Schwarz werden

Abstract

Soul-Musik und »Black Power«-Solidarität, blonde »Afros« und schwarz-weiße Werbekampagnen: Afroamerikanisches hatte in verschiedenen Feldern der Gegen- und Popkultur der Bundesrepublik um 1968 Konjunktur. Diese Studie zeigt Formen und Hintergründe der »Afroamerikanophilie« auf und zeichnet damit ein ungewohntes Bild der Zeit um 1968, als ein zunehmend »exklusives« afroamerikanisches Selbstbewusstsein entstand und die »weiße« Suche nach imaginären Einlassstellen in die »schwarze« Welt zugleich eine neue Qualität gewann. Aus einer Vielzahl von Quellen werden dabei auch theoretische Fragen nach dem Zusammenspiel von Identifikation und Solidarität, Rassismus, Aneignung und Nachahmung entwickelt.

Becoming-Black: Patterns and Politics of West-German ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ in the Late 1960s

“…However, solidarity workers weren't disconnected from pop cultural imaginaries and, in their cultural criticism, sometimes held on to racialized imagery that would have been too explicit for much of the pop cultural world. 23 This argument is developed further in Ege (2007), where I discuss Charles Wilp's 'Afri Cola' advertising campaigns. Classic arguments against the 'consumption of difference' (as forms of 'incorporation,' of 'eating the other') have been made by hooks (1992) and others.…”

“…On the German side, this included the Black Panther Solidarity Committees, groups within the so-called GI underground (which partly overlapped), and, later on, the Angela Davis solidarity network. As historians Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke (2010) have analyzed in great detail, most of these groups arose within the anti-imperialist radical left scene of the student movement (see also Klimke (2006;; Siegfried (2006); Ege (2007); and Höhn (2008) Chapter 5) already drew a large, more popular and politically centrist-liberal, much less subcultural crowd (20,000 people attended a sermon at West Berlin's Waldbühne, for instance). The developments of the late 1960s in Europe must also be seen in the context of a situation in which African American activists were broadening their movement's scope towards global Black populations (Joseph 2007;Finzsch, Horton & Horton 1999: 490-531;Van Deburg 1992: 112-191 A similar stance was taken by the most spectacular and media-savvy group of the time, the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense, which was watched in awe and…”

“…2 The term is coined in slightly satirical reference to the 1920s concept of 'Negrophilia.' See the introduction to this journal issue for further reflections on the term, as well as Ege (2007) and Broeck (2010).…”

WE WERE DANCING IN THE CLUB, NOT ON THE BERLIN WALL: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Exclusionary Incorporation into the New Europe

“…[1999:323-324] Because of the U.S. forms of racial segregation in the midst of Germany's racial reeducation, black and white U.S. troops went to different clubs and bars in the decades after WWII. But even the black clubs were frequented by white German women (see Fehrenbach 1998Fehrenbach , 2005Höhn 2002;and Ege 2007). After the Cold War, U.S. troop numbers diminished and Germany was no longer officially a country under U.S. occupation.…”

“…This desire was and is part of popular culture, and its revolution coincides both with U.S. military occupation and the sexual revolution of late 1960s and the early 1970s. Here, the sexual politics that emerged from the left (see Herzog 2005) coincides with an antiracism that imagines it can achieve revolution in part through sleeping with the Other (see Ege 2007). This fantasy persists in the 1970s and 1980s as a group of German feminists begin to see the Caribbean, West Africa, and other sites as alternatives to the white male masculinity that seemed dominant even on the Left (see Herzog 2005).…”