ABSTRACT
The exclusion and marginalisation of new ethnic minorities in post-war Europe, and new forms of racism and xenophobia, can be approached by looking at the politics of identity construction in contemporary Danish society. Identity is a concept that is largely dependent on social validation and institutional power relations, hence it carries different social meanings in different social and sociopolitical contexts. That identity is fluid does not mean that we cannot grasp the mechanisms and processes that objectivise it through the discursive production of symbolic meaning in the societal production of culture. The main thrust of my argument is that the exclusion of minority ethnic communities from the social, economic, and cultural spheres has a great deal to do with the politics of identity construction by institutional discourse. This exclusion needs serious analysis not of immigrant cultures but of the symbolic production of meaning by dominant societal institutions.
