Black European Studies

“Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 14 May 2019.

“Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 03 September 2019.

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.

Before the age of European expansion overseas and the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa, Renaissance Italy became a common destination for scores of Ethiopian monks and dignitaries. These travelers presented themselves on the European scene as active agents of transcontinental discovery: interested in learning more about a region they  regarded  as  the  ultimate  center  of  organized  Christianity,  they became the protagonists of an Ethiopian age of exploration. This article examines the dynamics of interaction between Italian elites and Ethiopian travelers throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

By the early 1400s, diplomatic representatives and pilgrims from the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia had traveled to the Italian peninsula for political and religious reasons. In doing so, they inaugurated an era of Ethiopian–European relations that unfolded for more than 200 years: Ethiopians reached multiple locales across Latin Europe to forge political alliances, acquire technology, and pursue religious knowledge. They drew the attention of European observers, especially those with an interest in the overseas. Secular and religious personalities, but also average merchants, began their quests for the Ethiopian highlands, lured by the tales of their visitors who were believed with growing certainty to be subjects of the mythical Prester John, the imaginary Christian sovereign believed to rule the Indies. Their journeys enabled cultural exchanges, technological transfer, and the forging of one of the first Euro-African political alliances, that between the kingdoms of Ethiopia and Portugal.

In the 15th century, Ethiopian pilgrims flocked to Rome, and diplomatic representatives found hospitality in the Venetian Republic and at the Aragonese and papal courts. Concurrently with Ethiopian arrivals in Europe, European adventurers and representatives began reaching Ethiopia, eventually leading to the establishing of Portuguese–Ethiopian relations. The exchanges climaxed with a Portuguese military intervention to support the Ethiopian monarchy against the sultanate of Adal in 1541. In the decades following the conflict, Jesuit missionaries began operating in the country: after a difficult inception in the 1620s, the fathers experienced ephemeral successes, followed by a dramatic expulsion that ended early modern Ethiopian–European relations.

in: Peter Burschel/ Sünne Juterczenka (Hgg.): Das Meer. Maritime Welten in der Frühen Neuzeit, Cologne: Böhlau, 597-610.

This chapter deals with the legal status of trafficked people in the Holy Roman Empire. In analysing the writings of Ludwig Julius Friedrich Höpfner (1743–1797), the chapter investigates one of the most respected and influential practitioners and professors of law in the second half of the eighteenth century. Höpfner confirmed the existence of a slave status both in his natural law publications and in his commentary on Roman law. Both legal systems were used as subsidiary legal sources in the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern period, when the positive German law – as in the case of slavery – did not contain any explicit provision. According to Höpfner and his legal colleagues, however, in a case of conflict, Roman law took precedence between the two legal traditions, as a look at the practice of eighteenth-century jurisprudence confirms. German law in the eighteenth century thus not only theoretically maintained the option of a slave status, it was – as contemporary legal cases show – also applied in practice.

In this article, I examine cultural production as an avenue for mapping African diasporic identities and racialised experiences in Finland. Hip hop culture has long acted as a lingua franca for the African diaspora and has been central in the development of collective identities among second-generation European youth of colour. Prior to the 2010s, the landscape of Finnish hip hop was largely white with little engagement with race or hip hop’s roots as a Black American cultural form. This status quo was disrupted by the rise of Afro-Finnish rappers. Since gaining mainstream visibility, they have catapulted into the national consciousness with music that reclaims the language of racial and ethnic identities, interrogates assumptions about national belonging, and represents the lived experiences of first-generation Black/Afro-Finnish men. Approaching hip hop as a resource for resisting normative Whiteness and carving out space for Black/African diasporic collectivities in the Finnish cultural and political imaginary, I show how Afro-Finnish rappers articulate and navigate Blackness in relation to identity, racism, and national belonging in Finland. In doing so, I emphasise the tensions between racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity, on the one hand, and the rigidity of Finnish Whiteness and national exclusion, on the other.

May Ayim is one of the best-known representatives of both the Black German movement and Black German literature. Her individual and collaborative works helped to shape collective modes of Black German identity, making visible and affirming ties to the Black diaspora. This paper examines the intersections of music—specifically, the blues—and literature in Ayim’s poetry, focusing in particular on blues in schwarz weiss (1995). Here Ayim references the African oral tradition not only through her inclusion of Adinkra symbols, but also through a blues aesthetic that manifests itself in scat-like interjections, rhythmic breaks and patterns, and repetitions. In addition to these formal aspects, her blues aesthetic also relies on the West African tradition of “Nommo”—the naming process. Ayim’s poetry follows this tradition by incorporating her personal experiences, addressing pressing socio-political issues, and by constructing and presenting a self-determined Black German subject as member of a larger community, within and beyond Germany. Her essayistic and poetic works stand in dialogical relationship with each other, and serve as a forum to publicly discuss discrimination and marginalization as universal problems. As with the Blues, this essay argues, Ayim’s poetry presents socio-political problems as resolvable by formulating a “we” capable of action.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Unter Einbeziehung zahlreicher unterschiedlicher und teils unveröffentlichter Quellen aus Privatarchiven rekonstruiert Tiffany N. Florvil die Geschichte der modernen Schwarzen deutschen Bewegung. In sechs ansatzweise chronologisch aufgebauten Kapiteln arbeitet Florvil sich von den 1980er Jahren bis in die Gegenwart vor bzw. von Audre Lordes Berliner Jahren und May Ayims literarischem Aktivismus über die Entstehung zentraler Schwarzer deutscher Organisationen wie der Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) und Afrodeutsche Frauen/Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland e.V. (ADEFRA) bis hin zu Black Lives Matter. Besonders viel Raum wird Schwarzen deutschen "Aktivistinnen-Intellektuellen" (activist-intellectuals) bzw. "Alltagsintellektuellen" (quotidian intellectuals) und ihrem intersektionalen wie transnationalen Feminismus eingeräumt.

This chapter traces different forms of African European belonging in two novels by the Nigerian–British author Helen Oyeyemi. In both her 2007 novel The Opposite House and her 2009 novel White is for Witching, Oyeyemi expertly draws together discourses about national identity and diaspora within the architectural space of the house. White is for Witching features a haunted guest house that tries to exclude those whom it considers to be foreign. The “somewherehouse” in The Opposite House has doors that lead to both Lagos and London, thus advocating a complicated multi-sited-ness. Both novels feature the house as a location for identity struggles while interrogating home and homeland. Even though initially internal, domestic, and exclusionary spaces, Oyeyemi’s homes become places filled with a plethora of diasporic identity constructs. In rendering the home un-homely and in de-nationalising the nation, the texts give way to other forms of belonging, fashioned by the female voices emerging from the narratives and their relationships—be they sexual, romantic, or familial, heteronormative or queer. This chapter thus pits the construction of explicitly diasporic, African European spaces against a more affective geography of practices of love and desire as developed in Oyeyemi’s texts.

This chapter examines the creative practices of a burgeoning Afro-Swedish art world. Attending to artists working in theater, music, literature, film, and visual art, the chapter argues for an artistically grounded conception of “Afro-Swedish renaissance.”

While citizens of Hamburg had long come into contact with people of non-European descent – both enslaved and free, fictional and real – a new fascination with African and South Asian physicality emerged from the 1790s onward: well-off Hamburg citizens hired and explicitly sought out domestic workers of non-European descent; amusement gardens, cafés, and restaurants featured performances by African dancers as well as by South Asian gymnasts. Concurrently, the city also saw the occasional exhibition of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans as ethnic others.
Diverse as these strands are, they point to two aspects of early nineteenth-century Hamburg popular culture that have been largely neglected by historical research thus far. The first regards the significant presence of people of non-European descent living and working in Hamburg in the early nineteenth century. The second pertains to the pervasive notion of the ‘exotic’ – an idea encompassing aesthetics, physical prowess,
and popularized anthropological concepts – which significantly shaped how people of non-European descent were perceived, often more so than contemporary abolitionist debates.
In this paper, I highlight the presence of people of non-European descent
working in the domestic labor as well as in a broadly defined entertainment sector in Hamburg, ca. 1790-1840. By drawing on printed sources, including advertisements and newspaper reports, I seek to analyze both individuals’ agency and their perception by others. I argue that, amidst a growing interest in methods such as craniology and
sustained transnational cultural exchanges, concepts of the ‘exotic’ came to endow Black and Brown bodies with specific aesthetic value. With a premium placed on the perceived enviable (and imitable) physical dexterity of non-European bodies, exoticism, on the one hand, contradicted proto-racist aesthetic hierarchies to some degree. On the other hand, it arguably advanced the development of a western gaze that would underpin the later development of human zoos.

This article examines the existential grounds and experiential limits
of an embodied and intersubjective being-in-the-world, in walking
dialogue with the remembrances of Afro-Swedish subjects. To
walk, wander, and roam in Sweden, particularly through the
abundant green spaces that intrude upon and surround nearly
every town and city, is a socially constitutive practice of everyday
life. It is a sign of personal vitality, healthfulness, and a kind of
being-with others predicated on a regular, vigorous, and
widespread being-toward nature. Yet, for many Swedes of African
descent (as for non-white Swedes more generally), such an
imagined community of salubrious walkers is largely just that, a
socially constructed fiction that perforce excludes them; an
abstraction of urban planning that encumbers their movements,
creating anomalous spaces of stasis and immobility; a caesura in
the biopolitical field that indexes their black lives as matter out of
place, beyond both culture and nature.

This study explores the dynamics of racism, specifically its generation and reproduction as an ideology, and its role in affecting the reception and occupational location of migrant medical labour in Britain. It is argued that the treatment of ‘overseas doctors’ in Britain draws on a complex interplay between racism and nationalism underpinned by the historical construction of ‘welfarism’ as a moral legitimator of ‘Britishness’. Through an exploration of internal and external immigration controls introduced with the aim of regulating migrant labour, we demonstrate how British social policy and elite discourses of ‘race’ combine to construct moral prescriptions of threat such that migrants and British-born ‘non-whites’ entering the British medical profession are forced to negotiate ‘saviour/pariah’ ascriptions indicative of discriminatory but contradictory processes specific to the operation of the British National Health Service as a
normative institution.

Maya Angelou’s critical life writing account of touring as a dancer with a US State Department-sponsored production of Porgy and Bess in Cold War Italy stages the workings of Americanism abroad and underscores African American modernist performance on the global stage as a form of embodied resistance to racism and segregation at home. Though the African American talent displayed on state-sponsored tours like Porgy and Bess was touted abroad as the fruits of American democracy, the ongoing Black freedom struggle at home exposed irrefutable social inequities. Angelou situates Italy—a country refashioning itself in the wake of Fascism and wartime defeat, with its own vexed relations between North and South—as a rich interpretive site for defamiliarizing the structure of US racism. I read Angelou's life writing about the tour as a critical text that imagines transnational, liberatory postwar identities. See link to Modernism/modernity Print Plus site.

Vortrag: Atlantisches Prekariat? Hamburger Zivilgesellschaft, Behörden und der Umgang mit nicht-weißen ArbeiterInnen, ca. 1750-1840

Presentation: Atlantic Precariat? Hamburg Civil Society, Institutions and their Dealing with  Non-White Workers, c. 1750-1840

The article argues that there are three senses of the term African diaspora-a continental, a cultural and a racial sense-which need to be distinguished from each other when conceptualising Black African diasporas in Europe. Although African Diaspora Studies is occupied with African diasporas in a racial sense, usually it has conceptualised these in terms of racial and cultural identities. This is also true of the past decades of African Diaspora Studies on Europe. This article makes an argument for a socio-political conceptualisation of Black African diasporas in Europe that includes, but goes beyond, matters of identity and culture.

Die Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten Baden- Württemberg laden am 18. November ein zu einem digitalen Werkstattgespräch. Im Rahmen der Veranstaltung präsentiert der österreichische Regisseur Markus Schleinzer zudem seinen Spielfilm ANGELO (2018) über den berühmten Wiener „Hofmohren“ Angelo Soliman.
Anmeldung unter https://www.schloesser-und-gaerten.de/besuchsinformation/veranstaltungen/werkstattgespraeche-und-filmpraesentation

Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication Date: 2014
Publication Name: Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions
Editors: Veronica Watson; Deirdre Howard-Wagner and Lisa Spanierman

This article focuses on representative digital platforms created and coordinated by African and Afro-descendant people from Spain and Portugal. It argues that, by sharing and articulating mutual narratives online, these platforms act as spaces where Afro-diasporic communities are being imagined. To that effect, this paper not only builds on theoretical reflections on how Blackness and Afrodescendance are conceptualised on the internet. Adopting a cultural studies’ approach that offers an interpretation of selected posts, it deduces the main narratives displayed and the diverse identificational spaces intertwined in those narratives. In doing so, the paper shows that these platforms challenge biased perspectives on Afro-diasporic communities and, within the digital space, conceptualise alternative, decentred—national and transnational—communities of Afro-diasporic people that are based on shared experiences of displacement, exclusion, resistance and self-empowerment.

Matteo Salvadore talks about the strange journey of Ṣägga Krǝstos and his impact on the Renaissance world. Salvadore is an Associate Professor of History at the American University of Sharjah. He’s the author of The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555. Salvadore writes about Ṣägga Krǝstos in his essay “‘I Was Not Born to Obey, but Rather to Command’”: The Self-Fashioning of Ṣägga Krǝstos, an Ethiopian Traveler in Seventeenth-Century Europe”