"How does it feel to be a problem?": Black German Girlhood and the Historical Entanglements of Nation

In this comparative reading of Doris McMillon's Mixed Blessing and Ika Hügel-Marshall's Invisible Woman, I examine the ways that the authors use the autobiographical form to engage notions of black girlhood in both Germany and the United States. By focusing on their fractured family relationships—and their desire for a return to family, race, and nation—the authors reveal the ways in which national and transnational discourses demarcate the boundaries of racial and national belonging. The narratives return us to scenes of fraught personal and national histories to articulate experiences of subject-making that echo transnationally, while making visible the black girl's body as a pivotal site of nation-state transformation.