Mixed Race Studies

Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken

The New Book Network
2017-02-04

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press 2015)

“There were black Germans?”

My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size.

Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased attention lately, with an exhibit on German colonialism appearing at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in October and recent headway on a deal for Germany to pay reparations to the descendants of Herero and Nama genocide victims in Namibia. In Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Disapora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken supply a part of the colonial story that gets even less attention than that of Germans in Africa: what about Africans in Germany? Focusing primarily on a community of West-African-born black Germans and their families, Rosenhaft and Aitken trace the groups evolution in the nineteenth century through its persecutions by the Nazi state and postwar existence.

Download the interview (00:25:27) here.

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960

Cambridge University Press
September 2013
379 pages
18 b/w illus.
235 x 158 x 22 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107041363

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in Imperial History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

This groundbreaking history traces the development of Germany’s black community, from its origins in colonial Africa to its decimation by the Nazis during World War II. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft follow the careers of Africans arriving from the colonies, examining why and where they settled, their working lives and their political activities, and giving unprecedented attention to gender, sexuality and the challenges of ‘mixed marriage’. Addressing the networks through which individuals constituted community, Aitken and Rosenhaft explore the ways in which these relationships spread beyond ties of kinship and birthplace to constitute communities as ‘black’. The study also follows a number of its protagonists to France and back to Africa, providing new insights into the roots of Francophone black consciousness and postcolonial memory. Including an in-depth account of the impact of Nazism and its aftermath, this book offers a fresh critical perspective on narratives of ‘race’ in German history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The first generation: from presence to community
• 2. Should I stay and can I go? Status and mobility in the institutional net
• 3. Settling down: marriage and family
• 4. Surviving in Germany: work, welfare and community
• 5. Problem men and exemplary women? Gender, class and ‘race’
• 6. Practising diaspora – politics 1918–33
• 7. Under the shadow of national socialism
• 8. Refuge France?
• Epilogue

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

Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
January 2013
304 pages
Illustrations: 8 colour plates, 12 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846318474

Edited by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of ‘transnational practice’ that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction / Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken
• I. Enacting Identity: Individuals, Families and Communities
  • 2. Prince Dido of Didotown and ‘Human Zoos’ in Wilhelmine Germany: Strategies for Self-Representation under the Othering Gaze / Albert Gouaffo
  • 3. Schwarze Schmach and métissages contemporains: The Politics and Poetics of Mixed Marriage in a Refugee Family / Eve Rosenhaft
  • 4. ‘Among them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919–1939 / Jennifer Anne Boittin
  • 5. ‘In this Metropolis of the World We Must Have a Building Worthy of Our Great People’: Race, Empire and Hospitality in Imperial London, 1931–1948 / Daniel Whittall
• II. Authenticity and Influence: Contexts for Black Cultural Production
  • 6. Féral Benga’s Body / James Smalls
  • 7. ‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow / S. Ani Mukherji
  • 8. ‘Coulibaly’ Cosmopolitanism in Moscow: Mamadou Somé Coulibaly and the Surikov Academy Paintings, 1960s–1970s / Paul R. Davis
  • 9. Afro-Italian Literature: From Productive Collaborations to Individual Affirmations / Christopher Hogarth
• III. Post-colonial Belonging
  • 10. Of Homecomings and Homesickness: The Question of White Angolans in Post-Colonial Portugal / Cecilie Øien
  • 11. Blackness over Europe: Meditations on Culture and Belonging / Donald Martin Carter
• IV. Narratives/Histories
  • 12. Middle Passage Blackness and its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War Epistemology / Michelle M. Wright
  • 13. Black and German: Filming Black History and Experience / John Sealey
  • 14. Excavating Diaspora: An Interview Discussing Elleke Boehmer’s Novel Nile Baby / John Masterson with Elleke Boehmer
  • 15. Afterword / Susan Dabney Pennybacker
• Bibliography
• Index