Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories ed. by Tiffany N. Florvil and Vanessa D. Plumly (review)

Rethinking Black German Studies is a project inspired by the authors' participation in a seminar on Black German Studies at the 2015 GSA conference. However, as editors Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly openly acknowledge, the motivations behind the work—to advance the field of Black German Studies; to problematize and reconsider calcified narratives pertaining to topics like nation, race, and identity; to explore and demonstrate the potential behind employing interdisciplinary methodologies; and to introduce new theoretical approaches to the broader field of German studies—have been driving scholars and activists in the field of Black German Studies for decades now. Florvil and Plumly have taken on the monumental task of characterizing the state of the inherently multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of Black German Studies. Divided into three sections—German and Austrian Literature and History, Praxis and Theory, and Art and Performance—authors' studies cover topics from many different points in the centuries-long history of Black people in Germany.

Part 1, "German and Austrian Literature and History," includes three chapters that intervene in the often exclusionary histories of German-speaking Europe, challenging reified assumptions about "how things were" or, as Silke Hackenesch describes in her chapter, "the nature of things" (64). In her essay, Hackenesch contextualizes the linkage between Blackness and chocolate in the German colonial imaginary. She argues that this connection resulted from the ubiquity of images entering German society that situated Black laborers in the colonies within a discourse meant to popularize the colonial endeavor and to increase the consumption of colonial products. Images relied on the bodies of Black male laborers to sell colonialism as a (sexualized and racialized) fantasy.

While the histories of Afro-/Black Germans, including colonial histories, have increasingly found their place in Black German Studies and German studies, Black Austrian histories have not benefited from the same scholarly attention. In her chapter, Nancy Nenno examines several Black Austrians' work that she argues have exposed contemporary representations of Black Austrians as both racialized and ahistorical. Finally, Meghan O'Dea engages with the autobiographical accounts of two former Namibian "DDR-Kinder," arguing that these works expose how these children were instrumentalized to uphold an understanding of East German Solidaritätspolitik as inclusionary and humanitarian, while it also relied on a certain racialized politics of exclusion.

Part 2, "Theory and Praxis," begins with Kimberly Singletary's exploration of the haunting relationship between Afro-Germanness and American Blackness. Using Avery Gordon's concept of haunting as it represents the existence of racialized pasts not yet confronted, addressed, or absolved, Singletary writes about the erasure of Afro-/Black German subjectivity that results from upholding racialized versions of national identities, particularly as this occurs in the conflation of whiteness with Germanness and Blackness with Americanness. Similarly, through her focus on the presence of racial profiling and police brutality in Germany, Kevina King reiterates the importance of centering Black voices and the voices of people of color when examining the presence and effects of whiteness in Germany in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of its destructive power. In both instances, Singletary and King have carefully shown how the denial that Black people (have always) belong(ed) to Europe and Germany has enabled the ignoring and devaluing of Black German subjectivity and experience in the present.

Finally, in the third section, "Art and Performance," Kira Thurman, Vanessa Plumly, and Jamele Watkins explore, in turn, the relationships between Black embodiment, performativity, and identity. Thurman's analysis of the ways that Germans struggled with the idea that Black people had a potential place in the world of high art music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals white Germans' and Austrians' fragile and shifting ideas about Black musicians' ability to belong in the world of high art. While white German-speaking Europe was preoccupied with what it would mean to accept Black musicians as...