The politics of multiculturalism, citizenship, and exclusion

In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and "foreign" Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers "left behind" in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

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[T]his book is an important addition to scholarship on citizenship and minority inclusion/exclusion in Europe, adding a much-needed perspective on Germany to a field dominated by work on Britain and France. It is highly readable: Partridge has an easy, engaging style that makes the book eminently suitable for undergraduates, in addition to graduate students and specialists.

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Hypersexuality and Headscarves is a critical analysis of the dynamics of race and citizenship in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With this highly original investigation, Partridge offers an important contribution to the study of race in Germany.

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[This] book's impressive ethnographic breadth thus serves to convey just how varied, pervasive, and entrenched the mechanisms of exclusion are in Germany. . . Taken as a whole, Partridge's portrait of exclusion in Germany is an illuminating and damning one. August 2013