In 1984 at the Free University of Berlin, the African American poet Audre Lorde asked her Black, German-speaking women students about their identities. The women revealed that they had no common term to describe themselves and had until then lacked a way to identify their shared interests and concerns. Out of Lorde's seminar emerged both the term ""Afro-German"" (or ""Black German"") and the 1986 publication of the volume that appeared in English translation as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. The book launched a movement that has since catalyzed activism and scholarship in Germany.Remapping Black Germany collects fourteen pieces that consider the wide array of issues facing Black German groups and individuals across turbulent periods, spanning the German colonial period, National Socialism, divided Germany, and the enormous outpouring of Black German creativity after 1986. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Robert Bernasconi, Tina Campt, Maria I. Diedrich, Maureen Maisha Eggers, Fatima El-Tayeb, Heide Fehrenbach, Dirk Gottsche, Felicitas Jaima, Katja Kinder, Tobias Nagl, Katharina Oguntoye, Peggy Piesche, Christian Rogowski, Nicola Laure al-Samarai, and Andrew Zimmerman.
Author(s): Sara Lennox
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 376
City: Amherst
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Knowledges of (Un-) Belonging: Epistemic Change as a Defining Mode for Black Women’s Activism in Germany
2. Inspirited Topography: Haunting Survivals and the Location of Experience in Black German Traditions of Knowledge and Culture
3. Self-Assertion, Intervention, and Achievement: Developments in Contemporary Black German Writing
4. After the German Invention of Race: Conceptions of Race Mixing from Kant to Fischer and Hitler
5. Counterfeit Money/Counterfeit Discourse: A Black German Trickster Tale
6. Black Voices on the “Black Horror on the Rhine”?
7. Black “Others”?: African Americans and Black Germans in the Third Reich
8. The Motion of Stillness: Diaspora, Stasis, and Black Vernacular Photography
9. My 13 Years under the Nazi Terror
10. Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State
11. Making African Diasporic Pasts Possible: A Retrospective View of the GDR and its Black (Step-)Children
12. Blackness and its (Queer) Discontents
13. Looking Backward and Forward: Twenty Years of the Black Women’s Movement in Germany
Epilogue. Of Epistemologies and Positionalities: A Conversation, Berlin, October 21, 2014
Notes on Contributors
Index
Back Cover
