Mixed Race Studies

Toxi

DEFA Film Library
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1952
85 minutes, b/w (English subtitles)
West Germany

Robert A. Stemmle, Director

A five-year-old girl suddenly appears on the doorstep of a well-to-do Hamburg family. The members of the multi-generational, white household react differently to the arrival of Toxi, who is black, the daughter of an African-American G.I. and a white German woman who has died. Eventually Toxi works her way into the hearts of this German family, but then her father returns, hoping to take Toxi back to America with him.

In West Germany at the time of the film’s release, there were nearly 100,000 children of Allied paternity born since WWII; of these, fewer than 5,000 were of colored paternity. Toxi was the first feature-length film to explore the subject of “black occupation children” in postwar Germany. It premiered in 1952 as part of a plan to raise public awareness, as these children began entering German schools. Known for his unique blend of social realism and melodrama, Robert A. Stemmle—one of in West Germany’s most popular directors—brought together an exceptionally renowned group of classic German actors with very diverse experiences of the Nazi era, including Paul Bildt, Johanna Hofer and Elisabeth Flickenschildt.

Special Features

• Biographies & Filmographies
• Audio commentary, by film scholars Angelika Fenner & Tobias Nagel
• “Toxi and the Story of Race after Nazism,” by historian Heide Fehrenbach
• Trailer: Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story (2011, Dir. Regina Griffin)
• Original film flyer, with English translation
• Books on the movie

Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi

University of Toronto Press
June 2011
288 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781442640085

Angelica Fenner, Associate Professor of German and Cinema Studies
University of Toronto

Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema investigates postwar racial formations via a pivotal West German film by one of the most popular and prolific directors of the era. The release of Robert Stemmle’s Toxi (1952) coincided with the enrolment in West German schools of the first five hundred Afro-German children fathered by African-American occupation soldiers. The didactic plot traces the ideological conflicts that arise among members of a patrician family when they encounter an Afro-German child seeking adoption, herein broaching issues of integration at a time when the American civil rights movement was gaining momentum and encountering violent resistance.

Perceptions of ‘Blackness’ in Toxi demonstrate continuities with those prevailing in Wilhelmine Germany, but also signal the influence of American social science discourse and tropes originating in icons of American popular culture, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Birth of a Nation, and several Shirley Temple films. By applying a Cultural Studies approach to individual film sequences, publicity photos, and press reviews, Angelica Fenner relates West German discourses around race and integration to emerging economic and political anxieties, class antagonism, and the reinstatement of conventional gender roles.

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey 2012 Annual Convention: Call for Papers

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
2012-01-31

Building on the success of the inaugural 2011 conference, the second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey (BGCSNJ) will be held at Barnard College in New York City on August 10-11, 2012.  This year’s convention will focus on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?” The conference will feature a keynote address by Yara Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, screenings of the films “Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story” and “Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984-1992,” and readings by Black German poet-performers Olumide Popoola and Philipp Khabo Köpsell.

The BGCSNJ Review Committee invites proposals for papers that engage the multiplicity and diversity of the experiences of Blacks of German heritage and on Blackness in Germany. We welcome submissions for twenty-minute presentations on three academic panels and two sessions devoted to life writing, oral history and memoir. To participate please send a one-page abstract and a CV or short biographical statement to: bgcsinc@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2012

For more information, click here.

Berlin marks Black History Month but the struggle goes on

Deutsche Welle
2012-02-16

Anne Thomas

Berlin has become more diverse and the situation for Afro-Germans has improved, but it’s still hard to get a job or an apartment. Black History Month highlights the challenges faced by over 2 percent of the population.

A black Portuguese friend of mine once dated an African-American guy she had met in her favorite bar. “We were so surprised to see another black person, we instantly gravitated towards each other,” they told me, laughing. They were able to joke, but for many Afro-Germans, it has been a lonely struggle.

Although I live in Neukölln—reportedly Berlin’s most diverse district with inhabitants from 160 countries—I am always struck by how white the city seems compared to other European capitals. I have never seen a black doctor, civil servant, yoga teacher, ticket collector, bus driver, pharmacist, plumber, policewoman, librarian… Most of the black people I know are from the US, UK, Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil or Portugal.
 
As a white foreigner in Germany, I sometimes find it difficult here and am very aware of my differences. However, I cannot really imagine what it must be like to constantly be considered exotic, just because of a different skin color.

Remembering May Ayim

So this year’s Black History Month in Berlin has been especially fascinating. The Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD) introduced this annual event in 1990, the year of German reunification, which Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim described as a celebration “without immigrants, refugees, Jewish or black people.”

To date, many in Germany maintain the country has a very insignificant colonial history and racism is not an issue. Ayim (1960 – 1996), whose father was Ghanaian and mother German, suffered from this ignorance and co-founded the ISD to change attitudes and work towards a non-racist Germany…

…Introducing Afro-Germans

Micosse-Aikins also praised the fact that Berlin had changed for the better as a result of the work of May Ayim and her fellow panelist, the historian and activist Katharina Oguntoye, who was born in Zwickau to a white German mother and a black Nigerian father.

When Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist Audre Lorde arrived in Berlin in 1984, she looked for other black women and found mainly isolated individuals, including Ayim and Oguntuye. She encouraged them to write a book.

“She said we should introduce ourselves to each other and to the world,” recalled Oguntoye, adding that this was an extremely daunting task for two women in their early 20s, but one they felt equipped to perform.

The result was “Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out,” a groundbreaking combination of historical analysis, interviews, personal testimonies and poetry that explored racism in Germany and was published in German in 1986…

Read the entire article here.

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992

Third World Newsreel
2012
84 minutes
Germany
English/German with English Subtitles

Dagmar Schultz

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lorde’s incisive writings and speeches defined and inspired the women of color, feminist and LGBT social justice movements in the United States.

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992  explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life, a period in which she helped ignite the Afro-German Movement and made lasting contributions to the German political and cultural scene before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification.

Lorde mentored and encouraged Black German women to write and publish as a way of asserting their identities, rights and culture in a society that isolated and silenced them, while challenging white German women to acknowledge their white  privilege. As Lorde wrote in her book Our Dead Behind Us: Poems, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 contains previously unreleased audiovisual material from director Dagmar Schultz’s personal archive, showing Lorde on and off stage. With testimony from Lorde’s colleagues, students and friends, this film documents Lorde’s lasting legacy in Germany.

See the Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 Study Guide here.

Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story

Third World Newsreel
1997
28 minutes
Germany
German with English Subtitles

Maria Binder

A moving documentary about the life and untimely death of Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political personality May Ayim. Ayim was one of the founders of the Black German Movement, and her research on the history of Afro-Germans, but also her political poetry, made her known in Germany and other countries.

Ayim wrote in the tradition of oral poetry and felt a strong connection to other black poets of the diaspora. Poetry gave her an opportunity to confront the white German society with its own prejudices.

Interviews and poems reveal the search for identity, how and why the term Afro-German was introduced. An insightful look at how a young black woman experiences the German reunification.

In the foreword to Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiß (Blues in Black and White), Maryse Conde wrote “… With the unmistakable sound of her voice her poems spoke to me of her, told of others that are like her and yet so unlike her in Germany, in Africa, in America. These poems held passion and irony … In May’s voice I found the echo of other voices from the diaspora.”

Claudia Unterweger – Austria’s first black News presenter

Afro-Europe: International Blog
2012-02-18

^©ORF (Ali Schafler)

Claudia Unterweger (39) is the first black TV News presenter in Austria. She was born to an African-American father and an Austrian mother. Since February 2011 she is one of the News presenters of “Zib-flash”, a program of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF.

Unterweger caused a stir in 2011 because of the simple fact that she had a different skin color than the general population. “I define myself as black, or as an African-Austrian woman,” says the Vienna-born Unterweger.

She sees herself as a part of the media history. “Arabella Kiesbauer (an Afro-Austrian) was over 30 years on the screen and was already a pioneer in the entertainment field. We are now taking a step forward and I hope that many more steps will follow.”

Unterweger continues. “I personally call and see myself as an Afro-Austrian, a black Austrian, but also as part of a whole generation of black people who grew up here in Austria, but who are still perceived as an anomaly.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World

Oxford University Press
July 2012
300 pages
12 halftones, tables, and graphs
234x156mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-19-726524-6

Edited by

Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor of History
King’s College London

Adrian Pearce, Lecturer in Brazilian & Spanish American History
King’s College London

• Comprehensive overview of racism and ethnic relations throughout Portuguese-speaking world
• Radical updating – last overview was published in 1963
• Draws out new connections between different parts of this area over time
• Experiments with new methods, e.g. anthropological history, visual culture

How did racism evolve in different parts of the Portuguese-speaking world? How should the impact on ethnic perceptions of colonial societies based on slavery or the slave trade be evaluated? What was the reality of inter-ethnic mixture in different continents? How has the prejudice of white supremacy been confronted in Brazil and Portugal? And how should we assess the impact of recent trends of emigration and immigration? These are some of the major questions that have structured this book. It both contextualises and challenges the visions of Gilberto Freyre and Charles Boxer, which crystallised from the 1930s to the 1960s, but which still frame the public history of this topic. It studies crucial issues, including recent affirmative action in Brazil or Afro-Brazilian literature, blackness in Brazil compared with Colombia under the dynamics of identity, recent racist trends in Portugal in comparative perspective, the status of native people in colonial Portuguese Africa, discrimination against forced Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in different historical contexts, the status of mixed-race people in Brazil and Angola compared over the longue durée, the interference of Europeans in East Timor’s native marriage system, the historical policy of language in Brazil, or visual stereotypes and the proto-ethnographic gaze in early perceptions of East African peoples. The book covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, integrating contributions from history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies. It offers a radical updating of both empirical data and methodologies, and aims to contribute to current debates on racism and ethnic relations in global perspective.

Table of Contents

• Francisco Bethencourt: Introduction
• Part I. Present Issues
  • 1: António Sérgio Guimarães: Colour and Race in Brazil: From Whitening to the Search for Afro-Descent
  • 2: Peter Wade: Brazil and Colombia: Comparative Race Relations in South America
  • 3: Jorge Vala and Cícero Pereira: Racism: An Evolving Virus
  • 4: Luiz Felipe de Alencastro: Mulattos in Brazil and Angola: A Comparative Approach, Seventeenth to Twenty-First Centuries
• Part II. The Modern Framework
  • 5: João de Pina-Cabral: Charles Boxer and the Race Equivoque
  • 6: Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke: Gilberto Freyre and Brazilian Self-Perception
  • 7: David Brookshaw: Writing from the Margins: Towards an Epistemology of Contemporary African Brazilian Fiction
  • 8: Michel Cahen: Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926-62)
  • 9: Miguel Jerónimo: The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Race and Labour in the Third Portuguese Empire, ca. 1870-1930
• Part III. The Long View
  • 10: Ricardo Roque: Marriage Traps: Colonial Interactions with Indigenous Marriage Ties in East Timor
  • 11: Herbert Klein: The Free Afro-Brazilians in a Slave Society
  • 12: Andrea Daher: The ‘General Language’ and the Social Status of the Indian in Brazil, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
  • 13: José Pedro Paiva: The New Christian Divide in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)
  • 14: Jean Michel Massing: From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’

German History
Volume 30, Issue 1 (March, 2012)
pages 45-74
DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghr124

Julia Roos, Associate Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5, April 2012
13 pages

Gonçalo Santos, Senior Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

This article is about a long-standing tradition of scientific imagination concerned with “the systematic study of human unity-in-diversity” (Stocking 1983:5): the anthropological tradition. I focus on the emergence of a particular field of inquiry within this very broad scholarly tradition, but I analyze this process from the perspective of a peripheral arena of scientific production within the Western European core: the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that this relatively peripheral condition combined with a complex historical conjuncture of internal political and economic crises gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. This started to change in the 1930s with the rise of a powerful dictatorial regime—Salazar’s Estado Novo—that supported the emergence of a “colonial anthropology” strongly oriented, at least until the 1950s, toward the field of physical anthropology.

The development of the discipline of physical anthropology started in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process of discipline building produced a remarkable degree of international consistency, but it also engendered considerable variations, especially before the second half of the twentieth century (Blanckaert 2009; Dias 2005; Stocking 1988; Zimmerman 2001). As the editors of this supplemental issue of Current Anthropology note, these disciplinary variations remain poorly studied outside core Western European and North American areas, and this article joins recent calls to rethink the history of anthropology more inclusively (Handler 2000; Kuklick 2008) and to focus on diversity in world anthropological production (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000; Krotz 1997; L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006).

My contribution to this “world anthropologies” agenda is to bring to the surface a little-known Western European perspective on the origins of modern anthropology and the discipline of physical anthropology. In clear contrast to the American anthropological tradition and its four-field approach, the Portuguese anthropological tradition—as I show elsewhere (Santos 2005)—was built on two different but closely intertwined variants of anthropological research. One was more culturalist—focusing on “people,” “language,” and “customs”—and the other was more naturalist—focusing on “race,” “body,” and “fossils.” It was from within this naturalist camp that emerged in the late nineteenth century the first studies of “physical anthropology.” As in the French context (Jamin 1991; see also Blanckaert 1988, 1995, 2009), this early tradition of physical anthropology was so prominent that it was often labeled with the unmodified term “anthropology” (antropologia) and contrasted to its other half, “ethnology” (etnologia)—the ancestor of modern social-cultural anthropology and modern archaeology…

…Before plunging into an analysis of such disciplinary transformations in late nineteenth-century Portugal, I would like to give a brief account of what happened to the entire field of anthropological production from the early twentieth century onward so as to make more explicit the linkages between my “archaeological exploration” and the contemporary anthropological scene.

After a very short-lived First Republic (1910–1926), the dictatorial regime established in 1933 proved very stable and long-lasting but had a very negative effect in the academic sphere. This authoritarian regime repressed freedom of speech, rejected liberal economic reforms, and set out to build a Third Empire in Africa. Anthropologists did not oppose this enterprise and were called on to produce useful “colonial knowledge.” Physical anthropologists—most of whom still espoused a holistic conception of the discipline—played a salient role in this process. By and large, their work offered “scientific” support to the regime’s colonial rhetoric, which emphasized the civilizing mission of the Portuguese imperial expansion and opposed racial miscegenation (Pereira 2005; Santos 2005; Thomaz 2005).

This rhetoric started to change in the post–World War II period, and the major intellectual figure behind the new official ideology was the great Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work on the formation of Brazilian society praised the allegedly humanistic nature of the Portuguese colonial endeavor and civilizing engagement with miscegenation (Castelo 1999; Vale de Almeida 2002). This new official rhetoric again constrained the work of anthropologists, but it was more in tune with the liberal antiracialist and cultural relativist anthropology that became internationally dominant in the post–World War II period (Vale de Almeida 2002, 2008). Starting in the 1960s, there emerged increasing epistemological and institutional divides between physical-biological and social-cultural anthropologists, and the latter gained the upper hand in colonial affairs (Pereira 2005)…

Read the entire article here.