Full Description
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.
Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I OCCUPYING BLACKNESS
1. After Diaspora, Beyond Citizenship
2. Exploding Hitler and Americanizing Germany: Occupying Black Bodies and Postwar Desire
3. Occupying American Blackness and Reconfiguring European Spaces: Noncitizen
Articulations in Berlin and Beyond
PART II HOLOCAUST MEMORY AND EXCLUSIONARY DEMOCRACY
4. Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): Monumental Memory amid Contemporary Race
5. Democratization as Exclusion: Noncitizen Futures, Holocaust Heritage, and the
Defunding of Refugee Participation
PART III NONCITIZEN FUTURES
6. The Rehearsal Is the Revolution: "Insurrectionary Imagination"
7. Articulating a Noncitizen Politics: Nation-State Pity versus Black Possibility
Conclusion: From Claiming Blackness to Black Liberation
Key Terms and Sites
Notes
Bibliography
Index
