Celebrity migrants and the racialized logic of integration in Germany

ABSTRACT

Since the turn of the millennium, “integration” has become a predominant floating signifier in discourse and policy regulating the place of immigrants and minorities in European societies. This study analyzes a self-described “integration campaign” that used celebrity exemplars to promote the German language to immigrants and their descendants. This case demonstrates the interrelationship between celebrations of new German diversity and discourses that frame immigrants-and especially Muslims-as a potential threat to national life. This campaign combines two potent sites of symbolic cultural politics: language and the body. It uses racialized celebrity exemplars to articulate normative whiteness symbolized by standardized German. The campaign targets the imagined figure of the perpetual migrant who is beyond the reach of the German language and, thus, outside the regulatory and disciplinary control of majority society. While it is self-styled as a playful invitation to learn German, the content of the campaign, its theme song, and the press discourse about it use racialized celebrity bodies to affirm colorblind meritocracy while devaluing the lives of racialized “migrants”who are unable or unwilling to conform.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• Migration
• Celebrity
• Language
• Integration
• Cultural politics
• Germany

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lit. “Out with language, into life.” Raus mit der Sprache is an idiom, which loosely translates to “speak up” or “out with it.”

2. WISO-net.de includes 188 local, regional, and national periodicals.

3. The first-run campaign also included a number of non-celebrity people of color who work in media and public relations.

4. Harris uses a highly pejorative term for foreigners that is associated with Turkish and Arab minorities. The term was partially “reclaimed” in the 1990s in the Kanak Attak movement (see Göktürk, Gramling, & Kaes, 2007).

5. All translations are the author’s own.

6. The common Arabic name Ali is used as a racialized slur.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Zambon

Kate Zambon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in global media studies focuses on the cultural politics of nationalism, race, and migration in international sporting events, news, and entertainment media. Her current research analyzes how the rejection of multiculturalism across Europe has paved the way for the rise of “integration” as a new paradigm for managing transnational and multiethnic populations.