Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia in Austria as historicist racism

This paper examines discourses of liberal Islamophobia in Austria, analysing interviews with journalists from national newspapers, magazines and TV station. Using a theoretical framework that combines a Gramscian analysis with methods of discourse analysis, it identifies “temporalization” as an effective discursive mechanism in the construction of the Muslim “Other” as a “folk devil”. It argues that liberal Islamophobia works as a historicist racism, which allows differently positioned subjects to invest into, and reproduce, a mythical space of representation where the Muslim “Other” figures as a “devil from our past”, embodying everything Austrian society has supposedly done away with in the years of political reform after 1968.