Now You See It, Now You Don't: Afro-German Particulars and the Making of a Nation in Eva Demski's Afra: Roman in fünf Bildern

Promising both a national history (of the Federal Republic) and a particular one (of the "mixed race" protagonist), Afra filters both through a textual economy of black-and-white symbolism that alternately foregrounds and backgrounds the "visibility" of different levels of historical experience. By examining competing functions of racialized discourse in the novel, this essay probes the relationship between Afra's story and the national one in which it is made to assume representational status. Not a literary rendition of an Afro-German sociological reality, Demski's text nonetheless invokes a kind of social discourse that does have some bearing on the Afro-German project of self-definition in the 1990s as well as our disciplinary obligation to respond to it. (LAA)