Skip to product information
1 of 1

Blackness as a Universal Claim

Regular price $34.95
Regular price $0.00 Sale price $34.95
Sold out
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...
Read More
  • 06 December 2022
View Product Details
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.
 
files/i.png Icon
Price: $34.95
Pages: 238
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 06 December 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520382213
Format: Paperback
REVIEWS Icon
"[The book] succeeds in demonstrating the need for Blackness as a mode of seeing across the totality of human existence."

"By focusing on how the rhetoric about Blackness shifted and was impacted by external events like the Civil Rights Movement within the context of the occupation and democratization period in Germany, this discussion sets the stage for linking the emerging historical contradictions with Holocaust memory and processes of democratization."

“[The book] provides a stimulating take on how Blackness—having experienced many hard-won successes tied to rights, agency, and recognition on the international stage—has enabled opportunities for minoritized groups in Berlin to make calculated and confident steps toward liberation and justice in a biased and discriminatory system.
Featuring elements of Critical Race Theory, such as antiracism, which holds people and institutions accountable, and the significance of testimony, the book examines how People of Color in Germany have fought for liberation through a crafted and deliberate engagement with Blackness.”
 
Damani J. Partridge is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
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