Christian Zeitz defended his doctoral dissertation, "Islamophobia and the Politics of the Human in Contemporary German Mediascapes", on Tuesday, May 20, 2025. The committee consisted of Angelica Fenner (supervisor), Sara Saljoughi, Alice Maurice, Sarah Sharma, exam chair Darry Edwards, and external examiner Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia).
We asked Christian about his work, as well as his plans for the future.
“Islamophobia and the Politics of the Human in Contemporary German Mediascapes” expands debates about race in posthumanist studies by positioning two wide-spread German right-wing tropes – the idiomatically strange compounds Kopftuchmädchen (headscarfgirl) and Messermann (knifeman) – as racializing technologies that sort between human and not-quite-human, person and what I term matterperson. Although posthumanist and new materialist approaches affirm the matterperson to be just another person, I argue that the exceptionalizing of matter, affect, and inorganic non-biological attributes is precisely where the unevenly Orientalized category of the matterperson exerts its racializing and biopolitical force. Most broadly, extrapolating from some strands of Black Studies wherein the human – as an ontological, epistemological, and juridical category – is re-thought as foundationally anti-Black, the dissertation also offers genealogies of the headscarfgirl and knifeman as indexes of a foundational relationality between anti-Muslimness and the very condition of liberal political subjecthood, where the latter often forecloses the inhabitation of assertive Muslim political subjectivity in the first place. Similarly, I structurally entangle Orientalism with the post-1492 formalization of the human as a variable matrix of differentiation and antagonism. While interdisciplinary in theoretical outlook, the dissertation takes up the two tropes as transmedial figures, thus engaging a variety of media objects, ranging from streaming series – such as the teen web-series Druck and Germany’s first Netflix Original, the conspiracy thriller Dogs of Berlin – to political posters to digital discourse. Overall, in its attention to the role of the non-organic, the sartorial, and the ornamental, the dissertation contributes to critical theories of the politics and aesthetics of (anti-Muslim) racialization.
This project is indebted to all the critical curiosity it has received from my supervisor, Angelica Fenner, as well as committee members, Alice Maurice and Sara Saljoughi, all of whom have helped me find a language for my ideas. Their unwavering support in my navigation of both academic writing and academic spaces, more generally, has made me a better researcher and scholar. I also want to thank my examiners, Jasbir Puar and Sarah Sharma, for their profound and generative engagement with the dissertation and its future directions. More generally, I am extremely grateful for my formative time at the CSI and UofT, and for all the friends, colleagues, professors, and students I had the pleasure to learn from during my PhD journey.
His supervisor, Angelica Fenner, had this to say about Christian's dissertation:
Although Dr. Zeitz’s thesis centers the German cultural context, reframing the significance of anti-Muslim discourse circulating across media platforms and the popular press, his reasoning also remains highly pertinent to other national settings. According to external examiner Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia) "the dissertation makes significant contributions to a number of fields." She highlights in particular, the ways the analyses bring forth potential racial dimensions of new materialism and circumvent the ethnocentrism of Wilderson’s Afropessimism, rendering pessimism also applicable to Muslim identities. Internal external examiner Dr. Sarah Sharma also drew attention to the machinic terminology associated with Zeitz’s discussion of the human body, which may reveal another way in which the ‘mattering’ of the body may be ‘overtaken’ by the inorganic.
Christian's project benefitted from generative feedback and discussion while serving first as fellow in the Kolleg-Europa funded by the DAAD, and then as graduate fellow at U of T’s Centre for Culture and Technology. Throughout his graduate studies, he has served as an engaging and reliable teaching assistant within the CSI curriculum, and also as instructor for courses on multiculturalism in German and European screen media. We wish Dr. Zeitz every success as he explores future postdoctoral fellowships and teaching posts!
Congratulations, Dr. Zeitz!
