"German" and "Ungerman": (Racial) Crisis as the New Normal in the United Germany

Speakers): Professor Fatima El-Tayeb, UC San Diego

The so-called European refugee crisis – a reference less to the plight of the millions desperately fleeing military, political and economic warzones than to the inconvenience their massive arrival is causing the European Union – has dominated debates across the continent since 2015. Germany has been at the center of these debates, both as the largest receiver of refugees and through Chancellor Merkel’s increasingly contested insistence that “We can do it” (changing the nation’s image from that of Europe’s bully, forcing harsh austerity on Greece, to that of standard bearer of European humanism). In my talk, I contextualize the current “refugee crisis” as part of a pattern of racialized crises that have become a means to manage post-Unification transformations in Germany’s national identity.
Fatima El-Tayeb is professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies and director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of two books, European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (University of Minnesota Press 2011; German translation: Anders europäisch, Unrast 2015) and Schwarze Deutsche. Rasse und nationale Identität, 1890-1933 (Black Germans. Race and National Identity, 1890-1933, Campus 2001), as well as of numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Her research interests include African and Comparative Diaspora Studies, Queer Theory, Transnational Feminism, European Migrant and Minority Cultures, Muslim communities in the West, Queer of Color Critique, and Visual Cultural Studies. Before coming to the US, she lived in Germany and the Netherlands, where she was active in black feminist, migrant, and queer of color organizations. She is also co-author of the movie Alles wird gut/Everything will be fine (Germany 1997).
 
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies and the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies