Call for Papers: Afropolitanism. German Afro-diasporic literature and other Afro-descendant literatures – critical dialogues.
Afropolitanism. German Afro-diasporic literature and other Afro-descendant literatures – critical dialogues.
Catarina Caldeira Martins - catarina.martins@fl.uc.pt
Erica Schlude Wels - eswels@letras.ufrj.br
Cleydia Regina Esteves - cleydia@letras.ufrj.br
Submission of full texts: by May 30th, 2026.
It was in the 1980s that people of African descent in Germany began to identify themselves as the Afro-Deutsche community (Eggers, 2006). The designation Afro-Deutsche was encouraged by the African-American feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) for black women of African or African-American descent who were born in Germany but felt excluded from that society for racist reasons. At the same time, the volume Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986) was published, edited by May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. It is a collection of studies on the history of people of African descent in Germany since colonial times, supplemented by autobiographical accounts and interviews. Today, there is a proliferation of black writers, especially black women writers, who write in German, constituting a field of study that falls within Black Studies in general, as well as Black Studies in Europe. Among them, the late poet May Ayim (1960-1996) stands out with her book of poetry Blues in schwarz weiss, published in 1995, as well as the writer Sharon Dodua Otoo, who won the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis in 2016 with her short story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. Her novel Adas Raum (2021) consolidates her position as a leading figure in this literature.
By making the history of black people in Germany visible, the pioneering volume Farbe Bekennen allowed German culture to be examined from an invisible margin, which the very notion of "Germanness" condemned to non-existence. In fact, in a nation that not only imagines itself as white, but sees itself as the epitome of whiteness, the condition of being of African descent appears as an oxymoron (Wright, 2004). As Ngien-Ha et al. (2007), El-Tayeb (2011), and Martins (2016, 2024, 2025) explain, in Germany's imagination there is no place for "People of Color," who are therefore confronted with internal boundaries of different expressions. They are “Undeutsch” (El-Tayeb, 2016): the Other that defines the Self (German), while still being German. This necessarily implies a transformation in the ways of conceiving the "nation", itself or even overcoming this paradigm (Martins, 2016, 2024, 2025), as proposed by Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) when applying the idea of "queerizing," as a radical deconstruction of the fictions of ethnic homogeneity embodied by Western models of the Nation (Anderson, 1983), now globalized by various “empires.”
Since Farbe Bekennen, it has become possible to recognize how pertinent a postcolonial or decolonial approach to German-language culture is (Ngien-Ha et al. 2007). The most recent research makes it clear that the different waves of constitution of the Afro-descendant community in Germany, the wave of subjects from the Empire, the wave of descendants of black French and British soldiers who occupied the Rhineland following Germany's defeat in World War I, the wave descended from black American soldiers who would occupy Germany after World War II, as well as the wave descended from contemporary migratory waves, are crucial to understanding historical processes such as National Socialism, the post-war period, and German reunification, and even the current growth of the far right. In this context, the concept of "miscegenation," between the Nazi idea of "racial contamination" and the assumption of an "Afro-German" black identity, inspired by the American one, to the broader "People of Color," must also be the subject of dense and contextually precise tensions.
At the same time, the history of black people in the German-speaking world also implies a new look at the concept of diaspora (El-Tayeb, 2011) and even at the complexities of the processes of racialization and racism, which evolve in different ways, depending on the colonial history and memory of the countries in which they are located. In Europe, the concept of Afro-Europeans is consolidating as a transnational Afro-diasporic community, stretching from Berlin to London, Paris, Brussels, but also Barcelona and Lisbon, passing through Rome, with circulations throughout the Americas, particularly the US and Brazil (Thomas 2014). In this context, the concept of Afropolitanism, as proposed by Achille Mbembe (2020) and Taye Selasi (2005), emerges as relevant for a comprehensive view of Afro-descendant diasporic communities worldwide, attentive to commonalities as well as the specificities that arise from: 1) their respective spatialities and temporalities; 2) their imagery and identity construction; 3) migratory processes and the circulation of people and ideas; 4) their relationship with colonial and postcolonial social and political processes; 5) their relationship with national identity or post-national formations; 6) the concrete analysis of processes of racist oppression and intersectional resistance; 7) the way they understand artistic and literary practices.
This dossier aims to contribute to the development of these reflections by inviting submission of articles focusing on German-language Afro-descendant literature or artistic expressions that reflect the experiences of Afro-descendants in the German-speaking world, in dialogue with other Afro-diasporic literature and artistic expressions, allowing for the consideration of the points listed above. The uniqueness of the German Afro-descendant experience is invoked as the axis of renewed critical perspectives in the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, critical race and racism theory, diaspora studies, Black Studies, and studies on memory and nation, including feminist, queer, and intersectional perspectives.
References:
Aitken, Robbie / Eve Rosenhaft (2013): Black Germany. The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge and NY: Cambridge UP.
Campt, Tina (2005): Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Eggers, Maureen Maisha (2006): "Positive Self-Images, the Diaspora as a Central Reference Point, Identity Spectrums, and Coalitions." In: Dossier Black Community in Germany, Heinrich Böll Foundation. Local History. Migration Policy Portal https://heimatkunde.boell.de/2006/05/01/positive-eigenbilder-die-diaspora-als-zentrale-referenz-identitaetsspektren-und (25.10.2021).
El-Tayeb, Fatima (2011): European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
El-Tayeb, Fatima (2016): Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der Postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript.
Martins, Catarina (2016): "Writing Against the German Mirror. Self-Images of Black Women in Germany." In: Von Hoff, Dagmar et al (Eds.). Cuts: Signatures of Violence in Text-Oriented Media. Würzburg: Könnigshausen & Neumann, pp. 113-132.
Martins, Catarina (2024): "The Inner Boundaries of the (Seemingly) Uniform Nation. Challenges for Literary and Cultural Studies Based on the Literature of Black Women in Germany: May Ayim and Sharon Dodua Otoo." Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 54, 827–847 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41244-024-00354-1
Martins, Catarina (2025): Lost frontiers: challenges to the (still) philological assumptions of Cultural Studies by Black diasporas in Portugal and Germany. Via Atlântica, São Paulo, v. 26, n. 1, pp. 337-367, May 2025 DOI: 10.11606/va.v26.n1.2025.207008
Mbembe, Achille / Laurent Chauvet (2020): “Afropolitanism.” Journal of Contemporary African Art, Duke University Press Number 46, May 2020, pp. 56-61.
Nghi Ha, Kien / Nicola Lauré al-Samarai / Sheila Mysorekar (2007) (ed.): re/visions. Postcolonial Perspectives of People of Color on Racism, Cultural Policy, and Resistance in Germany. Münster: Unrast.
Oguntoye Katharina / May Opitz / Dagmar Schultz (ed.) (1986): Farbe bekennen. Afro-German women on the trail of their history. Berlin: Orlanda Verlag.
Otoo, Sharon Dodua (2021): Ada's Room. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Otoo, Sharon Dodua (2022): Mr. Gröttrup Sits Down. Frankfurt a.M: Fischer.
Selasi, Taiye, “Bye-Bye Babar.” In: The Lip, (March 3, 2005). http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 (September 23, 2022).
Wright, Michelle (2004): Becoming Black. Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
