Celebrity migrants and the racialized logic of integration in Germany

ABSTRACT Since the turn of the millennium, “integration” has become a predominant floating signifier in discourse and policy regulating the place of immigrants and minorities in European societies. This study analyzes a self-described “integration campaign” that used celebrity exemplars to promote the German language to immigrants and their descendants. This case demonstrates the interrelationship between celebrations of new German diversity and discourses that frame immigrants-and especially Muslims-as a potential threat to national life. This campaign combines two potent sites of symbolic cultural politics: language and the body. It uses racialized celebrity exemplars to articulate normative whiteness symbolized by standardized German. The campaign targets the imagined figure of the perpetual migrant who is beyond the reach of the German language and, thus, outside the regulatory and disciplinary control of majority society. While it is self-styled as a playful invitation to learn German, the content of the campaign, its theme song, and the press discourse about it use racialized celebrity bodies to affirm colorblind meritocracy while devaluing the lives of racialized “migrants”who are unable or unwilling to conform.