Editors' Introduction

"An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center" (8), writes critic and poet Claudia Rankine in her genre-blending 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric. This passage—like Citizen more broadly—encapsulates the affective experience and corporeal consequences of exposure to everyday racism for the black (woman) subject, who is addressed throughout the book with the second-person "you." The unsettled feeling described by Rankine arises from the constant threat to the black body posed by expressions of racist violence and microaggressions, both linguistic and physical, which the book documents in seven wide-ranging chapters that attend to both personal experiences and public examples, including the racist treatment of tennis star Serena Williams, the structural racism underpinning the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the murder of people of African descent, especially at the hands of the police: "because white men can't / police their imagination / black people are dying" (135). In Citizen, Rankine combines poetry and criticism, punctuated by media images and visual art, to find a new formal language for giving voice to the felt experience of the raced, gendered body today.

"An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center": Rankine's line might serve as an epigraph for our times, when the flagrant endorsement of white supremacy in the policies and platforms of elected officials across Euro-America and beyond poses an open, public threat, especially to the bodies of people of color. In Germany, the extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) has experienced a meteoric rise in public support and is currently the most powerful opposition party within the German government. Overtly racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Islam, the AfD's platform also advocates explicitly misogynist and homo-and transphobic policies and denies human-induced climate change. In the United States, the devastating racist and anti-immigrant stance of the Trump administration, widely supported by white Americans, has openly institutionalized hate-based politics, underwriting raids targeting minoritized groups, mass deportations, and the incarceration of children under inhumane conditions, all tactics that resonate with the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including the genocidal crimes of the Nazis. The resurgence of fascist movements and ideas in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere demands our vigilant attention and action as feminist scholars of German studies who are committed to social justice, intersectional critique, and combating violence in all forms, especially violence against vulnerable bodies.

"An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center": the American Heritage Dictionary defines unsettled as "Not in a state of order or calmness; disturbed," but also as "Uninhabited or not occupied by settlers" as well as "Not fixed or established." Rankine's use of the word unsettled indicates the disturbed affects arising from the precarity of the vulnerable body; it also suggests the sense in which that precarity derives from the violent incursion of the settler. As the 2019 Open Letter to the American Association of Teachers of German—composed by a group of scholar-activists participating in the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum conference, and endorsed by over two hundred signatories—reminds us, the history of German studies is entwined with the history of settler colonialism, ethnonationalism, racism, and white supremacy, "often coupled with heteronormativity, misogyny, and ableism to reinforce a homogenous vision of Germany and German Studies." We heed the urgent call articulated in the open letter to dismantle white supremacy and to work harder on behalf of antiracism, diversity, inclusive access, and an-ticolonization, and we are committed as editors to pursuing this work in the space of Feminist German Studies.

We begin our introduction to volume 35—an issue whose contributions place a special focus on vulnerable bodies—by citing Rankines Citizen because of its signal political and aesthetic intervention, which unsettles conceptions of citizenship and belonging in an age of resurgent fascism through its notable unsettling of conventional modes of representation. Rankine's blurring of genre and form to make palpable "an unsettled feeling [that] keeps the body front and center" shares something in common with other recent works that blend theory and criticism with poetic and literary language, offering...