Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. By Tiffany N. Florvil. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020. xvii + 283 pages. $110.00 hardcover, $26.95 paperback, $14.95 e-book.

In her essay “Black Matters” (Playing in the Dark, 1992, 3–28), the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison uses the term “Africanism” “for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings and mis-readings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these peoples” (6–7). Almost three decades later, Tiffany Florvil reframes the term in her history of post-Second-World-War Germany. With the Afro-German (Afro-deutsche or Schwarze Deutsche) movement at its center, Florvil documents Black Germans’ struggle to claim their space in the political text of the Federal Republic of Germany and post-1989 reunified German nation and writes, “Blackness was an ontological experience and a political and intellectual practice across time and space. As the [Black German] movement emerged in cities across Germany, it transformed notions of citizenship, the diaspora, and Europeanness, including Germanness” (12).

I start my review of Mobilizing Black Germany with this juxtaposition to signal both the temporal and spatial distance as well as the contextual specificities and multiple layering of meaning and political significance that the term “Blackness” has acquired in the early twenty-first century, and which therefore must be traced in the histories of European nations anew. It is this task of tracing, identifying, mapping, and narrating that Florvil takes up in her compellingly argued, meticulously researched, powerful reconstruction of a transnational feminist movement.

There is no doubt that the field of African German Studies in the United States has been enriched by many notable works by historians, cultural theorists, literary scholars, and sociologists. Framed mostly through postcolonial theoretical frameworks of representation of the racial-ethnic other, studies such as Colonial Fantasies (Susanne Zantop, 1997), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (ed. Eric Ames et al., 2005), German Colonialism Revisited (ed. Nina Berman et. al., 2005) created an important space for discussions of entangled histories of Germany and Africa and their impact on German literature and culture. Publications in the second decade of the twenty-first century evidence a notable thematic shift with important works published in Black German Studies. These include European Others (Fatima el-Tayeb, 2011) [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 104.2, Summer 2012, 303–305], Image Matters (Tina Campt, 2012), Remapping Black Germany (ed. Sara Lennox, 2016) [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 110.2, Summer 2018, 273–75], White Rebels in Black (Priscilla Layne 2018) [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 112.4, Winter 2021, 752–55], among others.

Mobilizing Black Germany complements this scholarship, but it stands out in a number of ways. First, by clearly articulating Blackness at once as an ontological experience and political practice, Florvil conducts a multi-perspectival examination of the category of Blackness. She draws on German colonial history but does not reduce “Black Germany” to the historic space of colonial fantasies or simply define Black Germans as the European colonial other. In fact, referring to studies by Paul Gilroy and Michelle M. Wright, Florvil categorically states that “Black Germans’ diasporic identity was not directly tied to the slave ships during the Middle Passage” (11). Second, by underlining the centrality of diasporic connections—multiple Africanisms, from Africa, but also the United States, Caribbean nations, and even including accounts of Indian activities in the movement—Florvil fractures monolithic assumptions and imaginations of what comprises “Black Germany” and grants it Blackness. Third, through her own identification and mobilization of multiple sources as archives—from a seminar with the Afro Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde at the Free University of Berlin (1984) that led to the organization of Black Germans under a common appellation of Afro- or Schwarze Deutsche to letters exchanged among Dagmar Schultz, May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye and Audre Lorde—Florvil creates an extremely rich, granular history of a transnational women’s movement, making a case for how “Blackness” is mobilized by women to carry a two-pronged resistance to patriarchy and racism, within and beyond a nation. Fourth, by tracing the development of not one, but several movements striving for racial equity in Germany—such as Afrodeutsche Frauen/Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland e.V. (ADE-FRA), Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland (ISD), Interkulturelle Initiative Schwarzer Frauen für Minoritätenrechte und -Studien in Deutschland (IISF)—and explaining the alliances with and differentiations from pan-European movements such as Black Women and Europe Network (BWEN) and Mouvement pour la défense des droits de la femme noire (MODFEN), Florvil outlines an entire network of Black women intervening in the socio-political discourse of respective nations, while maintaining pressure on the European Union to confront and condemn racism. And finally, by situating her study of Afro-German women in the larger landscape of immigration policies of the former German Democratic Republic and the FRG, refracted, once again, through Black Women’s political struggles in the United States and Europe, Florvil’s study becomes exemplary of what the Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has called “connected histories” (2005), or the German historian Sebastian Conrad terms “global histories” (2016).

And yet, within the larger macro-history of ideas, Florvil manages to focus on individual contributions, the micro-histories of affective interpersonal relations, exchanges of ideas, literary works and memoirs, and public presentations—in academic and non-academic venues—thus establishing Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Peggy Piesche, and many others as “quotidian intellectuals” (6, 78–79), as vanguard thinkers who must be given their due credit in the making of contemporary Germany. The six chapters of the book, organized with intersecting chronologies, trace the Afro-German movement from its inception to its multiple iterations and now new formations and reformations in the age of the Black Lives Matter movement in Germany and the US. Starting with the central role played by Audre Lorde in the creation of the movement (Chapter One), Florvil moves to reconstructing histories of the movements (Chapters Two through Four) in national and transnational contexts. She then turns to a rich account of Diasporic Spatial Politics (Chapter Five), ending with the elaboration of “Black Internationalism” (Chapter Six) and a poignant note on Black Lives Matter in Germany as the Epilogue.

To categorize Mobilizing Black Germany simply as a book about marginalized, and therefore only victimized, identities would be a huge mistake. Florvil’s book is a powerful statement on how marginalized communities overcome victimization, write themselves into the text of a nation and make themselves visible on an international stage. Her moving accounts of Afro-German women’s struggles, along with the resilience and determination that fuel the movements, provide valuable insights into ways in which minoritized women intellectuals carve a space to make themselves heard and seen despite all attempts to render them invisible. Readers of transnational German Studies will find in this book many resonances with forward-thinking works in history and cultural studies by subaltern feminist historians such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays on Cultural Politics, 1988), historians of the Civil Rights Movement such as Brenda Gayle Plummer (Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960, first published in 1996), theorists and cultural historians such as Tejumola Olaniyan (Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama, 1995), among others. By suturing historical narrative with literary criticism, by recognizing literary works as a major source for understanding the craft and the task of history, Florvil’s engaging and thoughtful prose connects her with important historians of Germany such as George L. Mosse (The Nationalization of Masses, 1975) and Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men, 1992), and of South Asia such as Romilla Thapar (Somnath: The Many Voices of History, 2005) and Ayesha Jalal (The Pity of Partition, 2013).

Mobilizing Black Germany is a stunning map of pathways of thought exchanges beyond political boundaries of a nation, and how through these exchanges Black women have conceptualized and sustained powerful movements for human rights and human dignity. Moving the history of the marginalized community to the center of national political histories, Florvil successfully demonstrates how the margins are often the richest sources of thinking about national self-representations. Much like Toni Morrison’s, Florvil’s notion of Blackness draws attention to an entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-readings that have become bad habits of thinking as part of our collective Eurocentric legacies. The book also mobilizes hope that through solidarity, national historical narratives can be challenged, reshaped, and indeed redefined by minoritized and marginalized communities.