In the spring of 2012, the use of blackface/blackfacing in German theater, long an unremarked-upon practice, became the object of public protest, and prompted heated debates about the politics of race and representation. Through a discussion of the Deutsches Theater’s production of Unschuld (Innocence ) by Dea Loher, which stirred up the controversy, the essay shows that blackfacing is part of larger patterns of racial representation. These have recently come under increasing scrutiny in Germany. The controversy about blackfacing is a symptom of larger tectonic shifts in narratives of German identity as postnational, postracial, and cosmopolitan.
A great deal of the scholarship on global communications media welcomes and romanticizes the stretching of racial, ethnic and national intimacies across continents and along migration patterns, connecting diasporas with distant origins and constituting community through satellite signals and fibre-optic lines. The instantaneous accessibility and wide delivery of images and information on the Web can arouse sympathy and compassion for distant others, aid fundraising for victims of tsunamis and earthquakes, and fuel enthusiasm for faraway revolutions. In his book The Empathic Civilization, sociologist Jeremy Rifkin celebrates the advent of the 'age of empathy' warranted by mirror neurons in our brains, and facilitated by the global information networks that birthed a planetary consciousness. 2 Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, author of Empathy in the Global World, likewise regards digital media as the midwife of intercultural literacy and global responsiveness to distant others brought close to us via Web, mobile phones and social-networking technologies.
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