Full Description
Interrogating Integration explores how international sporting spectacles, media campaigns, and public debates construct racialized national identity in an era of rising right-wing nationalism. Across Europe, "integration" has emerged as a guiding concept to regulate cultural differences, particularly in Germany, where integration became a watchword after the introduction of birthright citizenship in 2000. The legal expansion of German citizenship threatened the homogeneous definition of the nation and spurred increased scrutiny of immigrants and Germans of color, primarily Muslim and Black Germans. This opened a new chapter in the long struggle over German identity. The celebrations, scandals, and debates analyzed here reveal how the admission of new citizens inspired an optimistic cosmopolitanism that claimed to differentiate the new Germany from its fascist past while simultaneously reinscribing racialized hierarchies and providing fuel for rising far-right politics.
Using touchstones of public memory, including events surrounding men's World Cup soccer and the record-breaking success of a book blaming Muslims for Germany's decline, Zambon examines persistent problems in European conceptions of race, where racializing projects take place under an "ideology of racelessness" and the atrocities of historical and transnational racisms are used to deny current local forms of racism.
Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Integration, Race, and Popular Nationalism
Sentimental Citizenship: Heimat and Being at Home
Selling the Nation on Itself: Transforming the People through Global Sporting Spectacle
"Soccer Patriotism": Rehabilitating Celebratory Nationalism in the 2006 World Cup
Sport Integration: The Promise and Peril of "New Germans"
Immigrant Patriotism: The Redemption of National Pride
Destructive Productivity: The Sarrazin Debate and the Threat of Proliferating Noncitizens
Models and Miscreants: The Integration Bambi Awards
Conclusion: Separating Fact from Fairy Tales in Germany's Willkommenskultur
References
Index
