Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural LocationPosted in Books, Chapter, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-03-25 02:03Z by Steven |
Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location
Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies
Temple University
The African German Experience: Critical Essays
Greenwood Publishing
1997
edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay
The leitmotif of the German society in regards to African people has a lot to do with the way Germans approach racial difference. Thus, the German society, in many ways, similar to that of other European nations views Africans as other and lesser. This is a particularly troubling problem for children of mixed heritage since in the German construction of social reality they cannot be German by blood and therefore are African, the other.
It is claimed in this essay that the Afro-Germans, those born of African fathers and German mothers or German fathers and African mothers, a less frequent combination, have a peculiar problem of cultural location which is unlike the problems of other residents of Germany. There is a relatively sizable population of immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the former Yugoslavia who reside In Germany. But while Turks, Italians, and Greeks may be defined as not-German they are still seen in the light of their own nationality, but to which nation is the Afro-German connected? This is at once an existential and a locational question for the Afro-German, encompassing being and physical place…
Read the entire chapter here.