https://read.amazon.co.uk/?asin=B081B949XJ Drawing on long-standing, dynamic practices of scholarship, art, and activism, this introduction recognizes African European studies as a vibrant site of engagement, generated by and responding to an array of historical and contemporary configurations interrelating Africa and Europe. In particular, it positions the field’s critical diversifying, anti-racist impetus in relation to a critique of what the editors call Europe’s “politics of contingent belonging”. This politics has governed European publics and policies for the longest time. Boosted by racist–nationalist populisms, today it engenders and naturalises normative whiteness while subjecting people of colour to a conditional belonging that is strategically granted and revoked in accordance with white Europe’s self-interests. Under certain conditions, and when strategically employed for subversive self-positioning, contingent belonging can also exert a contestatory potential. It can reject supposedly benevolent forms of belonging, thereby drawing attention to the inherent instability and uncanniness of the racist compartmentalisation and hierarchisation that resides at the core of European white supremacist self-definition. Analysis and critique of these structures have been, and continue to be, central concerns for African European studies and the work collected in this book. free sample for cloud reader and kindle: https://lesen.amazon.de/?asin=B081B949XJ all chapters here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429491092

When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers “Negroes with white souls,” associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university. The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

Audre Lorde and her work as writer-activist have had a strong influence on the development of Afro-German women's communities, especially with regard to fostering solidarity among these women and creating a distinct group identity. However, the interactions between the "warrior poet" and her "Black German sisters" have not been one-directionally influential. Rather, traces of her connection with and impressions of Germany and Afro-German women can be found in Lorde's work and call for a reading of her writings in this context. The women she connected with personally or via her (literary) work have been transformed or at least affected by their mutual exchange(s) with her. This essay analyzes these transatlantic dialogues and interactions which are primarily based on gender and black solidarity and outlines Lorde's seminal role for Afro-German women as individuals and as an identifiable and visible group in German society. In the first part of this article, I, therefore, put Audre Lorde's works in the context of her relationship to Germany and particularly Afro-German women. The second part primarily focuses on Lorde's influence on Afro-German women's communities and the final part of this paper works towards an understanding of the overall conditions and consequences of this mutual exchange as well as its meaning within the context of the African Diaspora.

Dual Inheritance Theory (DIT) asserts that both genetic and environmental factors have a formative impact on the physical as well as psychological upbringing of people. Audre Lorde, a famous Afro-American poet and a model (according to DIT) has influenced Afro-German women writers. For the forging of a collective Black German consciousness of identity, Audre Lorde's connections with Black Germans were pivotal and marked the beginning of a cross-cultural movement that was seminal for the building of various organizations like the Initiative of Black Germans (ISD), ADEFRA (Afro-German Women) and Home story Deutschland. This paper argues that Afro-Germans, and Afro-Americans, who share much in common, are part and parcel of the environment they have been raised in; therefore, according to genetic-cultural coevolution, subsequent generations are fully developed Homo sapiens whose biological and cultural genes are every inch (Afro-)Germans (and (Afro-)Americans). Moreover, the paper argues that a model, Audre Lorde in this case, who shares genetic roots with others, such as May Opitz, alias May Ayim—a palindrome that underscores her fascination of word play—, and who lives somewhere else can transfer some of his/her environmental practices such as protest against racism and give voice to the marginalized. Analysis and comparison of some poems by Lorde and Ayim will prove the DIT model's influence on others. The study of genetic information and its modes of operation and transmission along with socio-cultural systems stresses the formative impact of the two different kinds of constructions (environmental and biological) necessary for creating fully cultured human societies with human beings that can reflect the material out of which these societies are constructed (See: Paul 2-3). Transmission of cultural practices and models resembles DNA's: " [W]hereas culture is transmitted by way of sensory perception, DNA is transmitted by means of copulation. This basic difference turns out to have enormous consequences for how the two channels influence the organization of human socio-cultural system " (Paul 11). Moreover, and in terms of promoting pro-social behavior such as gratitude, " it can be said that biology and culture colluded and constituted a powerful " dual-force " that was likely to have activated a stream of serial reciprocity " (Machalek and Martin 23). The impact of cultural models in transmitting Afro-Americans' and Afro-Germans' reactions against racism is proven through an investigation of cultural coevolution of genetically psychological 27

From Josephine Baker's performances in the 1920s to the 1970s solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis, from Audre Lorde as »mother« of the Afro-German movement in the 1980s to the literary stardom of 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Germans have actively engaged with African American women's art and activism throughout the 20th century. The discursive strategies that have shaped the (West) German reactions to African American women's social activism and cultural work are examined in this study, which proposes not only a nuanced understanding of »African Americanizations« as a form of cultural exchange but also sheds new light on the role of African American culture for (West) German society, culture, and national identity.

In Encountering Empire, Elisabeth Engel traces how black American missionaries – men and women grappling with their African heritage – established connections in Africa during the heyday of European colonialism. Reconstructing the black American 'colonial encounter,' Engel analyzes the images, transatlantic relationships, and possibilities of representation African American missionaries developed for themselves while negotiating colonial regimes. Between 1900 and 1939, these missionaries paved the way for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest independent black American institution, to establish a presence in Britain's sub-Saharan colonies. Illuminating a neglected chapter of Atlantic history, Engel demonstrates that African Americans used imperial structures for their own self-determination. Encountering Empire thus challenges the notion that pan-Africanism was the only viable strategy for black emancipation.