ABSTRACT
How does an academic field come into being? This essay explores the paradoxical possibility of trying to create an academic field from scratch; of creating a discipline or sub-discipline where academia (and the wider, mainstream public) do not see the necessity for such a creation. I explore the political and historical context of present-day Germany and the problem of addressing the increasing heterogeneity of its population, a heterogeneity of which its Asian communities are only one example. Within this context, ethnic communities—and Asian Germans more specifically—have been granted only a somewhat bizarre, token inclusion into Germanness. For the purposes of this essay, ‘Asian’ will be used as an umbrella term, which must in turn be negotiated against the generic use of ‘ethnic’ or, rather, ‘foreign’, as it permeates contemporary German discourse. At the same time, it is crucial to note that given the recent influx of Indian professionals into Germany, the South Asian component of this umbrella Asianness is currently the most visible in German popular culture, which is why the examples used in this essay will mainly be concerned with South Asianness in German popular culture. On the other hand, in order to gain a historical perspective of this new visibility as well as a basis for opposing the generic dismissal (or tentative inclusion) of ‘foreignness’ into the German nation, it is necessary to relate this South Asian presence and the discourse that surrounds it to the presence and histories of other Asian communities currently living in Germany.
