Reading the Black German Experience: An Introduction

This special issue represents an important opportunity to present an American audience with critical insights into the situation of a black European community whose history has, until recently, gone largely overlooked in scholarly engagement with the African Diaspora in the US. The cultural and political formation of the Black German community provides a rich site for exploring the dynamics of the African Diaspora. As the essays collected here demonstrate, the Black German experience adds a new dimension to existing modes of articulating the tensions of diasporic relation—at once affirming, contesting and rearticulating these complex positionings.

In the twelve years since its introduction, there has been much discussion among members of the Black German movement of the appropriateness of the term "Afro-German." As this movement has evolved and come to include individuals of more diverse cultural backgrounds (for example, individuals of Indian, Arab, and Asian heritage), the more inclusive term "Black German" ("Schwarze Deutsche") has come to be widely accepted among members of the movement. "Black German" emphasizes the constructedness of blackness in German society and the fact that public perception of blackness in Germany is not restricted to the attribute of skin color. Both Black German and Afro-German remain meaningful and relevant designations in the Federal Republic and among the Black German population in general, for both implicitly ask the question of what/who is "Black" in German society and how blackness is defined.

To some, particularly an American audience, "Afro-German" is a concept which, on the surface, appears almost self-explanatory as a form of hyphenated identification directly related to the term "Afro-American." As the authors of Farbe bekennen explained in this pathbreaking publication, the term evolved in the interactions of Afro-German women with Audre Lorde, one of the most influential African Americans involved in the Afro-German movement (Opitz, et al 10 [trans. Adams xxii]). It was in this moment of articulation through dialogue—coinciding with the founding of the movement through organizations like the Initiative of Black Germans (InitiativeSchwarze Deutsche—ISD) and ADEFRA, the Afro-German women's association—that Afro-German identity emerged as a relational concept where the construction of both race/blackness and identity are constituted through a sense of community and relation both to those positioned in similar ways, as well as to the discourses and categories of racial difference and identity through which this process of positioning is enacted. Black German identity is thus the product and process of importing individual, social, and cultural meanings to blackness as a strategic form of self-definition and identification. ¹ Afro-German and Black German can be seen as thoroughly diasporic terms, which emerged through a cross-cultural dialogue among Black women on the specificities of the experience of race and blackness in their respective cultural contexts. In this dialogue, the African-American experience served initially as a central point of reference through which to articulate the very different experiences of Black Germans.

In recent years, diaspora has become an important conceptual lens for thinking about Black identity cross-culturally. Traditionally, diaspora has been associated with an historical event of migration, dispersal, or displacement and complex relationships between real and imagined communities in the "homeland" and places of settlement. Here the primary reference is often the Jewish diaspora (as the diaspora par excellence), although the African diaspora also conforms to this model. Black British theorists of culture and identity, most notably Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, have theorized diaspora in the British context as complicated processes of positioning in the construction of a sense of belonging and community through the creation of psychic, symbolic, and material communities and "home(s)" in the places of settlement. These theorists highlight the creative and syncretic processes of cultural formation. ² More recently, scholars like Jacqueline Brown have developed even more nuanced elaborations of diaspora as a theoretical concept of analysis. Analyses like Brown's emphasize sophisticated notions of diasporic desire and longing for community and belonging...