Kate Zambon – författare

Interrogating Integration explores how international sporting spectacles, media campaigns, and public debates construct racialized national identity in an era of rising right-wing nationalism. Across Europe, “integration” has emerged as a guiding concept to regulate cultural differences, particularly in Germany, where integration became a watchword after the introduction of birthright citizenship in 2000. The legal expansion of German citizenship threatened the homogeneous definition of the nation and spurred increased scrutiny of immigrants and Germans of color, primarily Muslim and Black Germans. This opened a new chapter in the long struggle over German identity. The celebrations, scandals, and debates analyzed here reveal how the admission of new citizens inspired an optimistic cosmopolitanism that claimed to differentiate the new Germany from its fascist past while simultaneously reinscribing racialized hierarchies and providing fuel for rising far-right politics.Using touchstones of public memory, including events surrounding men’s World Cup soccer and the record-breaking success of a book blaming Muslims for Germany’s decline, Zambon examines persistent problems in European conceptions of race, where racializing projects take place under an “ideology of racelessness” and the atrocities of historical and transnational racisms are used to deny current local forms of racism.

Interrogating Integration explores how international sporting spectacles, media campaigns, and public debates construct racialized national identity in an era of rising right-wing nationalism. Across Europe, “integration” has emerged as a guiding concept to regulate cultural differences, particularly in Germany, where integration became a watchword after the introduction of birthright citizenship in 2000. The legal expansion of German citizenship threatened the homogeneous definition of the nation and spurred increased scrutiny of immigrants and Germans of color, primarily Muslim and Black Germans. This opened a new chapter in the long struggle over German identity. The celebrations, scandals, and debates analyzed here reveal how the admission of new citizens inspired an optimistic cosmopolitanism that claimed to differentiate the new Germany from its fascist past while simultaneously reinscribing racialized hierarchies and providing fuel for rising far-right politics.Using touchstones of public memory, including events surrounding men’s World Cup soccer and the record-breaking success of a book blaming Muslims for Germany’s decline, Zambon examines persistent problems in European conceptions of race, where racializing projects take place under an “ideology of racelessness” and the atrocities of historical and transnational racisms are used to deny current local forms of racism.

In the age of networked publics and global viral publicity, celebrity is transnational. Its circulation illuminates global, national, and local dynamics of power and resistance. Celebrity shapes concepts of race, gender, class, and national identity on a global scale. Governments use transnational celebrity as evidence of their country’s cultural power, transmuting cultural influence into economic and political power. Meanwhile, celebrities who cross borders become potent and contested icons of national identity. At the grassroots level, citizens in diverse geographic contexts are becoming increasingly fluent in the global language of celebrity and are mobilizing it in new ways for personal and political projects. Reaching beyond the Global North, this book showcases research on transnational celebrity as a technology of soft power and counter-hegemonic organizing, and as a driver of discourses of race and migration. It also explores self-presentation and self-branding in the globalized attention economy. This book demonstrates the need for a renewed politicized treatment of the topic of celebrity in its transnational and globalizing reach. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Popular Communication.