Placing the Extremes: Cityscape, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right Extremists in East Berlin

Shoshan, Nitzan

doi:10.1080/14782800802501013

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…These labels not only operate as “grammars of identity and alterity” (Baumann and Gingrich ) but also organize distinct structures of feeling that color the minute sensibilities of everyday life (Shoshan , 389). When navigating their neighborhood, Borgerhout residents experienced and construed objects, places, and people around them as tangible indices of these three categories, reading them as part of teleological plots regarding the neighborhood's future.…”

Section: Reading Urban Scenesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When navigating their neighborhood, Borgerhout residents experienced and construed objects, places, and people around them as tangible indices of these three categories, reading them as part of teleological plots regarding the neighborhood's future. This engendered a “somatic weaving of an ethnicized urban landscape” (Shoshan , 380) that allowed residents to read directionality and meaning into otherwise inchoate emotions and actions in ways that are socially shared within particular spaces and networks.…”

Section: Reading Urban Scenesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

Koning

Vollebergh

2019

American Anthropologist

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Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents’ sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe]

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Section: Reading Urban Scenesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reading Urban Scenesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

Koning

Vollebergh

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…In contrast to the NPD and Republikaner's broader xenophobia and isolationist nationalism, underground groups' racism can 'be redefined and redirected… unlike ideological targets which tend to be fixed elements in an integrated belief system' (Watts, 1996, p. 99). Evidence from surveys of young Easterners professing far-right views conducted by Shoshan (2008), Watts (1996) and Hörschelmann and Schafer (2005) reveal that extremeright xenophobia is inconsistent and highly contextual, with respondents in cities like Berlin and Leipzig being strongly anti-Turkish, but supportive of American culture, Japanese investment and perceived high Vietnamese work ethic, in contrast to the rural prevalence of anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Furthermore, Cooke and Grix's 1988 study of young Eastern neo-Nazis reveals surprising tolerance towards hard-working foreigners, who participants viewed as less of a 'threat' to their German identity than rival youth movements including goths and punks (Cooke and Grix, 2000), heavily contrasting with the NPD and Republikaner's early 1990s ultra-nationalism.…”

Section: Section Two: Explaining Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is especially dangerous in a context where unemployment has led to youth losing faith or respect in their parents, with seasoned neo-Nazis able to act as authoritative father figures, and extreme-right groups offering a sense of family that distant national parties like the NPD cannot. Furthermore, in addition to East Germany lacking services to challenge youth extreme-right development, feelings of insecurity and negative worth caused by globalisation and reunification's economic challenges have led to poorer, young Easterners disconnecting from multi-ethnic society (Shoshan, 2008). This withdrawal prevents interaction with ' outsider' groups, making extreme-right views on race consensus, with the narrow spaces these groups occupy leading to violent territorial attacks on ' outsiders'.…”

Section: Section Two: Explaining Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

From Vergangenheitsbewältigung to Violence: Unravelling the Paradoxes of the German Extreme-Right

Kushner¹

2019

Undergraduate Journal of Politics and International Relations

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This paper seeks to understand the reasons for the German extreme-right's successes and failures, particularly examining the interrelations between political parties and underground movements. It also places a particular focus on German reunification, especially the wave of East German anti-immigrant and asylum seeker violence that emerged from 1991 to 1993. Furthermore, it argues that economic factors are not enough to understand this and other subsequent German extreme-right violence, and that structural factors, such as police and intelligence inadequacies, as well as psychological factors are vital. The first section explores why xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments remained high in Germany despite extensive denazification, and the reasons for extreme-right party failures to exploit this. The second section examines why this sentiment has often been violently expressed. The third section looks at the relations between violent underground groups and political parties, concluding that these connections have ultimately weakened the German far-right.

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“…And yet this project of signification responds not simply to the shadow of National Socialist evil in some general sense. Rather, it seeks to negotiate the myriad ways in which this sinister past hovers over the contemporary dilemmas of German nationalism, and particularly its troubled relation to immigration and cultural difference (see Shoshan ). In this sense, the management of hate addresses not only—perhaps even not primarily—the political delinquent.…”

Section: Conclusion: Governing Hatementioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Hate: Political Delinquency and Affective Governance in Germany

Shoshan

2014

Cult. Anthropol.

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The governance of young right-extremists in Germany has spawned a proliferation of therapeutic procedures for their political rectification. This article examines three such efforts in order to expose the excesses and paradoxes that dovetail with, and at times seem to overwhelm, the presumed biopolitical rationality of governance. The penal regimes that bear on young right-extremists call into being a peculiar figure: the political delinquent. In turn, these regimes form part of what I call the management of hate, a wide field of knowledge/praxis invested in governing the relation of German publics to cultural alterity. The elaboration and administration of corrective methods to political delinquents, key to the management of hate, thus reveals itself as inscribed within cultural and political aporias, rather than as fundamentally concerned with the economistic management of populations. Specifically, the intractable specter of National Socialism and the troubled relation of contemporary German nationalism to immigration and difference haunt these therapeutic regimes, which often end up inciting precisely those affective dispositions they seek to curb. The governance of hate in Germany, I conclude, reveals itself as a politically-charged social field, suffused with historical specters and cultural antinomies, and generative of tautological irrationalities and inexorable excesses.

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Placing the Extremes: Cityscape, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right Extremists in East Berlin

Cited by 17 publications

References 18 publications

Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

From Vergangenheitsbewältigung to Violence: Unravelling the Paradoxes of the German Extreme-Right

Managing Hate: Political Delinquency and Affective Governance in Germany

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