After the Berlin Wall: hip-hop and the politics of German reunification

This essay examines they ways in which German reunification in 1990 signaled the emergence of a ‘new’ Germany through the policing of spatial and racial borders that constitute the ‘nation’. Marked by increased violence against racialized ‘others’, reunification made visible the ways that national belonging was predicated on the construction and exclusion of ‘strangers’. Articulating the Black German experience of being a ‘stranger in my own country’, the musical collective Brothers Keepers uses hip-hop to connect their struggles to that of others in the African diaspora while critiquing the violence that attends to the (re)making of a nation.