Damani J. Partridge

Research and Teaching Topics

Citizenship and noncitizen politics, exclusionary incorporation, sovereignty, participation, governance, care, urban futurity, Germany, Detroit, dispossession, migration, Blackness and universality, post-humanism, decoloniality, sexualities and body politics, intersectional, Indigenous, Black, and POC feminisms, corporate formations, supply-chain capitalism, Holocaust memory and memorialization, film, media, and audio-visual production, analysis, and distribution

Biography

Damani J. Partridge is a Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan (U of M). He is also an affiliate with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the vice chair of the U of M Faculty Senate, the vice president of the German Studies Association, and the chair of the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Board of Directors.  He has published broadly on questions of citizenship, anti-citizenship, noncitizen politics, urban futures, decoloniality, sexuality, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Global Blackness, anti-Blackness, the culture and politics of “fair trade,” and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). His first book, Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany,” was published in the New Anthropologies of Europe series with Indiana University Press in 2012. His most recent book, Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Politics, and Black Power in Berlin was published with the University of California Press in 2023.

Selected Publications

Partridge, D. J. (2008). We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology, 23(4), 660-687.

Partridge, D. J. (2010). Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): monumental memory amidst contemporary race. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(4), 820-850.

Welker, M., Partridge, D. J., & Hardin, R. (2011). Corporate lives: New perspectives on the social life of the corporate form: An introduction to supplement 3. Current Anthropology, 52(S3), S3-S16.

Partridge, D. J. (2022). Hostility as Technique: Making White Space in a Black City (Observing a City Over Time through Collective Filmmaking and Collaborative Research). Anthropological Quarterly, 95(2), 363-386.

Partridge, D. (2023). Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen futures, and black power in Berlin. Univ of California Press.