Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work "crisis talk" does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.

Brigitte Hipfl is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She works on media and gender, subject formations, the affective labor of media, and postcolonial Europe, and is currently exploring migration in Austrian cinema and TV. Her publications include Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge (2012) co-edited with Kristín Loftsdóttir.

List of Illustrations

Introduction
Kristín Loftsdóttir, Andrea L. Smith, and Brigitte Hipfl

Chapter 1. Wise Viking Daughters: Equality and Whiteness in Economic Crisis
Kristín Loftsdóttir and Helga Björnsdóttir

Chapter 2. "Latvians do not understand the Greek people": Europeanness and Complicit Becoming in the Midst of Financial Crisis
Dace Dzenovska

Chapter 3. Fairness and Entitlement in Neoliberal England, 2005-2015
Steve Garner

Chapter 4. Debating Refugee Deservingness in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
Shay Cannedy

Chapter 5. What is a Life? On Poverty and Race in Humanitarian Italy
Andrea Muehlebach

Chapter 6. Policing Crisis in Austrian Crime Fiction
Brigitte Hipfl

Chapter 7. Crisis France: Covert Racialization and the Gens du Voyage
Andrea L. Smith

Chapter 8. Navigating the Mediterranean Refugee "Crisis": Alter-Globalization Activism and the Sediments of History on Lampedusa
Antonio Sorge

Epilogue: Declining Europe
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Index