Damani Partridge

Damani J. Partridge is a Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also an affiliate with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and has published broadly on questions of citizenship, affect, urban space, sexuality, decolonization, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Blackness and embodiment, the production of noncitizens, the culture and politics of “fair trade,” and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has also made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). His first book, Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany, was published in the New Anthropologies of Europe series with Indiana University Press in 2012. His forthcoming book, Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen politics, and Black power in Berlin will be published with the University of California Press in 2022.

Selected Publications

“We Were Dancing in the Club, Not on the Berlin Wall: ‘Black’ Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Exclusionary Incorporation in the New Europe,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 660–687.

“Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): Racial Memory Amidst Contemporary Race,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 52, No. 4 (October), pp. 820-850.

Corporate Lives. Special issue of Current Anthropology, co-edited with Marina Welker, and Rebecca Hardin. Vol. 52, Supplement 3 (April).

2019 Interrogating ‘Diversity.’ Special Issue of Public Culture, co-edited with Matthew Chin. Volume 31, Number 2 (May).