Hypersexuality and Headscarves

Hypersexuality and Headscarves
Author: Damani J. Partridge
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2012-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253005310

In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and "foreign" Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers "left behind" in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

Paths Made by Walking

Paths Made by Walking
Author: Amina Tawasil
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253070880

What can women's scholastic pursuits tell us about what building an Islamic state looks like for women who are loyal to its project? And what can an ethnographic study of women who are using Islamic education to transform their conditions in Iran teach us about our own humanity? Paths Made by Walking provides insight into these questions by examining how Iranian women have participated in Islamic education since the 1979 revolution. This groundbreaking ethnography on Iranian howzevi (seminarian) women reveals how ideologies of womanhood, institutions, and Islamic practices have played a pivotal role in religiously conservative women's mobility in the Middle East. Applying over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Amina Tawasil analyzes how the Islamic education of seminarian women has propelled some of them into powerful positions in Iran, from close ties with the state's supreme leader and chief justice to membership in the Basij (voluntary military organization). At the same time, these women often choose to remain "hidden" or to otherwise follow practices that seem inscrutable or illogical from a framework of politicized resistance. By centering the howzevi women's senses of self and revealing their complex interpretations of their beliefs, Tawasil offers a fresh perspective on forms of feminine identity that do not always mirror supposedly universal desires for recognition, autonomy, leadership, or authority. Taking readers into the classrooms, living rooms, and compounds where howzevi women participate in intellectual discourse, Paths Made by Walking invites readers to reconsider their conceptualizations of the women who support the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Out of This World

Out of This World
Author: Priscilla Dionne Layne
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810147599

Examining Afro-German artists’ use of Afrofuturist tropes to critique German racial history The term Afrofuturism was first coined in the 1990s to describe African diasporic artists’ use of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to reimagine the diaspora’s pasts and to counter not only Eurocentric prejudices but also pessimistic narratives. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism focuses on contemporary Black German Afrofuturist literature and performance that critiques Eurocentrism and, specifically, German racism and colonial history. This young generation has, Priscilla Layne argues, engaged with Afrofuturism to disrupt linear time and imagine alternative worlds, to introduce non-Western technologies into the German cultural milieu, and to consider the possibilities of posthumanism. Their experiments in futurist and speculative narratives offer new tools for breaking with the binary thinking about race, culture, and gender identity that have been enforced by repressive ideological and state apparatuses, such as educational, cultural, and police institutions. Rather than providing escapism or purely imaginary alternatives, however, they have created a space—outer and artistic—in which their lives matter.

Blackness as a Universal Claim

Blackness as a Universal Claim
Author: Damani J. Partridge
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520382218

In this bold and provocative book, Damani J. Partridge examines the possibilities and limits of a universalized Black politics. Young people in Germany of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for their everyday struggle. Partridge tracks how these youth invoke the expressions of Black Power, acting out the medal-podium salute from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming "I am Malcolm X," expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents the demands by public-school teachers, federal-program leaders, and politicians that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state's commitment to antigenocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships among European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how the concept of Blackness energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.

Gendering Post-1945 German History

Gendering Post-1945 German History
Author: Karen Hagemann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789201926

Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.

Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Encoding Race, Encoding Class
Author: Sareeta Amrute
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2016-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822374277

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

Islamophobia and Lebanon

Islamophobia and Lebanon
Author: Ali Kassem
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2023-01-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0755647998

Thinking through anti, post, and decolonial theories, this book examines, analyses, and conceptualises 'visibly Muslim' Lebanese women's lived experiences of discrimination, assault, wounding, and erasure. Based on in-depth research alongside over 100 Sunni and Shia participant between 2017 and 2019 it situates these experiences at the intersection of the local and the global and argues for their conceptualisation as a form of structural and lived anti-Muslim racism. In doing this, it discusses the convergences and divergences of anti-Muslim racism in Lebanon with anti-Muslim racism in other parts of both the global north and the global south. It examines the production of this racialisation as well as its workings across spheres of public, private, work, and state – including an analysis of internalised self-hate. It further explores various forms of resistance and negotiation and the contemporary possibilities and impossibilities of working beyond the epistemic framework of Eurocentric modernity. As the first in-depth and extensive study of anti-Muslim racism within Muslim-majority and Arab-majority spaces, it offers an urgent and timely redress to multiple gaps and biases in the study of the Muslim-majority and Arab-majority worlds as well as racialisation broadly and Islamophobia specifically.

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art
Author: Peter Chametzky
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262045761

The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects--those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel--and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German. With a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of "us" and "them" in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white, Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of "foreign bodies" among the German body politic; that grapple with food as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time. American discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills this gap.

White Rebels in Black

White Rebels in Black
Author: Priscilla Dionne Layne
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472123831

Analyzing literary texts and films, White Rebels in Black shows how German authors have since the 1950s appropriated black popular culture, particularly music, to distance themselves from the legacy of Nazi Germany, authoritarianism, and racism, and how such appropriation changes over time. Priscilla Layne offers a critique of how blackness came to symbolize a positive escape from the hegemonic masculinity of postwar Germany, and how black identities have been represented as separate from, and in opposition to, German identity, foreclosing the possibility of being both black and German. Citing four autobiographies published by black German authors Hans Jürgen Massaquo, Theodor Michael, Günter Kaufmann, and Charly Graf, Layne considers how black German men have related to hegemonic masculinity since Nazi Germany, and concludes with a discussion on the work of black German poet, Philipp Khabo Köpsell.

Former Neighbors, Future Allies?

Former Neighbors, Future Allies?
Author: A. Dana Weber
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800738978

German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.