From Black to Schwarz

Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany

Maria I. Diedrich, Jürgen Heinrichs

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780870139895
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628954876
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Black to Schwarz explores the long and varied history of the exchanges between African America and Germany, with a particular focus on cultural interplay. Covering a wide range of media of expression—music, performance, film, scholarship, literature, visual arts, reviews—these essays trace and analyze a cultural interaction, collaboration, and mutual transformation that began in the eighteenth century, boomed during the Harlem Renaissance/Weimar Republic, survived the Third Reich's "Degenerate Art" campaigns, and (with new media available to further exchanges), is still increasingly empowering and inspiring participants on both sides of the Atlantic.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Africanist Presence in Nineteenth-Century German Writers
• New Negro Renaissance – ‘Neger-Renaissance’: Crossovers Between African America and Germany during the Era of the Harlem Renaissance
• The Askari as New Negro: Alain Locke and German Colonial Art
• Staging the African American Conquest of Old Europe: Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf
• Bridging the Great Divides: Cultural Difference and Transnationalism at Frankfurt’s Jazzklasse
• Pictures of “US”? Blackness, Diaspora and the Afro-German Subject
• Black Bodies on White Snow: The Reconstruction of Germanness As White in Luis Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son) (1934)
• (Re)writing Twentieth-Century Slavery: John A. Williams’ Clifford’s Blues as Neo-Slave Narrative
• Reading Clifford’s Blues and Blacks in Nazi Germany in PostNegritude Time
• The Rebirth of the Nation: Cinematic Discourses of Race and Reconstruction in Transnational Perspective
• Rainer and Der weiβe Neger: Fassbinder’s and Kaufmann’s On And Off Screen Affair as German Racial Allegory
• In a Nation or a Diaspora? Gender, Sexuality and Afro-German Subject Formation
• Winold Reiss to Kara Walker: The Silhouette in Black American Art
• Mixed Media, Mixed Identities: The Universal Aesthetics of Marc Brandenburg
• On Ben Patterson / “I’m Glad You Asked Me that Question”
• Poetry, Jazz and the Politics of Aesthetics: Transcontinental Connections between German ’68ers and African American Culture
• Notes on the Contributors