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Reviewed by:
  • Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture ed. by Sara Lennox
  • Vanessa D. Plumly
Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture.
Edited by Sara Lennox. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. viii + 303 pages + 18 b/w illustrations. $90.00 hardcover, $31.95 paperback.

The much-anticipated volume Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro- German History, Politics, and Culture, edited by Sara Lennox, is a pertinent text that highlights the heterogeneity of the Afro-German Diaspora and its multiple points of historical and contemporary contact. Following recent publications including Peggy Piesche’s Euer Schweigen schützt euch nicht (2012), Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft’s Black Germany (2013), Mischa Honeck et al.’s Germany and the Black Diaspora (2013), Natasha Kelly’s Souls and Sisters (2015), Quinn Slobidian’s Comrades [End Page 273] of Color (2015), and Denise Bergold-Caldwell et al.’s Spiegelblicke (2015), its appearance comes at a time in which scholarship written both by and on Black Germans is flourishing. As a whole, Remapping Black Germany encompasses the rich diversity of interdisciplinary research in the field and conveys the need for engaging in Black German Studies from a multi-perspectival lens, within and beyond Germany’s geographic borders.

Not broken up into cohesive subsections, the contributions represent historical studies and theoretical reflections spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with Robert Bernasconi’s piece being one exception. Comprised of thirteen individual contributions with an additional preface, introduction, and epilogue, Black German voices are centered in ways that many recent scholarly volumes on the Black German Diaspora elide. In this vein, it includes the work of four prominent Black German scholars, incorporates interviews, and presents a republication of Black German Martha Stark’s “My 13 Years Under the Nazi Terror,” originally published in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1949. Thus, not just a collection of research essays, Remapping Black Germany harkens back to Farbe bekennen (1986), a seminal collection of Afro- German women’s autobiographical narratives and Afro-German history, in its composition. Given the quantity of contributions, ranging from Tobias Nagl’s exploration of Black German trickster identity in the Weimar era to Tina Campt’s reading of the suspended motion of vernacular photography, it is impossible to engage them all. Since many are revised or abridged versions of previously published works by the authors, I focus mostly on those chapters that represent the “new” perspectives the volume’s title touts.

The introduction to the volume is of value to newcomers to the field who wish to gain an overview of the history, culture, politics, and activism of the Black German diaspora. In it, Lennox neither seeks to articulate the views and direction of Black Germans and their history, nor does she purport to offer a complete record. The volume then opens with Maureen Maisha Eggers’s insightful piece that surveys what she structures as three stages of transformation in the activism of the Afro-German Women’s movement: articulating stories as a first step in visibility in the 1980s and as a countering of hegemonic discourse; turning inward in search of a vision for change within the self; and, finally, engaging in epistemic shifts through knowledge production/dissemination and interventions.

Shifting gears to trace the emergence of the “biological argument against race mixing” as it developed in the United States and was transferred to Nazi Germany, Robert Bernasconi asserts that while the idea of race originates with Kant, the discourse on miscegenation largely evolved with Josiah Nott’s “revival of polygenesis in the mid-nineteenth century” (95). By demonstrating how racial theory was adopted, adapted, and implemented back and forth across the Atlantic, he makes the case that a much broader context for understanding the significance of the “Black Horror” on the Rhine is necessary, especially as it later appears in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Picking up where Bernasconi left off, Christian Rogowski’s contribution on the “Black Horror” campaign introduces scholars to an unmapped perspective: the experiences of Black Germans inside of Germany who sought to distance themselves from the political propaganda of the time. Defending themselves against violence encountered as a...

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