Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany by Damani J. Partridge (review)

We know the conventional story. On October 9, 1989, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched around the city center of Leipzig, many of them shouting “Wir sind das Volk”—“We are the people.” It was the largest demonstration in the GDR’s history, and it set in motion the “peaceful revolution” that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the end of the Cold War. In the dominant liberal narrative of German unification, Leipzig is part of a story of unfolding freedom.

Partridge’s book tells a different story. In Leipzig, he notes, the demonstrators’ chants quickly changed to “Wir sind ein Volk”—“We are one people.” That linguistic shift, Partridge contends, did not merely signal the demand for the reunification of a fractured nation. It also signaled a transformation in the conception of citizenship from one based on universal rights—liberty, equality, justice—to one based on belonging to an essential German nation. Leipzig foretold the coming of a new Germany, not as a space of freedom but as a space of violence and exclusion. The crux of Partridge’s argument is that the freedoms offered by new German citizenship—to travel, to consume, to live private lives—are contingent on the subjection of non-Germans, increasingly targets of surveillance and policing, border control, social discrimination, and harassment. “From the perspective of noncitizens,” Partridge writes, “1989 was the beginning of a new violence” (3).

Anchoring the book analytically are two key concepts. First, “exclusionary incorporation” describes a system in which “the presence of noncitizens is formally recognized but there is no chance of equal participation” (2). The liberal state cares for its citizens’ education, employment, health, and housing; noncitizens are defined by a lack of such solicitude. Patridge’s second concept of “noncitizenship” “opens up a space for thinking about how the foreign subject is incorporated into social and political life without being totally excluded” (23). Here, Partridge joins political theorists like Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion, 2008), Patchen Markell (Bound by Recognition, 2003), and Etienne Balibar (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 1991) in muddying the distinction between exclusionary and inclusionary practices of the liberal nation-state. All point to the myriad ways in which the liberal state reinforces national identity and state sovereignty by including minorities within it, though never as full citizens.

Importantly, Partridge argues that exclusionary incorporation proceeds not only through formal laws and policies but also through popular culture and everyday social life. Partridge is at his best when tracing exclusionary incorporation in the everyday, giving ethnographic life to the operation of liberal citizenship in Germany. He is particularly attuned to the way that state power works through ordinary social relations and the everyday guardians of the nation-state’s boundaries—teachers, taxi drivers, and other “street bureaucrats”—who maintain and manage exclusionary incorporation.

In one chapter, for example, Partridge describes how relationships with Black men, and the consumption of the eroticized Black male body, allowed White German women from the East to become normatively German. Like other chapters, this one draws on multiple evidentiary sources—interviews, participant observation, films, magazines—to map the complex entwinement of race and sex, inclusion and exclusion, everyday practice and state law, as well as the shifting power relations that underpin the construction of Germanness. In contemporary Germany, formal legislation makes it almost impossible for Africans to immigrate legally. However, encounters between German women and African men in everyday spaces like dance clubs interrupt the law’s boundary drawing, giving White German women the power to make noncitizens into legal residents by entering into intimate relationships with them. At the same time, Black noncitizens remain outsiders, since “Black male bodies can be incorporated if White women see them as beautiful and if they successfully perform hypersexuality” (81). Exclusionary incorporation mobilizes the noncitizen to produce the normative citizen: the Black noncitizen’s...