ABSTRACT
The ways in which one experiences and interprets encounters with certain institutions can reveal a great deal about one’s relationship with those institutions. Mechanisms of governance and law can have profound effects on the ways people negotiate and articulate aspects of their identity, and paying close attention to how people deal with this process can help to distil aspects of life in Germany. The subject positions of Black people living in Germany can serve as a lens for viewing law. The aim for using this view is to identify how state institutional logics interrelate with the ways Blackness is experienced in Germany. Certain confrontations that Black people have with German law expose a critical dialogical tension on difference and state violence that crystallises in ideological dissonance as to the law’s purposes and objectives.
