White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture by Priscilla Layne (review)

Filling the gap in postwar German cultural studies on masculinity that leaves race practically untouched and the first book of its kind to tackle cultural appropriation of blackness in the second half of the twentieth century in Germany and into the present, Priscilla Layne's White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture addresses in her words, "how blackness functions as an ontology in postwar Germany" (1). In fact, postwar ontologies of masculine blackness in Germany serve as a better description of the book than Layne's chosen subtitle. Her lens, crucially, extends beyond the implied white German appropriation of black popular culture that serves as the focal point of the first three chapters. At the heart of this study is not only white German men's problematic integration and exploitation of diasporic forms of blackness (occluding Black Germaness) into their own conception of self in order to make up for what they lack in a psychoanalytic sense, but also their refusal to acknowledge black subjectivity as something German.

This erasure of black masculinity and the presence of visibly black subjects in Germany as well as its concurrent symbolic insertion into literature and film, through black diasporic music forms (e.g., jazz, zydeco), is brought into conflict in the second half of the book with the incorporation of African American authors who situate their protagonists as musicians in Berlin and Black German authored texts. The African American experience of embodying blackness and perceiving its interpellations in Germany, as well as the lived reality of Black German subjectivity that Layne employs in the latter chapters, critiques white Germans' adoption of popular forms of blackness. Such an approach allows for a nuanced rendering of how blackness manifests distinctive ontologies when those positioned through it are producing, performing, and inhabiting its essence. Layne's explicit and refreshing choice to home in on Black German masculinity and how its formation differs from white German hegemonic masculinity in postwar Germany is especially of interest, given the dearth of research in this area of Black German studies.

With an emphasis on sonic resonances and how music creates, reflects, and probes identity, Layne's integration of soundscapes (Maria Stehle's Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes, 2012) into her readings of postwar German blackness convey what she articulates as the dominant hegemony's use of blackness to resolve white Germans of postwar guilt and to signal an acceptance of modern forms of blackness. At the same time, they exploit that very blackness and relegate it either to the margins or place its origins outside of the German nation. Layne refers to these soundscapes as "auditory 'contact zone[s]'" that enable people to have "cultural encounters despite their immobility" (13). Contradictions inherent in white German men's appropriation of black popular culture are thus foregrounded in her analysis.

Taking up references to race via black popular culture dismissed by critics, Layne exposes, on the one hand, how whiteness revels in black rebellion when white German men appropriate it in postwar divided Germany as a fantasy of freedom as well as subversion of and emancipation from the Nazi past and authoritarianism in Günther Grass's Die Blechtrommel (1959) and Thomas Valentin's Die Unberatenen (1963) and in East German society in Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1972). This is also exhibited in the postwall present of the former East with her analysis of the film Schultze Gets the Blues (2003). On the other hand, blackness rebels in its white revelry when African American authors and Black Germans expose its uncelebratory truths and realities in their narrated historical pasts and contemporary presents through fictional fantasies of escape, such as those depicted in the protagonists' journeys in Paul Beatty's novel Slumberland (2008) and Mark Stewart's rock musical Passing Strange (2009) and in autobiographical accounts of Black Germans from Hans...