Mixed Race Studies

Imagining Ourselves: What Does it Mean to be Part of the African Diaspora?

Think Africa Press
2013-11-21

Jean-Philippe Dedieu, Research Fellow
IRIS of the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Tina Campt talks to Think Africa Press about black European subjectivities, the US’ dominance in diaspora studies, and how photographs tell us more than we might realise.

Tina Campt, Director of the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University, has been examining gender, race and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany and Europe more broadly for the last decade.

Her earliest works were insightful contributions to the growing scholarship on the overlooked history of African communities in imperial and post-colonial Europe. Her first book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, was an oral history acknowledging the participation of African minorities to the German history, from the Weimar Republic to the postwar period.

More recently, Campt has deepened her intellectual reflection by exploring the crucial issue of visual representation. In Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, published last year by Duke University Press, she traces the emergence of a black (European) subject by analysing a rich photographic documentation that intertwines her own family albums with snapshots of black German families and studio portraits of West Indian migrants in England.

In an interview with Think Africa Press, Campt talked to the French scholar Jean-Philippe Dedieu about the intellectual discourses on diasporas across the Atlantic as well as the significance of photography for allowing black people to imagine themselves, freed from racial prejudice…

…How did you end working on Afro-Germans?

Serendipity. The first time I went to Germany, I went to Berlin to pass my language exams in graduate school. I was in Berlin before the wall fell, in ‘87, and it was an extraordinary experience because I had never been outside the United States and I had never experienced the particularly bizarre form of racism I encountered there. It was a concatenation of exoticism and ignorance that just did not fit with any of the forms of racism that I was familiar with as an African-American who grew up in Washington DC. When I went back a second time, I was studying in Bremen in a context with other African-Americans and Africans. That was incredibly revealing, and taught me more about how to understand some of the responses I was getting.

Toward the end of my stay I happened, literally happened, to meet an Afro-German man on the street and had a conversation with him about being black and German, and there was something that distinguished his experience from mine because, as he described it, he had no point of reference. I remember him saying, “I am only German. I don’t have a history of slavery. I don’t have a history of a community that has fought racism or that has battled discrimination. I’m at the point where I am trying to gather that, to martial that as a set of resources that I can draw on to create this thing that I call Blackness in Germany, or Afro-German. I’m doing that in the absence of what you have – your history as an African-American.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Scientific and colonial discourses of racial mixture first converged on the issue of interracial marriage in the colonies. Scientific conceptions of the negative genetic consequences of racial mixture were already an element of nineteenth-century German colonial policies as articulated on the issue of Rassenmischehe, or racially mixed marriages between white colonial settlers and indigenous colonial peoples. Only six years before the Rhineland occupation, Reichstag debates on racially mixed marriages prefigured many of the same arguments and fears voiced later in the newspaper protest campaign. Although interracial marriage was not illegal under German imperial law, colonial officials began refusing to register interracial unions in the colonies in 1890. In 1905 Governor Friednch von Lindequist issued the first such measure in the form of a decree banning interracial marriages in German Southwest Africa. Reflecting the dominant views of the scientific community at the time, he cited what he saw as the dangerous effect of racial mixture on the purity of the white race: “Such unions do not preserve, but rather diminish the race. As a rule the offspring are physically and emotionally weak and unite in themselves the negative traits of both parents.” In 1907, the colonial High Court in Windhuk ruled that the marriage bans were retroactively valid, effectively nullifying mixed marriages concluded before the 1905 ban. The court’s ruling stated, “Any person whose ancestry can be traced to natives either paternally or maternally must be viewed and treated as a native.” Consequently, many people who had been considered white Germans and who had considered themselves white Germans suddenly were counted as natives. Following Lindequist’s administrative order, similar decrees were passed banning mixed marriages in the German colonies of East Africa in 1906 and Samoa in 1912. In response to this 1912 decree, protests broke out in the Reichstag, prompting delegates to debate the legality of these colonial decrees in light of their conflict with imperial law. But the objections raised in protest against the bans did not focus in any fundamental way on juridical arguments regarding the question of the precedence of imperial over colonial legislation. Rather, delegates raised explicitly moral arguments against the bans, which presented marriages between German colonialists and nonwhite colonial natives as a threat to sexual morality and existing racial hierarchies of difference.

Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 43-44.

Piesche Publishes Anthology on Audre Lorde

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
College News
2012-12-02

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s death, Visiting Instructor of German & Russian Studies 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)…

Read the entire article here.

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

University of Michigan Press
2004
296 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03138-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02160-4

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

It’s hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt’s Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book.

In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?

The answers to Campt’s questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Memory, and Historical Representation: Contextualizing Black German Narratives of the Third Reich
• Part I: Echoes of Imagined Danger – Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 1: “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 2: Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program
• Part II: Memory Narratives/Memory Technologies: Race, Gendering, and the Politics of Memory Work
  • Chapter 3: Conversations with the “Other Within”: Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 4: Identifying as the “Other Within”: National Socialist Racial Politics and an Afro-German Childhood in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 5: Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space – Writing History Between the Lines: A Postscript
• Appendix: Original German Interview Excerpts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index