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Abstract
This article examines the ways in which travel serves as an analytic to understand citizenship and the production of noncitizens after the Berlin Wall. This production is linked to a shift in the post-Wall German and European discourses and practices of asylum, which are significantly renegotiated and restricted shortly after the Wall falls. It is not only the law that changes, but also the mobility of the subjects perceived not to belong. The production of non-citizens is also related to official and unofficial articulations that attach Germanness to “Whiteness.” “Black” subjects must not only negotiate their citizenship via real histories of mobility and displacement but also because their skin itself signifies travel and adventure. In the end, I write about the space that this imagination of travel and adventure through “Black” bodies both opens up and closes off for a politics based on “Blackness.” I turn from normative accounts to the voices and bodies of “Black” subjects themselves.
The writing of this article would not have been possible without financial support from the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Lowie Olson Funds from the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, the Faculty Enhancement Fellowship Award, and research funds from the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. I also benefited during a semester leave from the resources at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humbolt University, Berlin under Prof. Wolfgang Kaschuba's direction.
In preparing this and an earlier version, I received invaluable comments and criticism from Aihwa Ong, Judith Butler, Allan Pred, Paul Rabinow, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, John Borneman, Duana Fullwiley, Kelly Askew, Miriam Ticktin, Nitasha Sharma, Andrew Shryock, Rebecca Hardin, Eduardo Kohn, Nadine Naber, Julia Paley, Elizabeth Roberts, two anonymous reviewers, and the Identities editors, Drs. Jonathan Hill and Thomas Wilson, as well as a number of other public and private audiences. Thank you.
Notes
1. For me, “Black” variously means “of African descent,” and sometimes simply Other. Needless to say, I am aware of a problematics in which people who are seen as Other also want to distance themselves from “Blackness.” I want to leave the category of “Blackness” open, while recognizing the ways in which it is often closed.
2. While Poles now have full rights to move through the European Union, the hierarchy of the relationship to movement is nevertheless made via this example.
3. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), in Germany's northeast, is a region that includes major tourist destinations on the Baltic Sea. It was also the location of the 2007 G8 meetings.
4. Access to German language courses is a major issue.
5. As opposed to a positive right to asylum, the “kleines Asyl” (small or little asylum) expresses a Verbot (ban) against deportation. On their web site, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior lists asylum in terms of three levels, Großes Asyl (large asylum), Kleines Asyl, and Subsidärer Schutz (subsidiary protection) (see http://www. stmi.bayern.de/buerger/auslaender/asyl/detail/06477/index.php, viewed February 1, 2008). The main grounds for the “large asylum” is political persecution.
6. Explaining “time-space compression,” David Harvey writes: “The time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider variegated space” (1990: 147).
7. Except where otherwise noted, all interviews in this text were conducted in German. I have translated them into English.
8. Rostock is an infamous port city on the Baltic Sea. After the fall of the Wall, the West German government sent many asylum seekers here, and they ended up fearing for their lives owing to instances of severe violence in which hundreds of youth threw Molotov cocktails and entered homes of “foreign” residents shouting “Foreigners get out.”
9. The subaltern is defined here as outside the binary oppositions of “Self” and “Other,” “East” and “West,” or “Black” and “White.”
10. More recently, Michelle M. Wright has written about “‘Blackness’ as a unity of diversity” (Citation2004: 5–6).
11. In analyzing the play Keloglan in Alamania, by Turkish-German playwright and author Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Katrin Sieg concludes very similarly to J.B. “In this play, there is no ethnicity outside of its performance; like Joan Riviere's famous essay, which theorized the same about femininity and the masquerade, Özdamar's dramaturgical thesis, that ethnicity and masquerade are the same thing, is both novel and consonant with orientalist presumptions” (2002: 244).
12. As noted in the introduction, by technologies of exclusion, I do not mean only physical technologies such as border fences or surveillance cameras, but also social technologies such as immigration law, asylum law, and the German Ausländergesetz (or “foreigner law”). They are not just exclusionary, but also productive, in that they produce the “foreign” subject as a noncitizen.
