Abstract: Contested Alterity

“We asked for workers. We got people instead.” (Beth Lyon quoting Swiss playwright Max Rudolf Frisch on the cover of her book, 2016) This literature review evaluates the role of multiculturalism in Europe and its impact on social practices. Although ethno-cultural diversity has been for long the political kernel behind modern ideological state apparatuses, migration pressure on economic and political landscapes led to a growing skepticism in public fora, regarding the factuality of a harmonious heterogeneous world. Fears reinforced by the exposition of clandestine places of religious fundamentalism and seditious propaganda that put in peril the European civic fabric and its liberal values. Popular responses to foreigners and minority communities fluctuate from an enthusiastic acceptance to blatant intolerance; a state of emergency that brings the need of a new critical grammar of multiculturalism and integration (Leslie Adelson, 2005; Zygmunt Bauman, 2015).