Ethnolinguistic Racism

Abstract

In late modernity, where the making of social worlds is governed by new media technologies, flexible systems of exchange, and an unprecedented traffic in money, markets, and people across sovereign borders, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. In this context, the projected frontiers of the nation are increasingly mapped out through the medium of language, thereby producing new mechanisms for membership and exclusion. With a focus on German cultural politics, I examine how regimes of nationality and imaginaries of citizenship are forged by a racialization of language. Under the impact of global capitalism and European unification, ethnolinguistic racism emerges as a discursive medium for reconstituting subjectivities and sovereignties.