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

"[O]ne of our main goals for this volume was to showcase the insightful scholarship of another generation of scholars who are pushing the fields of Black German and Black Austrian Studies in new directions" (21). The two editors, Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, do just that in Rethinking Black German Studies. Contributors to the volume explore a wide palette of previously ignored or scantily researched topics in Germanic studies. As the book includes aspects of Black lives in both Germany and Austria and expands the field beyond rethinking it, its title could have easily read Expanding Black German and Austrian Studies or Expanding Black Germanic Studies.

At the outset, in the introduction, the two editors bemoan the dearth of Black German and Afro-European scholarly voices in their volume and underscore the fact that they are writing from their own cultural perspectives as two non-German scholars, one white and the other Black.

The book is divided into eight chapters organized in three parts: Part I, "German and Austrian Literature and History"; Part II, "Theory and Praxis"; and Part III, "Art and Performance." Part I includes three chapters: "On Representations of Chocolate Consumption as a Colonial Endeavor" by Silke Hackenesch; "Here to Stay: Black Austrian Studies" by Nancy P. Nenno; and "Lucia Engombe's and Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo's Autobiographical Accounts of Solidaritätspolitik and Life in the GDR as Namibian Children" by Meghan O'Dea. Tackling topics ranging from the racialized images of Africans in German colonial cocoa plantations to the othering and racialization of Namibian children in the former German Democratic Republic, these first three chapters highlight the complexities of African Diasporic studies in the Germanic context.

Hackenesch meticulously analyzes the correlation between cocoa production and chocolate consumption on the one hand and the construction of racist images of "Black subjects" created for the sole purpose of supporting the German colonial endeavor on the other. She argues that visual representations of German colonialism through postcards and ads were used not solely to sell "colonial" products, in this case chocolate, but to comfort the Germans in their already established sense of white superiority. On these postcards and ads, the white German individual appears inevitably well dressed, dignified, in control and as a commanding figure in order to convey white efficiency, white control, white superiority and supremacy. The Black individuals that surround him or her are usually half naked, working hard, showing brawn, sweat and muscles. They usually appear in a subservient position.

Hackenesch selects four such postcards and ads to illustrate her point. However, she publishes only one postcard in her article: a 1910 postcard of the Reichardt Company depicting the West African Plantation Company Victoria, WAPV, in Cameroon, the largest cocoa cultivation company in Cameroon. Hackenesch picks apart the various aspects of the postcard, from its colors and tones to the movement or lack thereof of the individuals depicted.

The other postcards are very different: one represents several African boys in suits while another shows a Javanese woman and an African man, both scantily clad. A third one effectively highlights the contrast between a caricatured Black subject hiding behind a globe and the white woman in pristine attire posing in front of the globe holding a white porcelain cup from which she pours him the civilized hot chocolate beverage. Although the author only analyzes four postcards, each post card chosen represents a particular aspect of the colonial imaginary and of the racialization of the colonized in that imaginary where intersectionality is ever present. These postcards exude white male dominance and efficiency, white female "mission civilisatrice," Africans' acceptance of Western civilization through their western suits, and hyper-sexualization of the "other" through the Javanese woman and African man's hyper-exotic sexuality.

Nenno tackles a drastically different topic: she highlights the new Black activism among Black...