Politics Beyond Citizenship: Blackness and Jewishness (in Contemporary Germany) Now
Image credit: Street Art from Theater X in Berlin-Moabit. Photo: Damani Partridge, 2024.
This paper thinks Blackness and Jewishness in relation to historical and contemporary claims to citizenship in Germany. It asks: What hope does citizenship offer as a universal claim, and what impossibilities does it create vis-à-vis Blackness and Jewishness? To what extent are these concepts linked and how do they diverge in contemporary German life? The paper is centered in anthropological research in contemporary Germany where Holocaust memory plays a major role in terms of how Jewishness gets incorporated. Blackness offers a different possibility for making universal political claims.
Damani Partridge is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies with an affiliation in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His work examines noncitizen politics, affect, urbanity, sexuality, decolonization, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, and Blackness and universality. He directs “Filming Future Cities” in Detroit and Berlin.
His most recent book, Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen politics, and Black power in Berlin was published in 2023.
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