Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German HistoryPosted in Africa, Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-07-11 22:05Z by Steven |
Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History
Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 322-341
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0036
Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College
This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the “Rhineland Bastard.” Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.
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