Mixed Race Studies

BGHRA Convention 2013

Black German Heritage & Research Association
2013-05-15

We are pleased to announce the Third Annual International Convention of the Black German Heritage & Research Association to be held August 8-11, 2013 at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Maisha Eggers, Professor of Childhood and Diversity Studies at the University of Magdeburg, a screening of the 1952 film “Toxi” and presentations by guest artists Sharon Dodua Otoo and Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, editors of “The Little Book of Big Visions: How To Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World“.

For more information, click here. View the conference schedule here.

An Earth-Colored Sea: ‘Race’, Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World

Berghahn Books
2003
176 pages
index
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-57181-607-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57181-608-5

Miguel Vale de Almeida,  Professor of Anthropology
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), Lisbon

Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, “race”, culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite – or hybrid – nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.

Contents

• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Potogee: Being Portuguese in Trinidad
• Chapter 2. Powers, Products, and Passions: The Black Movement in a Town of Bahia, Brazil
• Chapter 3. Tristes Luso-Tropiques: The Roots and Ramifications of Luso-Tropicalist Discourses
• Chapter 4. “Longing for Oneself”: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal
• Chapter 5. Epilogue of Empire: East Timor and the Portuguese Postcolonial Catharsis
• Chapter 6. Pitfalls and Perspectives in Anthropology, Postcolonialism, and the Portuguese-Speaking World
• Epilogue: A Sailor’s Tale

The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism

Berghahn Books
February 2013
308 pages
26 ills & tables, bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-762-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-763-9

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, Professor of Anthropology
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Ayton

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

Contents

• Tables and illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Origins of a prejudice: the roots of racial discrimination
  • The discovery of human variety: early formulations
  • The emergence of ‘modern’ racism
  • Racialism under attack
• Chapter 2. Discourse, images, knowledge: the place of the colonies and their populations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire
  • The formation of Portuguese colonialism and ‘colonial knowledge’
  • The Colonial Act and the ‘creation’ of the Indígena
  • Colonial propaganda: ‘marketing the empire’
  • Colonial representations in primary and secondary school readers
  • Cinema and colonialism in action: moving pictures on colonial themes (1928-53)
  • Recurrent images and prejudices
  • The production of ‘anthropological knowledge’ of the colonies
  • Racial purity, miscegenation and the appropriation of myths
• Chapter 3. Exhibiting the empire, imagining the nation: representations of the colonies and the overseas Portuguese in the great exhibitions
  • The age of the great exhibitions
  • Representations of the Portuguese colonies, 1924-31
  • A ‘Guinean village’ at the Lisbon Industrial Exhibition (1932)
  • The Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of 1934: concept and objectives
  • Representations of the Portuguese colonies, 1934-39
  • The Exhibition of the Portuguese World (1940): concept and objectives
  • Colonial representations in Portugal dos Pequenitos
  • The status of the colonized populations at the exhibitions: the exotic vs. the familiar
• Conclusions
• Appendix I: Film
• Appendix II: Texts from the padrões of Portugal dos Pequenitos
• Bibliography

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914

Berghahn Books
July 2013
262 pages
25 ills, 2 maps, bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-953-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-954-1

Edited by:

Mischa Honeck, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Martin Klimke, Associate Professor of History
New York University, Abu Dhabi

Anne Kuhlmann, Research Fellow in Russian History
Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, Berlin

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans’ perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany’s protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

Contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann
• PART I: SAINTS AND SLAVES, MOORS AND HESSIANS
  • Chapter 1. The Calenberg Altarpiece: Black African Christians in Renaissance Germany / Paul Kaplan
  • Chapter 2. Black Masques: Notions of Blackness in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries / Kate Lowe
  • Chapter 3. Ambiguous Duty: Black Servants at German Ancien Régime Courts / Anne Kuhlmann
  • Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Africans in German Court divertissements / Rashid-S. Pegah
  • Chapter 5. From American Slaves to Hessian Subjects: Silenced Black Narratives of the American Revolution / Maria Diedrich
• PART II: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO EMPIRE
  • Chapter 6. The German Reception of African American Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century / Heike Paul
  • Chapter 7. “On the Brain of the Negro”: Race, Abolitionism, and Friedrich Tiedemann’s Scientific Discourse on the African Diaspora / Jeannette Eileen Jones
  • Chapter 8. Liberating Sojourns? African American Travelers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany / Mischa Honeck
  • Chapter 9. Global Proletarians, Uncle Toms and Native Savages: The Antinomies of Black Identity in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Bradley Naranch
  • Chapter 10. We Shall Make Farmers of Them Yet: Tuskegee’s Uplift Ideology in German Togoland / Kendahl Radcliffe
  • Chapter 11. Education and Migration: Cameroonian School Children and Apprentices in the German Metropole, 1884-1914 / Robbie Aitken
• Afterword: Africans in Europe: New Perspectives / Dirk Hoerder
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools (Erblehre und Rassenkunde für die Grund- und Hauptschule) 2nd edition

Verlag Konkordia
Bühl-Baden, Germany
1937

Karl Bareth, Author

Alfred Vogel, Author

Source: German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Archived and Translated by:

Randall Bytwerk, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Background: This is a teacher’s guide to racial instruction, covering the 4th through the 8th grades. I provide a translation of sections that strike me as particularly interesting. Bareth was an experienced teacher, and Vogel’s title is Rektor. Vogel also produced a set of posters to be used in classroom instruction. Published in 1937, before the alliance with Japan, there is some material on the “Yellow Peril.” Such material disappeared later.

…b) Race mixing among humans.

We have already spoken about one racial mixing. That had to do with the racial development of the German people. May we also speak of it as bastardization? If we look into the face of the German people, peering deeply into its spiritual life, we are absolutely convinced that the joining of these six races into one whole people was not a bastardization. Their genetic traits joined in a wonderful and harmonious way to form the German people, from which our German culture sprang.

We speak of bastardization in the case of a mixed race (Mischlinge) that develops from fundamentally different races or racial mixtures, as, for example, one between Europeans and Negroes, Europeans and Asians, Europeans and Indians, Europeans and Jews, etc. Such mixed race individuals carry the contradictory trains of both races, resulting in a confusion. Bastards are unhappy people. A bastard of European and Negroid decent has some of the characteristics of the white race, and some characteristics of the black race. He unsuited both for the jungles and hot sun of the south, but also for the north. Two souls live and compete within the breast of the bastard. He never finds peace and a harmonious, balanced life. The hard laws of blood force him to live a life of racial confusion and fragmentation…

Read the entire guide here.

Mary Seacole: The Black Woman Who Invented Modern Nursing

Basic Books
2004-11-19
288 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780786714148; ISBN-10: 078671414X

Jane Robinson

She was a black woman, and she flouted convention. In an age that put ladies in the parlor and preferred them to be seen and not heard, she was nursing the British wounded, not in hospital wards with Florence Nightingale but on the Crimean battlefields—and off them, she was running a restaurant and hotel. She purveyed homemade pickles in England; she mined for gold in Panama. For unabashed individuality, Mary Jane Grant Seacole knew no peer. Yet Punch, the Times, the Illustrated London News all ardently touted her, and Queen Victoria herself entertained her. Mary Seacole—childless widow of Horatio Nelson’s godson and “good ole Mother Seacole” to the soldiers at Sebastopol—was Britain’s first black heroine, and this robust, engaging biography by social historian Jane Robinson shows why. In a narrative driven by colorful adventure, Robinson charts Seacole’s amazing odyssey from her native Kingston, Jamaica, to her adopted London, via Panama, where she lent her doctoring and nursing skills to catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, and the Crimea, where she founded the famous British Hotel. Seacole makes numerous other eventful stops along the way, and everywhere, even in the face of disappointment, disaster, and loss, her indomitable spirit prevails.

Who Was the 1st Black Duke?

The Root
2013-05-13

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of History
Harvard University

Porträt des Alessandro de Medici by Pontormo, 1534-1535

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Meet the scion of a legendary Italian dynasty.

Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage.

I discovered the answer to the question above while visiting the Walker Art Museum’s exhibition “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” now at Princeton University. I was astonished when I encountered Bronzino’s “Portrait of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici,” a mulatto by the sight of him who, the exhibit claimed, also happened to be a member of one of the most powerful families in history and the first Duke of Florence almost 500 years ago! 

Fascinated, I hurried home to see if Joel A. Rogers had included him in his various compilations of famous black people, many of whom were mixed race, liked this man appeared to be. Sure enough, Rogers listed him both in his 100 Amazing Facts and in Volume II of his The World’s Great Men of Color. His conclusion startled me: “That Alessandro was a tyrant there is no doubt whatever,” a remarkably frank assessment from Rogers, who had a tendency to romanticize the achievements of just about every person of even the proverbial “one drop” whom he discovered hidden in the shadows of world history. I wanted to know more about this man. Here are the highlights of what I learned.

A Pivotal Potentate

Like the first black president of Mexico, Vicente Guerrero, and our first black president, Barack Obama, Alessandro de’ Medici (1511-1537)—the first black head of state in the history of the modern Western world—was a mulatto. He was the son of an African slave and one of two Medici males, either a duke or a future pope. With the latter’s blessing, Alessandro served as duke himself—of Florence—from the age of 19 to his assassination at age 26 at the hands of his cousin. The reason the cousin gave: Alessandro was a tyrant out of step with his times, a military ruler in a republican age…

Read the entire article here.

The Place in Between: An Interview with Esi Edugyan

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 46-51
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0070

Maaza Mengiste

Esi Edugyan’s 2011 Man Booker Prize finalist, Half-Blood Blues, opens with the lines, “Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil.” It is 1940 in Nazi-occupied Paris and the “boys” include Afro-German, Jewish, and African-American members of a jazz band who have recently fled an increasingly dangerous Berlin. They are living under a terrifying regime, trapped as much by the color of their skin as the curfews and constant presence of the Gestapo. Told from the perspective of Sid, an African-American bassist who left pre-civil rights era Baltimore to escape racial segregation, it is Hiero, the incomparably gifted trumpeter player, who holds the band together. But Half-Blood Blues is more than a book about music. Edugyan illuminates one of the forgotten victims of Nazi Germany’s ruthless quest for a racially “pure” state: the “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed-race Germans whose stories were lost when they went into hiding, fled, or disappeared into concentration camps. Hiero is one of those “mischlings,” and through him, we begin to understand how encompassing a denied history can be. But perhaps more than anything, this is a story about friendship, betrayal, loyalty, and the possibility of redemption through music. To read Half-Blood Blues is to hear jazz and the ache of regret through prose. Garnering nominations and awards internationally, the book has kept Edugyan on a busy, hectic schedule. It was my honor to have the chance to catch her in a quiet moment to talk about her book.

Mengiste:

I want to just jump right in and talk a little bit about the book’s setting and its characters. Part of the story takes place in 1940 Paris and Nazi Germany. What was your motivation for writing about this moment in history? What got you really interested in it, and these characters?

Edugyan:

I think I’ve always had a fascination with that period of history. It was such an extreme time in terms of what was happening everywhere, but especially in Europe, in those initial months when the Third Reich came to power. It was very fascinating for me. I had been living in Germany for about a year and a half, over two separate periods. The first time I was there for about thirteen months, learning German and really trying to immerse myself in the culture. And being a black woman living in Southern Germany, I started to wonder about the history of black people in Europe in general, but specifically in Germany. And so I did some research and discovered the story about the Rhineland Bastards—or the so-called “Rhineland Bastards.” That’s how I came to focus on this period that I had done quite a bit of reading on over my lifetime. It was interesting to me.

Mengiste:

When you were researching these Rhineland Bastards, these children born to black soldiers and German mothers in the period following WWI, what guided your decision to make your characters musicians?

Edugyan:

I have a very strong interest in music and grew up with a very strong interest in music even though I was never able to play the instruments very well. So, I’d been working on a project about a different kind of musician, a classical musician. And when I was in Germany, I started putting that aside and turning my sights to jazz musicians. And this was, in large part, because I quite love jazz. I’m not a huge expert on it, I’ll admit that, but what I’ve heard I really like. But also because I knew that Germany had gone through a big jazz age in the twenties, you know, there was a big avant-garde time after the First World War. So then you start to think about “well, what would happen to all of those musicians once the Third Reich took power?” And, you know, it was something that I certainly didn’t know anything about, so I just had to do…

A Black Nurse, a German Soldier and an Unlikely WWII Romance

The New York Times
2013-05-14

Alexis Clark

The nurse and the soldier may never have met – and eventually married – had it not been for the American government’s mistreatment of black women during World War II.

Elinor Elizabeth Powell was an African-American military nurse. Frederick Albert was a German prisoner of war. Their paths crossed in Arizona in 1944. It was a time when the Army was resisting enlisting black nurses and the relatively small number allowed entry tended to be assigned to the least desirable duties.

“They decided they were going to use African-Americans but in very small numbers and in segregated locations,” said Charissa Threat, a history professor at Northeastern University who teaches race and gender studies.

Ms. Powell was born in 1921 in Milton, Mass., and in, 1944, after completing basic training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was sent, as some other black nurses were, to tend to German prisoners of war in Florence, Ariz.

“I know the story of how they met,” said Chris Albert, 59, the youngest son of Elinor and Frederick Albert. “It was in the officers’ mess hall, and my father was working in the kitchen. He kind of boldly made his way straight for my mother and said: ‘You should know my name. I’m the man who’s going to marry you.’”

Frederick Karl Albert was born in 1925 in Oppeln, Germany. “He volunteered for the paratroops to impress his father, who served in WWI,” Mr. Albert said. “His father was an engineer and not really interested in his children. My dad ended up getting captured in Italy.”…

…The American military officially ended segregation after WWII, but for the Alberts, the issue of race would resurface throughout their lives. Their unlikely romance resulted in Stephen’s birth in December 1946. After Frederick was able to return to the United States, he and Elinor married on June 26, 1947, in Manhattan.

“I would say the first 10 years for my parents were a struggle to find some kind of economic security and a safe haven for an interracial family,” said Chris Albert, who plays the trumpet with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

“They moved to Boston and my father worked several jobs,’’ he said. “At some point, he decided it was best if they moved to Göttingen, Germany, where his parents lived. He could work for his father’s cement manufacturing business.”

But Kristina Brandner, 70, a niece of Frederick Albert, said life in Germany was difficult. “Göttingen is a small town,’’ she said. “My grandmother never had contact with black people so it was strange and uncomfortable for her with Elinor. Kids used to ask me how come there was a black woman living with us, and why is your cousin another color. Sometimes, I saw Elinor in the kitchen crying.”

In less than two years, Frederick, Elinor, Stephen and Chris, who was an infant, returned to the United States….

Read the entire article here.

Also by Mail

Edition Assemblage: Begleiterscheinungen emanzipatorischer Theorie und Praxis
2013-02-20
96 pages
Paperback, 142×205 mm
ISBN 978-3-942885-38-6
Series: Witnessed Edition 2

Olumide Popoola

Also by Mail is a modern family comedy-drama that follows the experiences of Nigerian German siblings Funke and Wale who fly to Nigeria to bury their suddenly deceased father. Their upbringing clashes with their uncle’s expectations and initial misunderstandings soon come to an éclat. When Wale returns to Germany, frustrated, he is bitterly reminded of how little his father acknowledged and prepared them for racist encounters there.

Loss and racism, sibling rivalry and cross-cultural etiquette, the play incorporates and subverses it’s urban, neo-African elements of story-telling to give a contemporary picture of a family that struggles not only with the legacy of its patriarch but with being racialized within the German context as well. Where does each stand in a circle of relations and needs? Where does each want to end up? And who is willing to help? It takes an inside-outside job to lighten the mood and the surprise startles them all.