Course Details

In the aftermath of World War II, encounters between African Americans and Germans had important political and cultural effects on both sides of the Atlantic. However, while most scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of this encounter on the African American community, only few such debates have considered the impact of these encounters on German society and the emergence of a Black German political consciousness. In this seminar we will look at the cultural conjunctions between these two diasporic communities as they are mediated through cultural productions, such as fictional and non-fictional literary texts, music and film, as well as through activism and community politics. Students in this class will thus become acquainted with theoretical and methodological approaches from Black Studies, Black Diaspora Studies, and Critical Mixed Race studies, as well as critical perspectives on transnationalism. I understand the political and cultural debates that ensued around relationships between African American soldiers and white German women during the immediate post-war years in both countries as a case in point to shed light on the convergence of German and US American anti-Black sentiments and political agendas. Moving on from there, the focus of this seminar will be on the 1980s, the formative years of Black German political activism and community formation, and the community’s development up until the present. In the early stages of the Black German movement, interactions between Black German women and the Black American writer, activist, and scholar Audre Lorde were an important driving force. Highlighting the fact that Black queer women continue to be at the forefront of community formation in both cultural contexts, another theoretical focus of this seminar is on intersectionality, as well as Black feminist and Black queer modes of knowledge production.