Rethinking Black German Studies

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Illustrations

SILKE HACKENESCH

1 ‘Hergestellt unter ausschließlicher Verwendung von Kakaobohnen deutscher Kolonien’: On Representations of Chocolate Consumption as a Colonial Endeavor

Figure 1.1. ‘2. Westafrikanische Pflanzungs-Gesellschaft “Viktoria”, Kamerun. Transport der Kakaobohnen zur Trockenhalle’ [2 West African Plantation Company ‘Victoria’, Cameroon. Transportion of cocoa beans to the drying hall], 1910.

KIRA THURMAN

6 ‘Africa in European Evening Attire’: Defining African American Spirituals and Western Art Music in Central Europe, 1870s–1930s

Figure 6.1. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Negersänger’, Stimme von der Galerie: 25 kleine Aufsätze zur Kultur der Zeit [Voice from the Gallery: 25 Short Essays on the Culture of the Time] (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Wilhelm Bernary, 1928).

Figure 6.2. ‘A Black Attack’, Kladderadatsch (16 December 1877), 1.

Figure 6.3. Hans Ewald Heller, ‘Negermusik’, Radio Wien (4 September 1931), 12.

VANESSA D. PLUMLY

7 Re-Fashioning Postwar German Masculinity Through Hip-Hop: The Man(l)y BlackWhite Identities of Samy Deluxe

Figure 7.1. Cover image of Verschwörungstheorien mit schönen Melodien. ← vii | viii →

Figure 7.2. Cover image of Berühmte letzte Worte.

Figure 7.3. Cover image of Verdammtnochma!

Figure 7.4. Cover image of SchwarzWeiss.

Figure 7.5. Cover image of Männlich.

Permission to reprint all images in Chapter 7 obtained from Gisela Sorge and Management Samy Deluxe.

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Acknowledgments

It seems only fitting that this book evolved out of our very first meeting in Berlin on 29 August 2011, when Silke Hackenesch, a member of the research network Black Diaspora and Germany, introduced us at the ceremonial unveiling of the May Ayim memorial plaque at the May-Ayim-Ufer, two years after its official renaming. Without Silke bringing the two of us together, this collaborative volume and many of our other academic and activist endeavors, including the seminars that we co-organized and co-facilitated at the German Studies Association (GSA) conferences in 2014 and 2015 and the establishment of the Black Diasporic Studies Network at the GSA, with the assistance of professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sara Lennox, would never have come to fruition. Our co-operation as scholars has been seamless and easy, and we complement each other quite well. In many ways, it seems as if we have always been destined to work together. We are an excellent team and value each other’s scholarship and friendship, as well as the impact that we have had on one another’s lives; indeed, we are in this together. Our efforts to engage race publicly within German Studies serve as an intervention, and the volume is a source of optimism for us, given the current nativist climate in the United States and across Europe. While this is our first collaboratively published work, it certainly will not be the last one you will see from us. We will continue to foreground the importance of Black German Studies (BGS), as well as the broader scholarship on race, racialization, racial difference and the Black/African Diaspora in the field of German Studies.

Yet, this volume owes a considerable debt to the cultural contributions, activist work and intellectual interventions of Black Germans such as Fatima El-Tayeb, Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Alexander Weheliye, Peggy Piesche, Katharina Oguntoye, Ricky Reiser, Lara-Sophie Milagro and Maisha Auma, to name a few. Without their consistent and incisive work on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume would not exist. To them, we owe our sincere appreciation. We would also like to thank scholars like ← ix | x → Michelle M. Wright, Tina Campt, Sara Lennox and others, who have helped to push the field of BGS in exciting new directions throughout the years. This volume also owes its existence to them.

We want to express our gratitude to the participants in both of our GSA seminars. They helped to make the seminars meaningful and energizing. Many of the participants are contributing to the field of Black German Studies and have been supportive of our work throughout the years. Sadly, there are far too many of them to name. To Rosemarie Peña, we owe our thanks, especially for her establishment of the Black German Heritage and Research Association and her countless efforts to forge a space for Black German Studies that includes the voices of Black Germans. Her dedication to the field has allowed us to build on the network’s conferences and scholarly production and help increase its reach.

We must also thank the amazing contributors to this volume. We certainly appreciated their patience and willingness to work with us. They integrated all of our feedback, producing astute and critical pieces that we are thrilled to include in the volume.

We also want to express our appreciation of Patrica Vester, a Black German graphic artist who designed the beautiful and inspiring cover art for this book, as well as the chapter break images. We are grateful that the book’s exterior reflects the internal content. We are also happy that we can share the beauty of her work with others.

Finally, we want to thank everyone at Peter Lang, especially Laurel Plapp for supporting our project. Laurel’s confidence and her initial suggestion that we co-edit a volume as two junior academics is what empowered us to pursue our work on this volume. Her understanding and encouragement (digitally and face-to-face at the GSA) has made the process of publishing this volume enjoyable.

I, Vanessa, would also like to thank Dr. Tanja Nusser for her unending academic and personal support, as well as Mercedes Rooney, Dr. Anne R. Roschelle, and Dr. Sunita Bose for their guidance, mentorship, friendship and boundless support and concern for my academic career. You have helped sustain me. My family has always encouraged me to pursue my career and become the person I am. Last, but certainly not least, I thank my friend and colleague Tiffany for her unending passion, which continually inspires ← x | xi → me and others, for her intellectual commitment to the field, and for her trust in me. You have made this process seamless.

I, Tiffany, would also like to thank my mom, who has made so many sacrifices that have enabled me to take this academic path. She has continued to support all of my academic endeavors by offering prayers, encouragement, love, and support each step of the way. My husband and best friend, Dave, has been so supportive, especially when I became discouraged with the process. He has continued to lend his ear and assisted me in so many ways. For that, I am truly grateful. I want to thank my son, Isaac, who came into my life halfway through this project. His arrival has transformed my life and made me a better person. I am grateful that I am his mother and enjoy life so much more because of him. Finally, I want to thank my colleague and friend Vanessa, for being such a fabulous collaborator, advocate and scholar. Her dedication and critical editorial eye has only helped to make this process fun and rewarding. I am confident this volume would not be as dynamic without you!

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TIFFANY N. FLORVIL AND VANESSA D. PLUMLY

Introduction: Rethinking Black German Studies

Integrating Theory and Praxis

In the autumn of 2014 and 2015, as the German Studies Association (GSA) met to convene for its annual conferences, something seemingly radical appeared on the program. At the 2014 conference in Kansas City, Missouri, a three-day seminar titled ‘Black German Studies: Then and Now’ was held.¹ Focusing our seminar on the themes of ‘Practices, Productions and Progressions’, we sought to examine the field as a critical, hermeneutic point of inquiry and to thematically trace its evolution over the last three decades. During the course of the seminar, questioning the title’s implicit delineation of a past distinct from the present made it clear that it is impossible to separate the intertwining of the two temporalities or to discuss the Black/African² Diaspora in Germany from a strictly teleological and, ← 1 | 2 → indeed, Western perspective with one origin point.3 Above all, we hoped that our first seminar would initiate exchanges and encourage creative and collaborative work by academics and non-academics alike that would not only underscore the experiences of Black Germans, but also continue to complicate the notions of Blackness, politics, racialized and gendered discourses, as well as diasporic identity across many affective, temporal and spatial borders. In addition, we envisioned that this seminar would help to create an inclusive intellectual community and space and to give this type of critical work on race, racialization and intersectionality a more visible presence at the GSA. Little did the seminar participants or the attendees of the GSA conference know at the time, but activist and writer Sharon Dodua Otoo, who became the first Black British female author to win the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for literature in 2016, was also in attendance.⁴

The following year, the GSA conference took place in Arlington, Virginia, and delivered yet another opportunity for a follow-up seminar. This time the seminar’s theme revolved around ‘Political Activism in the Black European Diaspora: From Theory to Praxis’, and it included different approaches to social, political and cultural activism that engaged a variety ← 2 | 3 → of chronologies, theories and geographies.5 Here, questions of the trajectory of theory into praxis and praxis into theory were critically examined, as both became understood as simultaneously necessary interventions, especially in institutions that structure racism and continue to normalize whiteness. These seminars offered a step forward in enhancing the visibility of Black Germans and the scholarship on the Black Diaspora in Germany and Europe institutionally.⁶ In fact, both of these seminars can be considered an articulation and enactment of theory and praxis.

Privileging English and African Diaspora Studies scholar Michelle M. Wright’s concept of spacetimes, we recognized that Black/African narratives in Europe challenge linear teleological histories and that Blackness was not a fixed trait, but constantly evolving.⁷ Our first seminar affirmed the critical role that Black German Studies (BGS) has had on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit in distinctive ways. It also grappled with questions of how the field is structured and might be framed outside of existing hegemonies, for example, through the lens of Queer Studies. The work of Black German critical theorist Fatima El-Tayeb has paved the way through her charge for more inclusive work that ‘queers’ the dimensions of diasporic memory and moves beyond strictly confined, delineated and marked boundaries and genealogies.⁸ Additionally, our seminar assessed Black German cultural practices (art, literature, theater, music) by examining the range of genres that Black Germans employ and that enable their subjectivity to be ← 3 | 4 → polyphonically performed, represented and affirmed.9 Many of the papers presented in the first seminar that broke new ground for the second one had already evinced how contemporary Black German cultural productions serve as acts of emplacement, in which Black Germans assert themselves as citizens of the German nation. These productions are also forms of social activism, reflecting how political engagement and positioning impacts aesthetic expression and reception.

Using this latter point, the second seminar re-imagined politics and activism across Europe. In it, we stressed the need for decolonizing processes at the academic level through grassroots activist practices that help to engender direct social change. Intercultural and comparative analyses provided a fruitful means to explore the Black European Diaspora – an area rife for future research, and, as a burgeoning field, it offers productive points for articulating nuance across Black/African diasporic landscapes. Thus, our second seminar expressed the idea that activism must not only take place within the realm of knowledge production and dissemination (i.e. the ivory tower, itself a colonizing concept), but just as importantly in the realm of implementation and application through critical intervention and constant rethinking and reworking (i.e. intellectual activism, grassroots activism and public engagement). Here, we believe that social activism, much like the production of history, occurs inside and outside of academia.¹⁰ Indeed, this understanding of social activism proves particularly compelling given that every day brings news of yet another Black life taken too soon through unjust actions and institutional violence across Europe and the United States. While the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement originated in the United States as a form of digital activism in 2013 after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the last few years have produced sustained movements, with BLM groups and marches in Britain, France ← 4 | 5 → and the Netherlands.11 Last June intersectional and multicultural feminist organizers held their first month-long series of events that culminated with a BLM March in Berlin, which built from the 2016 summer marches.¹² Likewise, protests took place in Paris, France, in February 2017 after police sodomized a Black French man named ‘Theo’.¹³ In addition to these developments, activists practicing intersectional feminism have pursued digital activism with hashtag campaigns in Europe such as #CampusRassismus, #Schauhin and #Rhodesmustfall.¹⁴ Each of these campaigns not only reveal ← 5 | 6 → the persistence of everyday racism, including anti-Black, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate, but also the global structures and routes of racism in diverse contexts.

Political platforms on social media may be new outlets due to the advent of modern technology, but campaigns like these are anything but novel. Individuals from across the Black/African Diaspora, who have studied, lived, performed and struggled in Germany and its colonies, have often made claims for social justice and recognition. Advocacy in Communities of Color in Germany has a long-standing history. Black Germans and African colonials in the colonies and the metropole, for instance, agitated for racial equality and basic rights from German colonial authorities.15 Other diasporic individuals, such as Mary Church Terrell and George Padmore, used Germany as a space to draw attention to sexism, racism and class oppression. As one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Terrell delivered a speech in both German and French at the 1904 International Congress of Women held in Berlin. In 1930, Padmore organized an international conference in Hamburg. He was active in the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) and edited its journal The Negro Worker.¹⁶ Padmore also spent time in Vienna, Austria. Furthermore, ← 6 | 7 → in the 1950s and 1960s, Civil Rights and Black Power activists, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson and Angela Davis, traveled to (East and West) Germany, advocating across geographic boundaries and garnering more attention for the civil rights struggle in the United States. African American GIs stationed in the country, oftentimes together with West German students, rallied against American imperialism, especially the war in Vietnam.17 Foreign students from the Congo protested the Prime Minister Moise Tshombe’s visit to West Berlin in 1964, particularly given his involvement in the overthrow of and eventual murder of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.¹⁸ This transnational activism demonstrates the necessity of diasporic connections and activist work that extends beyond national and cultural contexts. All of these actions had common goals: the challenging of corrupt political systems and leaders as well as the international liberation of People of Color from oppressive governments ← 7 | 8 → and regimes throughout the world. As these few examples reveal, Black/African diasporic consciousness has always operated in a queer fashion, one that navigates outside of prescribed filial bonds from a rigid Western framework that adheres to normative identities, behaviors and practices. Black German Studies encompasses these histories, movements and lived experiences, among many others.