Paper short abstract:

I explore the German variant of the European multicultural "crisis" from the perspective of local queer anti-racist activists in Berlin, highlighting their mobilizations of tense and history as they respond to and counter-narrate the contested present.

Paper long abstract:

2010 proved to be a watershed year for the national debate about multiculturalism in Germany. First, a media frenzy developed around the publication of a book-length polemic against German immigration policy and the de facto, runaway multiculturalism it was said to have spawned. Written by Thilo Sarrazin, high-ranking member of the Social Democratic Party and (now ex-)member of the Deutsche Bundesbank executive board, Sarrazin's claims and rhetoric provoked fierce media scrutiny, political ire from many political constituencies--and tremendous sales and public support. Although she distanced herself from his racialist rhetoric, Chancellor Merkel reignited the debate with her comments in October of 2010 when she said in a speech that multiculturalism in Germany "has failed, utterly failed". In this paper, I explore activist responses to these public death knells of multiculturalism. Drawing on my ethnographic research among queer anti-racism activists in Berlin, I focus on how these activists contest and respond to the death-of-multiculturalism narrative, highlighting the strategies they devise and deploy to render visible the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant foundation of this narrative which is so often occluded in public discourse. Building on recent work by Elizabeth Povinelli, I show how structural violence directed at Muslim immigrants, tucked away in the past perfect of the multiculturalism-has-failed logic, is made manifest in the figurations of the durative present these activists use to narrate their experiences of disappointment and despair, and as they articulate fantasies of anti-racist, multicultural social alternatives to neoliberal accounts of managable cultural diversity and beleaguered European exceptionalism.