Rearticulating Black Feminist Thought in Heimat, bittersüße Heimat

This article analyzes the play Heimat, bittersüße Heimat using the writings of the Black feminist theorists May Ayim, Grada Kilomba, and Patricia Hill Collins. It then examines three scenes in the first two acts of the play and their rewriting and rearticulation of May Ayim’s poems “afro-german I” and “afro-german II” onstage. In their use of these poems, the performance group Label Noir mobilizes humor to approach the theme of racism and belonging to the Volk in order to illustrate how exclusionary German society of the 1980s was, and how it continues to be so today.