A discourse of displacement: super-diversity, urban citizenship, and the politics of autochthony in Amsterdam

Abstract

The notion of super-diversity has been employed to describe the urban condition in cities across the world. By focusing on the politics of culturalization in the Netherlands, I engage with scholars who claim that super-diversity may lead to a normalcy of difference. I argue that in the Netherlands a culturalist common sense has emerged which divides Dutch society into distinct and internally homogeneous cultures and which represents Dutch culture as a threatened entity that must be protected against the mores and moralities of minoritized, racialized outsiders. Focusing on working-class whites in a neighbourhood in Amsterdam, I show how plans to demolish and restructure their neighbourhood fuelled a discourse of displacement in antagonistic relation to “Others”. Rather than normalizing differences, this culturalist common sense has brought into being a field of knowledge and both reflected and supported views that produce and reinforce boundaries between “ordinary” neighbours and cultural and social others.