Mixed Race Studies

Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany

University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
Multicultural Community Center, Hearst Field Annex-D
2012-09-25, 12:40-14:00 PDT (Local Time)

A reading by Ika Hügel-Marshall

Ika Hügel-Marshall was the child of an African-American serviceman and a white German woman. Born and raised in post-Hitler Germany, she tells about her experience of anti-Black racism and how she came to terms with her identity as an Afro-German. Only at the age of 39 she met other Afro-Germans and was involved in setting up the “Initiative of Black Germans” (ISD). In 1993, she found her father in Chicago and met him and his family—a most profound experience.

For more infomation, click here.

Review of Mazón, Patricia M.; Steingröver, Reinhild, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

H-German, H-Net Reviews
June 2009

Lynn Kutch, Assistant Professor of German
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Patricia M. Mazón, Reinhild Steingröver, eds. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. xvii + 247 pp. cloth ISBN 978-1-58046-183-2.

A Defiant “We” Announces Its Birth: Understanding the Complexity of Black German Identity

Given the long and varied history of cultural interactions between Africans and Germans–from the 1400s, when Africans populated Europe as slaves and court servants, to the pinnacle of German colonization in Africa in the late 1800s, to the post-World War I Rhineland occupation–the dominant German culture, perhaps understandably, has always viewed Africans as foreigners. This multifaceted collection interrogates the difficulty of categorizing the experience of Afro-Germans, a new organizing term in its own right. In each essay, the authors seek to expand the relatively limited current base of knowledge about the black German experience and to rectify the oftentimes ill-informed German and international reaction to that tradition. As a whole, the collected essays represent, as Sander Gilman puts it, a “major confrontation between the German image of Blackness and the reality of the Black” (p. 83). Gilman’s “confrontation” materializes in each essay’s distinctly articulated challenges to the common notion that racism toward blacks never existed in Germany. The book’s authors and editors not only dispute that comfortable assumption, they also sharpen the markedly German angle of the examination by claiming that attention paid to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, has consistently overshadowed the German colonial legacy and historical attitude about Africans. A vital reading given its multicultural approach to German studies, the book demonstrates that, despite the widespread cultural eclipse of this theme, historians, writers, and filmmakers have successfully exploited their talent to display a new self-confidence while educating others on overt acts of prejudice and racism in Germany.

Building upon previous research in the field and combining disciplines and methodologies, the editors have organized the volume into two thematic sections that will appeal to Afro-German readers as well as scholars with varying degrees of interest in and knowledge about the subject. The first subdivision, “Afro-Germans in Historical Perspective,” traces African intersections with German history from the colonial period through 1945. The second portion, “Cultural Representations and Self-Representations of Afro-Germans,” offers specific examples from various disciplines of the ever-changing perceived image over time and how the community of Afro-Germans seeks to define itself as a reaction to those general perceptions…

Read the entire review here.

The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies

Ashgate Publishing
October 2012
198 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7680-5
ebook ISBN 978-1-4094-2502-1

Jinthana Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

Debates over who belongs in Europe and who doesn’t increasingly speak the language of mixing, but how are the figures commonly described as ‘mixed’ actually embodied? The Biopolitics of Mixing invites us to reckon with the spectres of pathologization past and present, placing the celebration of mixing beside moral panics over terrorism and trafficking and a post-race multiculturalism that elevates some as privileged members of the neoliberal community, whilst ghosting others from it. Drawing on a broad archive including rich qualitative interviews conducted in Britain and Germany, media and policy debates, popular culture, race-based research and queer-of-colour theories, this book imagines into being communities in which people and places normally kept separate can coexist in the same reality.

As such, it will appeal to scholars across a range of sociological and cultural studies, including critical race, ethnic and migration studies, transnational gender and queer studies, German and European studies, Thai and Southeast Asian studies, and studies of affect, performativity, biopolitics and necropolitics. It should be read by all those interested in thinking critically on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability.

Contents

• Introduction: haunted origins
• Where are you from?
• From monster to fashion model: regenerating racialized bodies
• Is it better to be mixed race?
• Hybrid nations, mixed feelings: from marginal man to Obama
• Exceptional cities, exceptional citizens: metronormativity and mimeticism
• Reckoning with prostitutes: performing Thai femininity
• Conclusion: where do we want to go?
• Bibliography
• Index

French MP Harlem Désir set to become first black man to lead a major European political party

The Independent
London, England
2012-09-12

John Lichfield

The French Euro MP Harlem Désir appears certain next month to become the first black man to lead a major European political party.

After weeks of wrangling, Mr Désir, 52, was today named as the official choice of the hierarchy of the French Socialist party to replace Martine Aubry as its “first secretary” or national leader. The ruling party’s annual conference, set to take place between 26 and 28 October, is expected to endorse the choice overwhelmingly, giving Mr Désir a position once held by the late President François Mitterrand, the former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and the current President, François Hollande.

Mr Désir is seen as a safe pair of hands and competent administrator rather than a man likely to emerge as Mr Hollande’s successor as a “French Obama” or the Next Big thing on the Left. His choice is, nonetheless, a significant event in a country in which racial minorities have only recently started to play leading political roles.

Born “Jean-Philippe” in Paris in 1959, with a West Indian father and a Jewish mother, Mr Désir emerged in the 1980s as a Trotskyist, student and anti-racist activist. He changed his first name to “Harlem” in homage to African-American political leaders…

Read the entire article here.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers

Routledge
2012-07-11
234 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65367-1
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80189-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85989-6

Lauren Onkey, Vice President of Education and Public Programs
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Cleveland, Ohio

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed—and thereby created—a “black” identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: “Aren’t We a Little White for That Kind of Thing?”
• 2. “A Representative Americanized Irishman”: John Boyle O’Reilly
• 3. Melees
• 4. Bernadette’s Legacy
• 5. Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul
• 6. Born Under a Bad Sign
• Conclusion: Micks for O’Bamagh

For minorities in France, Obama still casts a spell

France 24: International News
2012-08-09

Jon Frosch

Though his reputation among blacks and Arabs in France is showing ever-so-slight signs of wear and tear, US President Barack Obama remains a powerful symbol for French citizens of colour. France24.com takes a closer look.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Anthony Borval, a black Frenchman of Caribbean descent, was elated.

“It was intense, I felt almost American,” the 29-year-old office manager confided. “Obama indirectly sent us a message that anything was possible, a message of hope for minorities in France, where it’s difficult for us to succeed.”

Four years later, as Obama spends the end of his tumultuous first term fighting a tough re-election battle against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the US president is still a hero for Borval. “His victory taught French people of colour to believe in ourselves,” he said. “Today, I still feel great pride that an African-American is running the world’s superpower.”…

…Perhaps more common than that bluntly pragmatic view is a sense among some French minorities that Obama is an admirable figure who has not fully lived up to his promise. Aziz Senni, 36, is a Moroccan-born Frenchman who founded an investment fund specialising in economic development in the “banlieue”. Like many people of colour in France, Senni says he was captivated by Obama’s rise and impressed with Americans for voting a black man into the White House just decades after the civil rights movement.

But Senni also noted that “like all new things, time goes by, the shine fades, and there are disappointments”. He cited Obama’s failure to advance the Mideast peace process, something that has tarnished the US president’s image among Arabs around the world. “We had a lot of hope after his Cairo speech, but he’s mainly been the same as his predecessors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Senni assessed. “That’s the reality of being an American president.”…

…French mistrust of multiculturalism has deep roots: since the French Revolution, the country has clung to the notion that a common French identity could override differences in race and creed. The problem, according to Ndiaye, is that “Frenchness” has not always been as inclusive in practice as it is in principle. “After France’s colonies became independent, France thought of itself as essentially white,” the historian stated. “And many French people feared that immigration from former colonies would cause the republic to be fractured.”

The result is a theoretically colour-blind country in which close-knit ethnic and religious groups are often viewed warily, politicians avoid referring to specific communities of voters, and disdain for affirmative action (known here as “positive discrimination”) is common on both sides of the political aisle.

According to Ndiaye, however, it is affirmative action that could eventually help France create conditions from which a French Obama might one day emerge. “Obama didn’t come out of nowhere,” he explained. “There is a critical mass of 10,000 elected black officials in America, from sheriffs to mayors to Congressmen to the president. Affirmative action helped. We need that in France.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Black Count,’ A Hero On The Field, And The Page

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2012-09-15

Scott Simon, Host

Tom Reiss, Author

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.

Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was one of the heroes of the French Revolution — but you won’t find a statue of him in Paris today.

He led armies of thousands in triumph through treacherous territory, from the snows of the Alps to the sands of Egypt, and his true life stories inspired his son, Alexandre Dumas, to write The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

How did the son of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman become Napoleon’s leading swordsman of the Revolution, then a prisoner, and finally almost forgotten — except in the stories of a son who was not even 4 years old when his father died?

“I like to think of him as history’s ultimate underdog,” says author Tom Reiss. His new book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, uncovers the real life that inspired so many fictional heroes.

“He’s a black man, born into slavery, and then he rises higher than any black man rose in a white society before our own time,” Reiss tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “He became a four-star general and challenges Napoleon, and he did it all 200 years ago, at the height of slavery.”…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:06:56) here.

The Fate of the Afro-Turks: Nothing Left But the Colour

Qantara.de
Bonn, Germany
2012-08-27

Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere (Translated from the German by Michael Lawton)

The Afro-Turks, whose ancestors came to the Ottoman Empire as slaves in the nineteenth century, are still struggling for recognition. Now, though, their desire to assimilate into the wider society has become greater than their desire to maintain their own identity.

A banner with the text “Sixth Spring Festival” hangs across the street near the park in Cirpi, a small village about 20 kilometres away from Bayindir, a regional centre south-east of Izmir. Such festivals have become common in Anatolia, with hundreds of them occurring between March and May every year.

But in Cirpi, it’s something special. The Sixth Spring Festival is really the Sixth Festival of the Calf, the traditional celebration of the Afro-Turks, which they’ve been celebrating since the nineteenth century in and around Izmir, formerly known as Smyrna.
 
In 1924, the Turkish republic banned the celebration, and it was not until 2007 that the event could be re-established by the Association of Afro-Turks. The first five annual festivals were modest affairs, but the sixth turned into a big event with 400 participants. They’ve not yet slaughtered a calf though…

…Alev Karakartal, is an Afro-Turk woman who now lives in Istanbul. Speaking at a conference there in early June 2012, she described the strategy with which many Afro-Turks confront discrimination. “By entering into mixed marriages,” she said, “Afro-Turks try to have lighter-skinned children, so that eventually their colour will disappear altogether.” But Olpak responds, “We have nothing else left aside from the colour. There’s nothing left culturally any more.”
 
When Karakartal, who is herself of mixed descent, asked her parents about her origins, the answer was always, “We are Turks and Muslims,” and that roots weren’t important…

Read the entire article here.

The black experience in postwar Germany

University of Connecticut
Honors Scholar Program
2012-05-06
36 pages

Jamie Christopher Morris

This paper endeavors to find the extent of anti-black racism in various sectors of German society following World War Two through an examination of primary sources and secondary scholarship. While some Germans, often women, tolerated and even loved African-American soldiers, many German men actively sought to keep black GIs out of their communities, encouraged by white GIs. Afro-German children were viewed as a huge and shameful problem to be dealt with en masse by the government. The development of German anti-black racism is interesting to track how the German people shifted from Nazi attitudes towards Americanized ones.

Introduction

In the late 1940s a young and frightened German girl believed that the African-American soldiers marching through her town had tails hidden in their trousers, a rumor that had been told to her by a passing white soldier. A decade later that girl was dating one of those same black GIs, and had in fact approached him first to get his attention. She may have been recalling the fact that it was the black soldiers who had treated her the best as a child, giving her gifts and making sure she was clean, or she may have simply desired an American boyfriend in the hopes that he would lavish her with his comparatively rich lifestyle. The girl’s attitude reflects that of many Germans towards blacks in the late 1940s and 1950s. Public opinion of black soldiers grew locally in the towns that hosted them, driven in no small part by their generosity and kindness compared to that of white GIs, but their exotic appearance and unique American outlook also attracted attention and praise.

Of course there was also some strong resistance to the stationing of black American soldiers in occupied Germany. Vestiges of the National Socialist ideology of racial purity remained in many Germans’ thoughts, if not always in their speech and actions, as well as the traditional prejudice against anything different from themselves that clung still to most Europeans. But because of the intense Nazi focus on race and cleansing, and the uncovering of the Nazi atrocities, Germany was forced into a unique position of having to prove its mended ways; as historian Heide Fehrenbach notes, “The postwar logic of race that emerged in Germany was beholden to an internationally enforced injunction that Germans differentiate their polity and policies from the Nazi predecessor.” Thus over the 1950s the language of “race” all but disappeared in Germany, although prejudices were often just as strong as previously. These hatreds, however, were turned towards the new and highly visible group of racial “others”: blacks.3 Germans maintained a unique outlook towards this new racial group, convincing themselves that they were not racist but proving hostile towards blacks and those who associated with them. An overwhelmingly conservative system of values warred with the Germans’ vehement denial of the feelings of the past to create a uniquely hostile yet also inviting environment for African-Americans…

Read the entire thesis here.

A Lesson from Philadelphia’s Little Film Festival that Could

Colorlines: News for Action
2012-08-10

Akiba Solomon, Columnist, Gender Matters

For a four-day event that began as a small assortment of screenings, there were plenty of major moments at Philadelphia’s inaugural BlackStar Film Festival last week. Curated in less than a year by producer and filmmaker Maori Karmael Holmes, this new celebration of film by and about people of the African diaspora featured more than 40 works from four continents including the Philadelphia premiere of Byron Hurt’s Kickstarter-assisted Soul Food Junkies; the U.S. debut of Berlin filmmaker Oliver Hardt’s The United States of Hoodoo, a sold-out screening of Nelson George’s Brooklyn Boheme, and a candid talk about African American filmmaking outside of the Hollywood system by Sundance-prize winning director and organizer Ava DuVernay…

…While the biggest crowds filled Philadelphia’s International House for screenings of nationally publicized works such as Brooklyn Boheme and Soul Food Junkies, lesser known films also attracted audiences. For me, the highlight was a German import, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992.

Written, directed and produced by German feminist publisher and professor Dagmar Schultz, the documentary provides an intimate portrait of the poet, professor, activist and cultural organizer who died of cancer in 1992 at age 58. Through never-released video, photographs and (sometimes hilarious) interviews with Lorde, her partner, Gloria Joseph, and a tight-knit group of Afro-German activists and writers, The Berlin Years tells the story of Lorde the genius facilitator.

When Harlem-born Lorde arrived in Berlin in 1984 as a visiting professor, she immediately sought out Afro-Germans—who were then known only by pejoratives like “cross-breed,” “mulatto” and “brown babies”—and taught them how to see themselves outside of what she observed as “the pain of living a difference that has no name.”

The anecdotes are rich. For instance, at the end of a 1984 poetry reading, Lorde asked the white women to leave the room and the black women to remain until they had spoken to at least one other black woman. “Her intention was to make us feel: No matter what you do, you are not alone,” recalls one Afro-German activist who was in that room. “You must work together! Make yourself visible and raise your voice, each of you in her own way.”…

Read the entire article here.