Prekäre koloniale Ordnung. Rassistische Konjunkturen im Widerspruch. Deutsches Kolonialregime 1884–1914 by Ulrike Hamann (review)

This is an impressive book. It weaves together sources from the era of German colonialism with works by Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, the subaltern studies group, Rancière, and Foucault to offer a "historisch fundierte theoretische Antwort" (9) to the question of what kind of racism exists in Germany today and why. Hamann challenges the scholarly emphasis on whiteness and colonizers of the 1990s and 2000s and directs our attention to resistance and the subjectivities, theoretical insights, and impacts of Black people.

The book consists of two long essays linked by a shorter, middle one. The opening essay concerns the perceptions and statements of two African American intellectuals visiting imperial Germany, Mary Church Terrell and W.E.B. DuBois. Terrell and DuBois embraced some aspects of their German experience while rejecting, purposefully ignoring, or otherwise misunderstanding (in the sense of Jacques Rancière's mésentente) the articulations of racism around them—articulations that presumed their own intellectual and social inferiority. For example, they identified with the German nationalist myth to the extent that it provided a "Gegen-Geschichte" (149), or example of challenging existing power relations, but questioned ideas of progress when those ideas presumed African inferiority. Hamann uses Terrell's and DuBois's statements to establish a sort of baseline regarding the nature of racism in Germany in the 1880s–1890s. Also noted are the specifics of those two visitors' responses, and their effects on those Germans around them who "believed themselves to be white." (Here I borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates's book Between the World and Me [2015] that fits Hamann's purpose well).

Hamann then turns in the middle essay to the genocidal war that started in 1904 in German South West Africa, and particularly its effect of unleashing a crisis of colonial legitimacy for Germans, which precipitated a turn to biologistic racism. Resisting Herero, Nama, and other colonial subjects had challenged the salience of difference. The prosecution of the war and postwar policies were a biologically conceived quest to reassert clear racial difference.

The final essay concerns the ruthless plan originating in 1910 to expropriate and expel longstanding African denizens of what is now the city of Douala, Cameroon. In the context of Hamann's analysis, this plan was a postgenocidal project of biopower that imposed medicalized racial categories on that urban space. Hamann shows in detail the nature and effects of the nonverbal, verbal, and written acts (especially petitions) of the Duala people. Their actions revealed widespread solidarity and delegitimized the German colonial project. While resistance temporarily halted the plan and then German rule itself ended, French colonial authorities pursued the plan in the decades after World War I.

Hamann makes a direct, causal argument that can be summed up as follows: around 1880, racism in German was traditional, paternalistically hierarchical, and cultural. As a result of African resistance and colonial war, a new German racism emerged that was modern, biologistic, and open even to genocide in the name of protecting the social organism. Evidence that this new racism had arrived was the plan to expropriate and segregate the African inhabitants of Douala, and Germans' responses to the Duala petitions. German racism had shifted from traditional and paternalistic to biological. Historians are unlikely to dispute that German racism changed along those lines; the milestones in Hamann's account of German racism and antisemitism are well-established knowledge. It is the causation—that the 1904 war changed everything—that historians find contentious, and this book will not shut down that debate. The main source base will seem narrow to historians: two sets of remarks by Terrell and DuBois and a modest set of documents from German Cameroon, mostly Duala petitions. It is true that this book is a highly detailed analysis of a few well-defined areas. But don't read this book as an account of German colonialism, or even as a narrative...