Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.

To mention only one example of the important, intersectional critique performed under the heading of identity politics, the spoken-word performances by Afro-German poet May Ayim (1960–96) attested to the predicament of black German citizens who are persistently misread as ‘foreigners’; after reunification and the surge of racist hate crimes that followed, Ayim struggled with the experience of being the target of racist exclusion and the object of fetishistic desire. Ayim constructed an African identity for herself as a source of pride, comfort and community through outfits that borrowed from the iconography of African liberation movements, and recalled Winnie Mandela or Miriam Makeba. The colourful costumes and headdresses in which she appeared called on audiences to imagine an extended notion of Germanness that could accommodate and value cultural differences, while her poetry tracked the shift from biological to cultural racism. Ayim's performances thus mark the apex of classical identity politics, embedded in the coalition of feminist and anti-racist movements at the time. At the same time, Ayim's evocation of ‘Africanness’, soon to be eclipsed by young Afro-German men's adoption of hip hop along with the misogyny embedded in the genre, could not quite forestall the fetishizing of ethnic/racial difference. Her protests against German racism failed to tackle the eclipse of nationalist paradigms of ethnic hierarchy and exclusion towards the corporate cooptation, revaluation and marketing of ethnic difference by globalizing culture industries in an increasingly transnational Europe.

In the past twenty years, the music industry and MTV-like programmes have made over the conditions and modes of cultural expression and political agency for minority subjects; in the process, they have created opportunities for minority artists. At the annual Eurovision Song Contest, a massive television extravanganza, for instance, we can observe Norway being represented by African dancers, Serbia by a Roma performer, Germany by musicians of Turkish and Arab background, and Estonia by a black Caribbean singer. While this multicultural inclusiveness has corrected the image of a lily-white, Christian Europe and brought it in line with the empirical demographics of the continent, it has (a) reinforced old and created new ethnic stereotypes, and (b) stepped up misogynist depictions of minority and immigrant women. A growing literature in anthropology and cultural studies describes the corporate refashioning of ethnic genders and minority subjects’ labour to produce (ethnic/gendered) identity in conformity with this new paradigm.Footnote ¹ Rey Chow's account of a vicious circle of identity, which exhorts ethnic subjects to continually reproduce the terms of their own subjection, and sets in advance the terms by which their performance can count as authentic, might be the most disparaging among them.Footnote ² Even Aniko Imre, who prefers the concept of ‘identity games’ over Chow's always-already exploitative ‘ethnic labor’, offers only a few, fleeting glimpses of vigorous, progressive deployments of identity. Ethnic authenticity, in her view, is warranted both by minority cultures’ unreconstructed sexism, and by the deep misogyny embedded in hip hop, the predominant, globally circulating idiom in which local ethnicities articulate a defiant and enviable racialized virility.Footnote ³ Women and queers either are excluded or else participate on male terms: the hypersexist performances of a Turkish German rapper who calls herself Lady Bitch Ray (archived on YouTube) is a perfect illustration of Imre's point. Numerous Muslim women in Europe have made careers as ‘professional ethnics’Footnote ⁴ by publicly condemning the sexism of a monolithic Islamic culture and reinvigorating long-discounted primordialist notions of identity.Footnote ⁵ Especially in the realm of high-profit mass media, cultural institutions have learned to selectively include, manage and reward the identity labour of men and women of colour, and harness it for cosmopolitan self-representations of the nation and of Europe.

Nevertheless, even those second- and third-generation Europeans who reject identity politics (whether in the sense of regaining their immigrant parents’ national heritage or of celebrating a hip hybridity) are faced with abiding constructions of difference neatly arranged into binaries and hierarchies. They have grappled with the vicissitudes of European cosmopolitanism in translocal networks like Kanak-Attak.de and EuroMayday.org, which predicate participation not on identity, but on commitment to certain issues. Key terms for mobilization, such as ‘precarity’, facilitate solidarities between women and men, and between immigrant, undocumented, and native/white labourers in post-Fordist economies. By adapting the Marxist critique to neo-liberal conditions, activists and artists have attempted to forge solidarities without grounding their politics in organic, historically grown, stable notions of identity or community. This issue- rather than identity-based approach also informs the productions of a new, immigrant-run theatre in Berlin named Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. The documentary collages they assembled during their first season (2008–9) are based on oral histories collected in the ethnically mixed neighborhood of Kreuzberg where the theatre is located. These plays eschew the patterns and tropes of ‘ethnic labor’ by chronicling complex negotiations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity without fetishizing ethnic difference or founding cultural authenticity on naturalized gender hierarchies. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the shows at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse offer small, subtle and unpretentious glimpses into Berlin life, rather than make grand pronouncements about Islam or Muslim patriarchy.Footnote ⁶ Playful and imaginative rather than wedded to television realism, the productions prompted me to wonder whether it is its small scale and local specificity that allows the theatre's probing of neighbourhood relations to escape the corporate straitjacket of ethnic referentiality. Its critical exploration of migration, sexuality, gender or youth is based on advocacy rather than experience. Since its artistic director Shermin Langhoff, a communist Turkish German woman, has recently been awarded prestigious prizes and headhunted for large festivals and theatres, it remains to be seen whether and how she can translate this kind of ‘postmigrant’ politics to the national and transnational scale, and whether the Ballhaus will continue to elude the confining role of model migrant theatre.