ABSTRACT
Those of us who have the privilege to travel have experienced the “identification” procedure at the border of the country of your origin as well as a foreign country. The scenario: you are standing in front of a border control and your features are checked—the official’s gaze commutes between your passport picture and your face—your eyes, your nose, your skin colour, your height and hair. The historical purpose of the carte de visite has been translated into an institutional process of authorisation of identities within national spatialities on the basis of the passport picture. 1 I am always a bit tense when a white German border official looks at me in this manner— although I am a German citizen—because there is something unsettling about the process of the approximately two minutes of passport check as the procedure raises questions of belonging and unbelonging. I am even sometimes asked a question in German such as, “ Können Sie bitte Ihre Brille abnehmen?” (“Can you please take off your glasses?”) as much to check my German-language ability as to enable the inspection of my face. The questioning and scanning gaze reminds me of the fact that I am assumed not to look like a German: a culturally constructed idea of which I was reminded constantly while growing up in Germany as an Afro-German woman through questions concerning my ethnic heritage, by doctors, bureaucratic officials, teachers and many other less official strangers like schoolmates, neighbours or even cashiers in supermarkets. In other words, to be Black 2 and German appears to many Germans as an insurmountable dichotomy and I feel reminded of that when I become aware of my appearance in relation to my passport through the gaze of the border official.
