ABOUT THIS BOOK

This remarkable study develops a theoretical critique of contemporary discourses on secularism and assimilation, arguing that the perspective of assimilating distinct religious minorities by incorporating them into a secular and supposedly neutral public sphere may be self-subverting. To flesh out this insight, Jansen draws on the paradoxes of assimilation as experienced by the French Jews in the late 19th century through a contextualised reading of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She proposes a dynamic, critical multiculturalism as an alternative to discourses focusing on secularism, assimilation and integration.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Yolande Jansen is Socrates professor of humanism in relation to religion and secularity at the VU University Amsterdam and a senior researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Globalisation Studies, University of Amsterdam.

REVIEWS

“Jansen has given us a brilliant and thorough philosophical reading of current writings on assimilation, multiculturalism, and secularism, weaving together a rereading of Proust on Jewish experiences of the paradoxes of assimilation with current debates about the situation of Muslims in Europe. She seeks no less than to reposition these debates in a renewed sense of multiculturalism as a critique of modernist assumptions about liberalism and assimilation.”

— John R. Bowen, Washington University in St. Louis

“Jansen’s book shows how even the most sophisticated academic views defending secularism and assimilation remain rooted in unexamined ‘modernist dichotomies’ inherited from French (and to some extent, European) modernism.”

— Rainer Bauboeck, European University Institute

“A must read. Not just another book on multiculturalism or laïcité: Yolande Jansen’s work is a hard-hitting and back to basics reminder of multiculturalism fundamentals. It also offers a brilliant, pragmatic and insightful analysis of what secularism makes invisible about the position of Muslims in France today. The subtle and delicate reference to Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du Temps Perdu makes Jansen’s work unique, brave and powerful.”

— Rim-Sarah Alouane, Université Toulouse I-Capitole

"For anyone who seeks to understand the roots of the ‘deepening crisis of multiculturalism’ in Europe, Yolande Jansen's book is required reading. Jansen's brilliant and insightful analysis draws on a variety of fields and lucidly shows how the crisis is a crisis in modernity. Subtly weaving Proust into the argument, she brings a dry subject to life."

— Brian Klug, University of Oxford

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter one. The crisis of multiculturalism, new assimilationism and secularism

Chapter two. Assimilation in the French sociology of incorporation from a multicultural perspective Introduction: Why reintroduce assimilation?

1. Gérard Noiriel. Writing the history of power in the context of migration

2. A multicultural perspective: I been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time

Chapter three. The new liberal sociology of assimilation and its transnationalist alternatives

Introduction: The international sociological debate about assimilation and its normative implications

1. Critique of postnationalism, multiculturalism and integration

2. The alternatives proposed by the ‘liberal assimilationists’

3. Complications for a diagnosis: ‘On their turf’

4. Alternatives

5. Against the new discourses of assimilation

Transit I: To the Proustian pluriverse or Proust as a witness of assimilation in nineteenth19th-century France

Europe; initial connections with the secularism-religion framework

Chapter four. Alfred Bloch’s personal integration test at the threshold of the protagonist’s family’s home

1. ‘And what’s the name of this friend of yours who is coming this evening?’

2. The Revolution’s conditions of Emancipation

3. Bloch coping with paradox

Chapter five. Stuck in a revolving door. Cultural memory, assimilation and secularisation

Introduction: Assimilation, cultural memory and metaphor

1. Bloch and his family being ‘picturesque rather than pleasing’ at the beach

2. Hannah Arendt reads Proust; from Judaism to Jewishness

3. Scratching the surface; Zygmunt Bauman and the paradoxes of assimilation

4. ‘A consubstantial malaise of republican society’

Transit II: Laïcité and assimilation in the Third Republic and today

Chapter six. Elements for a critique of the laïcité¬-religion framework

Introduction: Towards a genealogy of the laïcité¬-religion framework

1. Laïcité and neo-Kantian liberalism

2. Kant at school; Durkheim and Buisson

3. The genealogy of the religious ‘sign’ with a French twist towards ordre public

Chapter seven. Secularism, sociology, security
Introduction: The sociology of secularisation and the normative concept of laïcité

1. The Stasir Report: Un rapport sans médiation

2. Secularism or democratic multiculturalism?

Chapter eight. The highly precarious structure of assimilation: modernist philosophical schemes, memory and the Proustian narrative
Introduction: The invention of tense pasts ‘after’ assimilation
1. Adorno and Benjamin on assimilation and the rejection of Swann

2. Public and private Dreyfusism

3. The social discipline of forgetting

Democratic memory

1. The assimilation of the French Jews as a memory for today

2. Getting stuck in a revolving door in the early twenty-first21st century

3. Problematising the laïcité-religion framework instead of defining a better laicité

4. Multicultural alternatives