This volume assesses the current field of Black German Studies by exploring how periods of recent German history inform the present and future of the interdisciplinary field. The experiences of present generations of Black Germans, the construction and reimagining of race, and the opportunities for counter-narratives are considered.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.
A fundamental reassessment of the ways that racial policy worked and was understood under the Third Reich. Leading scholars explore race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.
The rise or resurgence of revisionist, repressive and authoritarian powers threatens the Western, US-led international order upon which Germany’s post-war security and prosperity were founded. With Washington increasingly focused on China’s rise in Asia, Europe must be able to defend itself against Russia, and will depend upon German military capabilities to do so. Years of neglect and structural underfunding, however, have hollowed out Germany’s armed forces. Much of the political leadership in Berlin has not yet adjusted to new realities or appreciated the urgency with which it needs to do so. Bastian Giegerich and Maximilian Terhalle argue that Germany’s current strategic culture is inadequate. It informs a security policy that fails to meet contemporary strategic challenges, thereby endangering Berlin’s European allies, the Western order and Germany itself. They contend that: Germany should embrace its historic responsibility to defend Western liberal values and the Western order that upholds them. Rather than rejecting the use of military force, Germany should wed its commitment to liberal values to an understanding of the role of power – including military power – in international affairs. The authors show why Germany should seek to foster a strategic culture that would be compatible with those of other leading Western nations and allow Germans to perceive the world through a strategic lens. In doing so, they also outline possible elements of a new security policy.
In spite of having been short-lived, "Weimar" has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic's place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany's defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser's state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties. Kathleen Canning is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, Women's Studies, and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (2nd ed., University of Michigan Press 2002) and Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press 2006). She is currently a board member of Central European History and the Journal of Modern History. Kerstin Barndt is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Sentiment und Sachlichkeit. Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik (Böhlau 2004) and several articles on German modernism, gender theory, and the history of reading. Her current book project Exhibition Time. History, Memory, and Aesthetics in Germany focuses on contemporary exhibition culture against the backdrop of national unifi cation, migration, and deindustrialization. Kristin McGuire is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and co-Director of the Global Feminisms Project based at the University of Michigan. She is the co-author of Global Feminisms through a Virtual Archive (SIGNS 2010). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Activism, Intimacy and Selfhood which offers a comparative historical analysis of women activists in Germany and Poland from 1890-1918; and co-editing a volume of translated essays entitled Women on Nietzsche, Gender, and Sexuality: An Anthology of European Women's Writings, 1880-1920. Cover image: Marianne Brandt, Es wird marschiert (1928)
This book offers the first interdisciplinary survey of community research in the humanities and social sciences to consider such diverse disciplines as philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, disabilities studies, linguistics, communication studies, and film studies. Bringing together leading international experts, the collection of essays critically maps and explores the state of the art in community research, while also developing future perspectives for a cross-disciplinary rethinking of community. Pursuing such a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community, the book argues, can counteract reductive appropriations of the term ‘community’ and, instead, pave the way for a novel assessment of the concept’s complexity. Since community is, above all, a lived practice that shapes people’s everyday lives, the essays also suggest ways of redoing community; they discuss concrete examples of community practice, thereby bridging the gap between scholars and activists working in the field.
Routes of Passage provides a conceptual, substantive, and empirical orientation to the study of African people worldwide. The book addresses issues of geographical mobility and geosocial displacement; changing culture, political, and economic relationships between Africa and its diaspora; interdiaspora relations; political and economic agency and social mobilization, including cultural production and psychocultural transformation; existence in hostile and oppressive political and territorial space; and confronting interconnected relations of social inequality, especially class, gender, nationality, and race.
The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.
Stunning shifts in the worldviews of states mark the modern history of international affairs: how do societies think about—and rethink—international order and security? Japan's "opening," German conquest, American internationalism, Maoist independence, and Gorbachev's "new thinking" molded international conflict and cooperation in their eras. How do we explain such momentous changes in foreign policy—and in other cases their equally surprising absence?The nature of strategic ideas, Jeffrey W. Legro argues, played a critical and overlooked role in these transformations. Big changes in foreign policies are rare because it is difficult for individuals to overcome the inertia of entrenched national mentalities. Doing so depends on a particular nexus of policy expectations, national experience, and ready replacement ideas. In a sweeping comparative history, Legro explores the sources of strategy in the United States and Germany before and after the world wars, in Tokugawa Japan, and in the Soviet Union. He charts the likely future of American primacy and a rising China in the coming century. Rethinking the World tells us when and why we can expect changes in the way states think about the world, why some ideas win out over others, and why some leaders succeed while others fail in redirecting grand strategy.