Peggy Piesche

I t has been more than two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War, yet now-unied Germany still struggles with the legacy of its forty-year division. To be sure, debates have changed over time as a consequence of politicians' priorities, shiing media emphases, and public engagement. However, questions regarding the historical contextualization of the GDR remain at the center of debates about contemporary issues in post-unication Germany. Within these debates, most news outlets foreground the GDR's failed policies and their ramications for contemporary society. Strikingly, the debates focus primarily on questions of memory, belonging, identity, and exclusion. However, apart from the troubling fact that the GDR is treated as an isolated historical unit seldom juxtaposed to West Germany, of most signicance for the direction of these arguments is their insistence on portraying the GDR as a homogeneous white country. Emigration (of its own population) rather than immigration is taken to characterize the GDR, and East German history is portrayed as if Black history did not belong to it. us, not surprisingly, the politics of integration in the GDR are portrayed as the default reason for the widely voiced assertion that East Germans are incapable of becoming citizens who eventually internalize democracy. e most recent debates regarding PEGIDA, the Alternative für Deutschland, or general political discussions concerning the European crisis of responding to an evolving/ emerging global refugee movement reveal that the earlier search for a

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s death, Peggy Piesche published a new anthology, Eurer Schweigen nützt euch nichts:  Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Your Silence Will Not Protect You:  Audre Lorde and the Black Women’s Movement in Germany). The book was launched with a discussion and reading on Nov. 21 in one of the main theaters in Berlin (Volksbühne).
Barnard Professor Tina Campt, author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, and Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, said about the book:  “This is a remarkable volume that makes a similarly profound intervention -- and will certainly have an equally significant impact -- as the pathbreaking text it honors and harkens back to, Farbe bekennen …
While it offers an eloquent accounting of Lorde’s transnational reach and her contributions to this nascent movement, it looks well beyond her instrumentality and gives a careful, critical, and long overdue assessment of the broader history of the Afro-German women’s movement that plots a far more complex picture than has been offered to date.
It introduces previously unheard voices of black German artists, activists and scholars, and effectively rewrites the history of this movement from a new and invaluable vantage point. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the uniquely intersectional politics of race, gender and sexuality in Germany, and the transnational dynamics of diasporic women's scholarship, activism and cultural production.”
The anthology in German and English includes Lorde’s poetry as well as interviews and essays and is contextualized with scholarly articles, essays and poetry by Piesche and other contemporary Black German scholars and artists."

Mit seinem Fokus auf die Subjekte rassistischer Herrschaft entwirft das Buch neue kritische Perspektiven auf Debatten um Kolonialismus, Rassismus, Feminismus und Postkolonialiät. Es richtet sich an WissenschaftlerInnen verschiedener geisteswissenschaftlicher Disziplinen sowie an MultiplikatorInnen bildungspolitischer Arbeit, AktivistInnen antirassistischer Arbeit und gesellschaftspolitisch engagierte und interessierte LeserInnen.

"Der Erste Schwarze Deutsche Internationale Literaturpreis ist der deutsche Beitrag zum Internationalen UNESCO-Jahr 2004 zum Gedenken an den Kampf gegen die Sklaverei und an ihre Abschaffung." UNESCO Kommission Deutschland "May Ayim sprach mit der Stimme Schwarzer Deutscher. Ihre Worte fanden ihr Echo und wir riefen 'Ja, wir sind auch da! Ja, wir werden gehört und unsere Stimme ist wunderschön.' Mit dem international ausgeschriebenen May Ayim Award erhalten wir die Gelegenheit, die verschiedenen Stimmen der schwarzen Diaspora in Deutschland und darüber hinaus zu würdigen. Und unser Land wird damit um vieles reicher." Branwen Okpako, Filmemacherin

This is the third and last part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia. The two other parts were publisehd over the last weeks on transversal.at.

This is the second part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia

This is the first part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia.

Im Ringen um Verständnis, im Versuch, dem allen einen Sinn zu geben, kann es keinen Zweifel geben: Weißsein windet sich im Erklärungszwang. Es ist gerade mal zwei Monate her, dass mit der Wahl von Donald Trump zum nächsten Präsidenten der USA eine gefühlte Tsunamiwelle der Erschütterung und Bestürzung, des Schmerzes und Schocks einmal mehr die vermeintlich linke mediale Welt vereinte. Wer kein*e offen pöbelnde*r, frauenverachtende*r Rassist*in war, wachte nach der US-Wahlnacht am 8. November diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks entsetzt, ja verzweifelt, auf.

Die Forschungen zu „Black Germans“ und ihrer Geschichte werden vor allem von weißen Wissenschaftler_ innen durchgeführt. Peggy Piesche kritisiert dies und hebt hervor, wie wichtig die Einbeziehung von Schwarzen Deutschen (in Wissen- schaft und Aktivismus) ist, vor allem um deren eigene Erfahrungen in die akademische Welt zu bringen.
In ihrem Artikel bringt sie die Bedeutung von kollektiven Erinnerungen für die Bildung der „Black (German) Studies“ ein.

kitchen table digital diaspora collective
(kara lynch and Peggy Piesche)
Sound and video files, surveillance camera.

kitchen table digital diaspora collective's installation uses Iwalewahaus’ architectural beginnings as a bank building to carve out the interdependencies of BlackFuture imaginations and ‘deposits of knowledge’. As in everyday life, access to knowledge is an issue of power-relations. In order to retrieve this interred cache, visitors to the vault exert themselves as they descend the stairs, pass through the gates, and unearth the keys to the archive. The safe, this strange cube at the margins of the exhibition space, makes this also tangible: It embodies the double function of a ‘safe space’: protected and protecting. The artwork plays on these notions, and foregrounds future as a ‘deposit’ which can be activated, and thereby is able to empower certain collectivities. “Because”, as Peggy Piesche puts it in the contextualization of this project, “in the collective experience of African/ Diasporic histories and futures we live our theories, work and praxis not as some distant dream, but as something that can and will happen, that is happening right now.”

‘Future’ seems to appear as an uncontested category in the analysis of political movements, revolutions and rebellions. It is taken as a given that struggling people strive for a ‘better future’ which conceptually lies in a teleological ‘after present’. Beyond this understanding we propose ‘future’ as an analytical category, as a possibility and potentiality to think radical collectivities through imagination. ‘Future’ is herein not a linear consequence of an assumed today, but a speculative tool and space of potentiality and anticipation, a possible intervention into the present. This leads to the collapse of conventional normative temporal orders of nation state, kinship, bodies and senses of hope and ‘belonging’ and unleashes energy for speculative imagining, e.g.as utopias, dystopias, radical socialities and being with and for others. “What if?” here serves as a catalyst for radical collectivities and can also function as a prism of various positionalities, wherein ‘future’ consequently shatters into multiple futures for and from diverse perspectives. Looking at ‘future/s’ in this way enables to understand temporary or enduring collectivities, their formation and fluidity. It also enables the focus on practices of the radical imagining other-wise, beyond terms such as ‘inversion’ and ‘subversion’ and dichotomies (‘rural – urban’, ‘local – global’, ‘western – non-western’). We invite contributions (theory and practice) from all fields, particularly art, and media.

Panel chair: Peggy Piesche, Katharina Fink (University of Bayreuth)

Deadline: 31 December 2014

Please submit your abstract (max. 1500 characters) via online form on the conference homepage:

http://www.ecas2015.fr/visions-of-futures-towards-radical-collective-imaginations/

Conference fees, accommodation, and travel expenses are not covered and must be secured by the participants.

Contact for queries: peggy.piesche@uni-bayreuth.de

“The Trauma of Guilt or: How can colonial History be contextualized in a post- colonial Germany of today?”) in the April issue 2012 of Freitext, a German journal on social justice and culture. The article “provides an overview of social movements, international relationships and postcolonial criticism in the light of contemporary Namibian Governmental negotiations between Germany and Namibia about German restitutions of colonial objects still in possession of several German universities and museums.” Piesche and her co-author, film critic Carolin Philipp, argue that “over the time the historical perception developed a postcolonial imagination of a German collective, which detached itself from its own pre WWI history.” Piesche stressed the notion of a postcolonial rewrite of the German colonial endeavor and discussed this based on four decades of charity advertisement in Germany.

Bridging the divide between scholarship on the GDR and scholarship on minorities in the West, Peggy Piesche ("Black and German? East German Adolescents before 1989, A Retrospective View of a 'Non-Existent' Issue in the GDR") traced the experiences of two groups with different but linked experiences of GDR "solidarity" with peoples of color. Students and laborers from Asia and Africa were often forced to live apart from GDR citizens, while children born into bi-national families in the GDR were educated as citizens of the state in schools where racist images of Blacks were standard fare. Noting that the GDR must be understood from its beginning as well as its end, Peggy Piesche stressed the importance of Black immigration and international "solidarity treaties" for grasping the particular form and function of racism that developed in the GDR, the cultural history of which remains to be written.

"Afrofuturismus wird gemeinhin im Westen immer als eine Genrebezeichnung genommen und dann auch versucht wie in einem Puzzlespiel in unseren schon gängigen und überlieferten Genres wie Sci-Fi und Fantasy oder andere Dinge. Da ist bereits ein Problem vorgegeben. Nämlich dass wir diese Genres schon besetzt haben, wir haben vermeintlich eine Definition dahinter, wir meinen alle zu wissen worüber wir sprechen, wenn wir über Science-Fiction oder Fantasy sprechen und versuchen dann so mit dem Vorsatz Afro etwas hineinzupressen. Schon alleine aus dem Grund würde ich sagen, dass die Genrebezeichnung für Afrofuturismus viel zu kurz greift. Es ist aber in erster Linie eine Widerstandsbewegung, aus der sich eine Methodik heraus entwickelt hat. Das kann man sehr schön sehen daran, dass es von verschiedensten Ansatzpunkten ausgeht. Wir haben Elemente von Musik, von Narration, von Philosophie, Theorie und all diese Elemente sind vor allem verbunden mit Aktivismus und sie verstehen sich in ihrer Gänze auch nur in einer Kollektivität."

Peggy Piesche und ich waren als Referentinnen zur Tagung „Das Übersehenwerden hat Geschichte – Lesben in der DDR und in der friedlichen Revolution“ in Halle geladen. Auf der Tagung standen verschiedene lesbische Perspektiven auf lesbischen Aktivismus in der DDR, während und nach der Wendezeit im Mittelpunkt. In diesem Zusammenhang fragte der Freitag ein Interview mit einer ‚Zeitzeugin‘ an, das ich nach der Tagung mit Peggy Piesche führte. Wir konnten das Interview nicht zur Autorisierung freigeben, so dass es nun auf der Mädchenmannschaft erscheint. Die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Freitag zeigte deutlich, dass viele sogenannte ‚Qualitätsmedien‘ bzw. journalistische Angebote nicht an Selbst-Erzählungen interessiert sind, die sich gängigen heteronormativen, weißen und westlichen Geschichts- und Diskriminierungsnarrativen und Interessen entziehen. Peggy Piesche hat dazu einen Text geschrieben, den ihr am Ende des Interviews findet.