University of Rochester Press Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

Product Description Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as "foreigners," assuming they are either African or African American but never German. In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany's transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not onlyby addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines. Patricia Mazon is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Reinhild Steingrover is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Review [T]his anthology advances our understanding of exclusionary practices and the history of institutionalized biological racism in modern Germany. It also pays tribute to the growing corpus of complex and challenging texts and films produced by Afro-Germans and to the degree to which the community has become networked and vocal in significant ways. -- Nina Berman ― RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Winter 2008 Not So Plain as Black and White will contribute in significant ways to the emerging field of Afro-German Studies and will be important as well for German Studies, Africana Studies, and Cultural Studies in general. -- Sara Friedrichsmeyer, professor of German, University of Cincinnati About the Author Anne V. Adams is Professor Emerita in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She served for five years as Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture in Accra, Ghana. A former President of the African Literature Association (ALA), her research and publications focus on gender in African Diaspora Literatures and include (co-ed) Ngambika and Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo At 70: A Reader in Cultural Studies.