Islamophobia and the Politics of the Human in Contemporary German Mediascapes

Orientalism, understood as a transhistorical sensibility of interreligious/inter-imperial external enmity and western superiority, plays a key role across German(ic) history, from Frankish clashes with early Islam, to the Crusades, Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry, among others, and later, to the Federal Republic’s transformation into an immigration society that encompasses a considerable Muslim diaspora. In the wake of diasporic populations in Germany predominantly interpellated as ‘Muslim,’ recent cultural discourses focusing on the integration of internal populations have become increasingly overdetermined by a perception of Islamicate epistemes as anti-democratic, essentialist, and governed by extremism and patriarchy. My posthumanist intervention into this more recent permutation of Orientalism interrogates whether contemporary Orientalisms are not, in fact, staging their own innocence by (re)framing cultural essentialism in the humanist language of a naturalized binary between the universal Humanity of the Occident and the particularized Posthumanity of Islamicate Culture.I tackle two recent neologisms coined in German right-wing populist discourse, specifically the compound nouns Kopftuchmädchen (headscarfgirl) and Messermann (knifeman), reading these as condensates of a disproportionally humanist imaginary that conjures the Muslim ‘Other’ as ontologically foreignand not-quite-human, in contrast to a normative, Vitruvian, biocentric fantasy of the integrity of the human (body). My first two chapters re-frame the German (and wider European) headscarf debates, firstly, in terms of their epistemological and ontological crisis potential for Western humanist thought, and, in chapter two, in relation to the teen series Druck, which centers a veiled Muslim character’s navigation of secular body politics. My third chapter argues that a right-wing moniker such as ‘knifeman’ is an expression of a broader, liberal democratic anxiety regarding Muslims’ supposed aberration from liberal political subjectivity. My fourth chapter tackles the Netflix conspiracy thriller Dogs of Berlin, which stages the policing of a fictional Berlin no-go area ruled by a Lebanese crime clan. Here, reconnaissance overlaps with conspiracy theories of Eurabia and of deindividualized Muslims controlled by forces external to national borders, hereby symptomatizing a more fraught relationship between liberal democratic rationality and conspiracist irrationalism than one might expect.

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