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Speakers): Tiffany Florvil (University of New Mexico)

From the U.K. to the U.S., African diasporic subjects have long engaged in the politics of emplacement by carving out spaces for themselves in order to assert their agency, signal their presence, and promote their cultures and histories in nations that have ignored, silenced, and oppressed them. In Germany, Black Germans and other African diasporic individuals also have practiced these acts of emplacement. This manifests particularly with the Initiative of Black Germans (Initiative Schwarze Deutsche, ISD), a political and cultural organization that established Black History Month events. Modeled after the annual observances that African American historian Carter G. Woodson created and originally sponsored by the Berlin chapter in 1990, the BHMs also involved other regional ISD activists across the country, members from another Black German organization, Afro-German Women (Afrodeutsche Frauen, ADEFRA) as well as other local diasporic organizations. Diverse historical lectures, film screenings, art exhibitions, performances, poetry readings, and other events took place that had informative and entertaining functions.
 
In this paper, I argue that Black Germans’ organization of the BHMs served as a form of grassroots diasporic activism that helped them engender new cultural and political practices that centered and made visible Blackness and the African diaspora within the white national polity. Advancing their grassroots diasporic activism, ISD’s BHMs quickly became a source of continuity, sociability, and kinship within the community. These annual events also formatively shaped Black German identity making, knowledge production, and community building. They provided an affirmative avenue through which to acknowledge the contributions of Black Germans and their existence in Germany. Furthermore, Black Germans’ planning of and activism in the BHMs also persuaded them to make broader socio-political connections and to identify international issues across the African diaspora that paralleled developments in Germany. For Black Germans, the BHMs demonstrated how entangled local, national, and international dynamics and politics remained in their lives and how integral these were to their activist efforts.
 
 
Tiffany N. Florvil is an Assistant Professor of 20th-Century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico, where she specializes in the histories of post-1945 Germany, the African diaspora, gender and sexuality, and emotions. She received her PhD from the University of South Carolina in Modern European History and her MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in European Women’s and Gender History. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Black Diaspora Studies Network at the German Studies Association; the Co-Founder and Network Editor of H-Emotions; an Advisory Board Member, a Network Editor, and Co-Founder of H-Black Europe; and member of the Black Central Europe. Florvil has received fellowships from the American Council on Germany, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and others. She has presented at conferences in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Germany. Her co-edited volume, Rethinking Black German Studies, will be published with Peter Lang this October. She has published chapters in Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies, Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as a piece in The German Quarterly and has edited a special issue in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. She is revising her manuscript entitled Both Black and German: Women and the Making of a Movement.