Mixed Race Studies

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

Peter Lang Publishing
Reimagining Ireland. Volume 16
2013
203 pages
5 black and white illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-0343-0839-7
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0353-0507-4

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

This book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation.

In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the ‘new Irish’. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. Ireland has always been a culturally diverse space and has produced a series of high-profile mixed-race stars, including Phil Lynott, Ruth Negga, and Simon Zebo, among others. Through an analysis of screen visualizations of the black Irish, this study uncovers forgotten histories, challenges the perceived homogeneity of the nation, evaluates integration, and considers the future of the new Ireland. It makes a creative and significant theoretical contribution to scholarly work on the relationship between representation and identity in Irish cinema.

This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Positioning the Black Irish: Theoretical, Historical and Visual Contexts
• Chapter One: ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’: Being Black and Irish in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
• Chapter Two: Gendering the Other: Raced Women in Irish Television (Prosperity (RTE, 2007), Love is The Drug (RTE, 2004) and Fair City (RTE, 1989–present))
• Chapter Three: New Identities in the Irish Horror Film: Isolation (O’Brien, 2005) and Boy Eats Girl (Bradley, 2005)
• Chapter Four: Black and Mixed Masculinities in Irish Cinema: The Nephew (Brady, 1998), Irish Jam (Eyres, 2006) and The Front Line (Gleeson, 2006)
• Chapter Five: Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me: Trafficked (O’Connor, 2010) and the Multicultural Irish Thriller
• Chapter Six: The Raced Stranger in Contemporary Cinema: Between the Canals (O’Connor, 2011), Sensation (Hall, 2010), The Good Man (Harrison, 2012) and The Guard (McDonagh, 2011)
• Conclusion
• Framing the Future of the Black Irish Onscreen
• Bibliography
• Index

UMASS Recognizes Growing Interdisciplinary Study of Black Germans in Academia

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2013-08-12

Jamal Watson

AMHERST, Mass.—In an effort to recognize a relatively young academic discipline that many in the academy have never heard of before, nearly a hundred students and scholars gathered at Amherst College over the weekend to discuss their research and ideas for how to grow Black German Studies.

This marks the third year that the Black German Heritage & Research Association sponsored the international conference, which highlighted a variety of interdisciplinary topics ranging from Black Germans during the Third Reich to their ongoing presence in German theater.

Like African American, Women and Queer studies, Black German Studies has an admitted social justice focus, says Dr. Sara Lennox, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an early founder of the Black German Studies movement in the U.S.

“We’ve made the field legitimate. You can now do this work and get tenure,” says Lennox, who was chiefly responsible for jumpstarting the Black German Studies concentration at UMASS Amherst. “It’s kind of a burgeoning field and movement. The other thing that’s really cool is there is a pretty strong connection between activism and scholarship and a really strong connection with the experimental … Black Germans talking about their stories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story

Regina Griffin Films, Inc.
2011
102 minutes
color
United States

Regina Griffin, Director

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story reveals the tragic lives of biracial, bicultural children, unwanted, ignored and forgotten by enemy nations. Imagine being born in a place and time where racism and hatred run rampant, and your mother is white and German and your father is a black American serviceman. Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story tells the painful and personal story of a forgotten piece of world history through eyes of the people who suffered most.

• ŸBest Documentary, American Black Film Festival 2011
• Best Film, Audience Award, African-American Women in Cinema 2011
• HBO Finalist, Martha’s Vineyard Black Film Festival, 2011
• Best Documentary Nominee, Black Reel Awards, 2012

Blackness in Germany: Locating “Race” in Johannes Schaaf’s 1986 Film Adaptation of Michael Ende’s Fantasy Novel Momo

Focus on German Studies
Volume 19 (2012)
pages 133-148

Benjamin Nickl
Georgetown University

Michael Ende’s 1973 fantasy novel, Momo first became popular in West Germany. Decades later, the book remained successful in the unified Republic. Intended as a piece of alternative literature for children, the story advocates resistance to consumerism, capitalism, and the time bind, in which free market economies situate members of the working population. The novel’s protagonist is the titular character, a small girl named “Momo.” She fights her adversaries, the “Gray Agents,” who are sent by the “Timesaving Bank” to steal mankind’s unused time and use it to sustain their lives. What allows for Momo’s resistance to the time-thieves is her state of innocence, a natural purity which prevents the young heroine from falling prey to Western civilization’s dogma of capitalism.

Ende’s original text, which is now in its 47th edition, never explicitly connects Momo as a symbol of pristine nature to non-white notions of race. However, the cinematic adaptation does exactly that. Cast in the role of Momo, then eleven-year-old Afro-German actress Radost Bokel was the visibly “exoticized” female lead. Her race set Bokel apart from her white cast members in the German-Italian production. Director Johannes Schaaf chose to define Momo in the context of a racial discourse to construct knowledge about otherness as ethnic difference. I read this as an exclusion of ethnic minorities in Germany, underscored by German film’s long tradition of nationalism based on ethnic affiliation.

Schaaf’s adaptation perpetuates a racial bias, which occupies a large part of the country’s ethnic history. The film exemplifies the projection of identities on the black body and performative manifestations of (black) identity, which were authored by a white majority despite the actual presence of individuals who identify as black. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, “becoming black” was a widespread phenomenon in West Germany. In the wake of the nation’s politicized student movement in 1968 (“68’er Studentenbewegung”), a great part of the white population imagined “blackness” as a way to express (national-political) innocence and justified anger over being the victim of capitalist rule. White people appropriated racial features of the black body, which they believed was unrightfully oppressed by the establishment; hence they made claims to socio-cultural aspects of both Afro-German and Afro-American identity. Especially the German youth expressed their white afrophilia in terms of fierce socio-politic engagement and wide circulation of cultural products branded as “Afroblack”…

Read the entire article here.

Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950

Duke University
2012
286 pages

Michelle René Eley

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring Black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a dynamic and flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work—Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003)—provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films’ depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in a German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany’s history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for using poetic politics and communities of coalition to affect social change.

Read the entire thesis here.

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

University of Michigan Press
2004
296 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03138-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02160-4

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

It’s hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt’s Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book.

In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?

The answers to Campt’s questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Memory, and Historical Representation: Contextualizing Black German Narratives of the Third Reich
• Part I: Echoes of Imagined Danger – Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 1: “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 2: Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program
• Part II: Memory Narratives/Memory Technologies: Race, Gendering, and the Politics of Memory Work
  • Chapter 3: Conversations with the “Other Within”: Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 4: Identifying as the “Other Within”: National Socialist Racial Politics and an Afro-German Childhood in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 5: Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space – Writing History Between the Lines: A Postscript
• Appendix: Original German Interview Excerpts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe

University of Michigan Press
2009
272 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03344-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02578-7

Rita Chin, Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan

Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential Research Professor
Northern Illinois University

Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History
University of Michigan

Atina Grossmann, Professor of History
Cooper Union, New York

An investigation of the concept of “race” in post-Nazi Germany

What happened to “race,” race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of “race” since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks—arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany—the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with “race” in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration—and about just how much “difference” a democracy can accommodate—are implicated in a longer history of “race.” This book explores why the concept of “race” became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from “race” for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Postwar German History in Context / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 1: Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State / Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 2: From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors in Postwar Germany / Atina Grossmann
• CHAPTER 3: Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race / Rita Chin
• CHAPTER 4: German Democracy and the Question of Difference, 1945 1995 / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 5: The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe / Geoff Eley
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Euer Schweigen schützt Euch nicht: Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Your silence will not protect you: Audre Lorde and the Black Women’s Movement in Germany)

Orlanda-Verlag
2012
160 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-3936937-95-4
(In German and English)

Edited by:

Peggy Piesche

20er Todestag der Schwarzen, lesbischen Poetin und feministischen Autorin Audre Lorde

“Euer Schweigen schützt Euch nicht” – Ein Aufruf zu Sprache und aktivem Handeln, der dringlicher nicht sein könnte. Wie viele der Appelle, Schriften und Aufrufe Audre Lordes war er prägend für die (internationale) Frauenbewegung und besonders für die Bewegung Schwarzer Frauen. Das rückhaltlose Ausloten von Sexismus, Rassismus, Homophobie und Klasse machen Audre Lorde auch zwanzig Jahre nach ihrem Tod zu einer der einflussreichsten Kämpferinnen für die Rechte Schwarzer Frauen. Der soziale Unterschied war für sie die treibende, kreative Kraft zu handeln und zu verändern. Ihre Essays, Gedichte, Vorträge und Erzählungen sind einschneidend und entschlossen, sie werfen einen schonungslosen Blick auf die Realität und transportieren dabei doch immer auch Hoffnung. Der vorliegende Band ist eine Sammlung von bereits erschienenen und bisher unveröffentlichten Texten Audre Lordes. Ergänzt werden diese durch Texte von Frauen, die gemeinsam mit der Autorin den Weg einer deutschen Schwarzen Frauenbewegung gingen und von Schwarzen Frauen der Nachfolgegenerationen aus Deutschland, die sich mit ihrem Erbe und den aktuellen Kämpfen auseinander setzen.

20th Anniversary of the death of the Black, lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you” – A call to action and active language which could not be more urgent. How many of appeals, writings and views Audre Lorde he was formative for the (international) women’s movement, and particularly for the movement of Black women. The unreserved exploration of sexism, racism, homophobia, and class make Audre Lorde, even twenty years after her death, one of the most influential fighters for the rights of black women. The social difference was to act for them, the driving creative force and change it. Her essays, poems, speeches and narratives are incisive and determined, they throw an unsparing look at the reality, transporting always hope. The present volume is a collection of previously published and unpublished texts Audre Lorde. These are complemented by texts by women who went along with the author the way a German black women’s movement and the subsequent generations of black women from Germany who deal with their heritage and the current struggles apart.

Black German culture, history highlighted at Amherst-sponsored conference

Amherst College News
Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts
2013-08-16

Peter Rooney, Director of Public Affairs

As more African-Americans are realizing they have German roots, and as Germans expand the notion of what it means to be German, a new academic discipline dedicated to examining the Black German experience is having its third International Conference at Amherst College this week.

Christian Rogowski, a professor of German at Amherst College, together with Sara Lennox of U Mass, helped organize this year’s conference of the Black German Heritage & Research Association Convention, which will be held from Thursday, August 8 to Saturday, August 10 and is free and open to the public.

“The conference is unique,” Rogowski said, “because it brings together researchers who work on issues of ethnicity and racial diversity and the situation of blacks in Germany with people who themselves fall into that category, people with hyphenated identities such as Afro-German, African-American German or Black German.”

One highlight of the conference is a screening of the film “Toxi”, recently released on DVD by the DEFA Library of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  The German movie from 1952 about an African-American girl who is born to a German mother after World War II, shows the impact that birth has on the girl, her family and the community that surrounds her. The film will be screened at 4 p.m. Friday in Stirn Auditorium, where Angelica Fenner of the University of Toronto will moderate a discussion about it…

Read the entire article here.