Mixed Race Studies

Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture & History, 1890-2000

University of Rochester Press
2005-03-01
266 pages
Pages: 266
Size: 9 x 6
Hardback 13 Digit ISBN: 9781580461832
Imprint: University of Rochester Press

Edited by

Patricia M. Mazón, Associate Professor of History
State University of New York, Buffalo

Reinhild Steingröver, Assistant Professor of German
University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music

Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as “foreigners,” assuming they are either African or African American but never German.

In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany’s transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not only by addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.

Table of Contents

1. Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity
2. The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890-1914
3. Converging Specters of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Pre- 1945 Afro-German History
4. Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film Before 1945
5. Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany: The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films
6. Will Everything Be Fine? Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema
7. Writing Diasporic Identity: Afro-German Literature since 1985
8. The Souls of Black Volk: Contradiction? Oxymoron?

ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

Peck School of The Arts News
University of Wisconsin, Madison
2010-06-15

The award will allow Assistant Professor Shelleen Greene to complete her book project, Equivocal Subjects: Mixed-Race Identity in the Italian Cinema. The book examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. Greene’s work further contends that these representations of mixed-race identity inform African diasporic filmmakers seeking to “write” the history of post-colonial Italy as a means of narrating African disaporic identity formation in the present era of global migration…

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The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (10th Anniversary Edition)

Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
2006-02-07
352 pages
8.26 x 5.23in
Paperback ISBN: 9781594481925

James McBride

James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared “light-skinned” woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.

The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Mommy,” a fiercely protective woman with “dark eyes full of pep and fire,” herded her brood to Manhattan’s free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents’ loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.

At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. “God is the color of water,” Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life’s blessings and life’s values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth’s determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college—and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.

Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Gender & History
Volume 15 Issue 3 (November 2003)
Pages 460 – 486
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x

Fatima El-Tayeb, Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany’s racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro-Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Afro-Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti-racist, explicitly Afro-German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro-German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.

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Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out

Orlanda Frauenverlag (German)
1986
University of Massachusetts Press (English)
1992
ISBN: 0-87023-759-4
Likely out of print.

Edited by

May Opitz [Ayim]
Katharina Oguntoye
Dagmar Schultz

Translated by Anne V. Adams

Foreword by Audre Lorde

May Ayim: A Woman in the Margin of German Society

The Florida State University College of Arts and Scienes
Spring Semester, 2005
76 pages

Margaret MacCarroll, Professor of Modern Languages: German Division
Florida State University

A thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This work explores the life of the Afro-German writer May Ayim by analyzing her writings as well as by discussing the social circumstances in which she lived. Chapter 1 provides a look at the Ayim’s life, with special emphasis on major factors influencing her childhood. The effects of the personal as well as social pressures that Ayim dealt with as a child and young adult are also discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of Afro-German children born shortly after World War II. Chapter 3 includes an explanation of Minor Literature and an examination of May Ayim as an author of such literature. Her importance as such is established. Due to Ayim’s position outside the mainstream of German society, social factors that greatly affected her life as a result of this situation are discussed in Chapter 4. These factors are: identity, culture, and ethnicity. In Chapter 5 Ayim’s attempts to incorporate both the white and black aspects of herself despite the deeply rooted history of racism in Germany are also discussed. Chapter 6 includes an examination of the toll that Ayim’s familial and social experiences played on her feelings of romantic love, especially toward another Afro-German. Chapter 7 examines the exhaustion that Ayim felt toward the end of her life.

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION

1. GROWING UP BLACK IN GERMANY
    Ayim’s Struggle with “Otherness“
    Childhood Pressure
    The White World and Ayim’s Black Father
    Grasping her Africanness
    Desire for Whiteness even in Africa

2. HISTORY OF RACISM IN GERMANY
    Recent History of Racism and Mischlingskinder after World War II

3. MAY AYIM, AUTHOR OF MINOR LITERATURE
    The Afro-German Minority Represented in Ayim’s Poetry

4. THE IDENTITY, CULTURE AND ETHNICITY OF PEOPLE ON THE FRINGES

5. MINOR RACE IN MAJORITY CULTURE
    Racism on the Global Scale
    Incorporating Her White and Black Self

6. MAY AYIM’S LOVE LIFE

7. AYIM’S EXHAUSTION ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY

CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Read the entire thesis here.

‘Fühlst du dich als Deutsche oder als Afrikanerin?’: May Ayim’s Search for an Afro-German Identity in her Poetry and Essays

German Life and Letters
Volume 59 Issue 4 (October 2006)
Pages 500-514
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0483.2006.00364.x

Jennifer Michaels, Professor of German; Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Humanities
Grinnell College, Iowa

Until her suicide in 1996, May Ayim was one of the leading voices among Afro-German women and the group’s most prominent poet. In her poetry and essays, she addresses such topics as marginalisation, multiculturalism and identity formation and describes her struggle to live in a society where she encountered racial prejudice and stereotypes. Her texts map the stages in her development from rejecting being black and wishing to be white to affirming her biracial identity, which she came to view as a source of her creativity. In her poetry she not only depicts aspects of the Afro-German experience but also powerfully evokes feelings of abandonment, loneliness, love and death. In this article I will set Ayim’s work into the context of the Afro-German experience and highlight issues that were of particular concern to her.

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ENGL S-88 Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: Interracial Literature (32137)

Harvard Summer Program in Venice, Italy: Liberal arts studies in Italy’s city of canals
2010-06-03 through 2010-07-30
Mondays, Wednesdays, 10:00-12:30 CEST (Local Time)
(4 credits: UN, GR) Limited enrollment

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction, as well as some films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial “passing,” from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of race. Focus is on the European tradition and the Harlem Renaissance.

Prerequisites: none.

For more information, click here.

Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses

Journal of Medical Humanities
Volume 23, Numbers 3-4 (December, 2002)
Pages 171-186
Print ISSN: 1041-3545; Online ISSN: 1573-3645
DOI: 10.1023/A:1016890117447

Allyson Polsky McCabe, Lecturer in English
Yale University

This essay examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, Polsky reveals a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S. based on the so-called one drop rule that systematically discriminated against African Americans.

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A Knock Out: A film by Tessa Boerman and Samuel Reiziger

Women Make Movies
Netherlands, 2004
53 minutes
Color, VHS/DVD
Subtitled
Order No. W05882

Boxing champion Michele Aboro grew up in South London, where life for a girl was never easy, let alone for a mixed-race lesbian girl. Thanks to her tenacious spirit and an uncanny talent for combat sports, she put her difficult past behind her and managed to sign a contract with the biggest boxing promoter in Europe. She won all 21 fights, 18 of them with a knockout – an exceptional achievement in women’s boxing. But despite her spectacular record in the ring, her career came to a sudden halt when her promoter broke her contract under the belief that she was not “promotable.”

Refusing to vamp up her image and pose naked in magazines, this undefeated world champion was abandoned by an industry more interested in selling sex than sport. A Knock Out interweaves Aboro’s personal story with interviews with boxers whose wild success strikes a painful contrast with Aboro’s struggles. Searching for logic behind Aboro’s case, this poignant documentary captures a universal story of fighting for one’s identity and offers a probing look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the increased commercialization of women’s sports.