part III. Media events and media dynamics
9. From Jyllands-Posten to Charlie Hebdo: domesticating the Mohammed cartoons
10. #JeSuisCharlie, #JeNeSuisPasCharlie and ad hoc publics
11. Mediated narratives as competing histories of the present
Part IV. The politics of free speech
12. Media power and the framing of the Charlie Hebdo attacks
13. We hate to quote Stanley Fish, but: “There’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too.” Or is it?
14. Jouissance and submission: ‘free speech’, colonial diagnostics and psychoanalytic responses to Charlie Hebdo
Part V. Racism and anti-racism in post-racial times
15. Not afraid
16. ‘Je Suis Juif’: Charlie Hebdo and the remaking of antisemitism
17. Race, caste and gender in France
18. The ideology of the Holy Republic as part of the colonial counter-revolution
About the contributors
Index