Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000
2006; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)German Colonialism and Identity Studies
ResumoMazon, Patricia, and Reinhild Steingrover, eds. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture andHistory, 1890-2000. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005.272 pp. $75.00 hardcover. It is fitting that a field of such intercontinental scope be site of such fertile exchange between Germanistik in North America and Europe. The first three contributions to this revealing volume expand half-dozen major periods in 20th-century Germany, and therefore Afro-German history. The final five fall under (self-) representations of Afro-Germans. Krista Molly O'Donnell chronicles a radical shift in South West Africa from 1891, when one in six male colonists wed to women labeled 'African' (62), to 1905/1907, when all interracial marriages were banned, including ones long existent. Offspring of these unions, whom O'Donnell perspicaciously refers to as the first Besatzungskinder (67), were ejected from many white schools (just as their parents were being forced from most social institutions there). Such actions went beyond those in colonies of other European powers. O'Donnell further relates how white and non-white children came to represent face of sexual victims and perpetrators respectively in protectorate, while adult-on-adult sexual violence dominated discourse elsewhere. Fatima El-Tayeb examines -from colonial period to present-the racialized definition of nationality (31) underlying most Germans' refusal to acknowledge that anyone darker than a certain skin tone could have a claim to Germanness. She cites how sports journalists constantly label national soccer team star Gerald Asamoah as a German passport holder from Ghana (27) yet seldom mention backgrounds of white foreign-born players. While most of this volume is accessible to readers from multiple disciplines, non-German-speaking readers will miss further racial hierarchies imbedded in untranslated titles of colonial postcards reproduced in this chapter. Tina Campt cogently traces echoes of specter of racial mixture associated with Afro-German population (83), with crescendos first in 1912 marriage debates involving children of African mothers, then a decade later, when African soldiers in French occupation of Rhineland fathered children with women. Tobias Nagl's contribution focuses Blacks on display in entertainment industry, where they were economically marginalized as individuals, yet sought after as symbols, especially of Germany's colonial past. …
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