Germany and the Black Diaspora

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans'' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany''s protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann
 

PART I: SAINTS AND SLAVES, MOORS AND HESSIANS

Chapter 1. The Calenberg Altarpiece: Black African Christians in Renaissance Germany
Paul Kaplan

Chapter 2. The Black Diaspora in Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, with Special Reference to German-Speaking Areas
Kate Lowe

Chapter 3. Ambiguous Duty: Black Servants at German Ancien Régime Courts
Anne Kuhlmann

Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Africans in German Court divertissements
Rashid-S. Pegah

Chapter 5. From American Slaves to Hessian Subjects: Silenced Black Narratives of the American Revolution
Maria Diedrich

PART II: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO EMPIRE

Chapter 6. The German Reception of African American Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century
Heike Paul

Chapter 7. “On the Brain of the Negro”: Race, Abolitionism, and Friedrich Tiedemann’s Scientific Discourse on the African Diaspora
Jeannette Eileen Jones

Chapter 8. Liberating Sojourns? African American Travelers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany
Mischa Honeck

Chapter 9. Global Proletarians, Uncle Toms and Native Savages: The Antinomies of Black Identity in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Bradley Naranch

Chapter 10. We Shall Make Farmers of Them Yet: Tuskegee’s Uplift Ideology in German Togoland
Kendahl Radcliffe

Chapter 11. Education and Migration: Cameroonian School Children and Apprentices in the German Metropole, 1884-1914
Robbie Aitken

Afterword: Africans in Europe: New Perspectives
Dirk Hoerder

Select Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index