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.
 
Table of Contents:
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


Review Quotes:
"In this exciting volume, Honeck, Klimke, and Kuhlmann put forward a unique resource for the burgeoning study of the African diaspora in Germany. Comprising essaysf rom scholars working in a variety of fields, the collection fills significant gaps in the current scholarship... In detailing a phenomenon long ignored within mainstream German culture and history, this collection will be of use to a variety of readers, including those working in African and African American studies, art history, German studies, and history...Highly recommended." - Choice
"The volume serves as a welcome corrective to a historiography of black Germany that has focused on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries... [It] offers a combination of precise historical detail and conceptual and temporal range, and the editors have made a strong case that 'accounts of German nation making that conceal or ignore black agency are no longer acceptable'." - European History Quarterly
"Because the majority of essays in this collection concentrate on 'Germany' before it existed as a unified nation-state, the book gives us more nuanced and highly contextualized portraits of black-white encounters on German-speaking lands." - Canadian Journal of History
"...the detailed research and accessible style of the volume make it exceptionally helpful in undergraduate and graduate seminars." - German Studies Review
"The essays collected here offer compelling evidence for what Hoerder calls the need to '[reintroduce] Africans into European history after their symbolic annihilation by white nationalist historians'. For the most part, this splendidly edited volume admirably succeeds in helping forgotten and neglected human beings in 'making themselves known'." - Colonial Studies
"This is a wide-ranging and fascinating if somewhat exploratory collection of articles. Half of the twelve chapters deal with the interactions of Africans and Germans across the last millennium; the personal interactions between Americans and Germans that are analyzed involve African-Americans who traveled to Germany or its African colonies." - Yearbook of German American Studies
"Meticulously researched in previously ignored archives and obscure publications, the essays included in this volume range from black figures in medieval art and baroque drama to German translations of 18th- and 19th-century African and African American writers... to the fascinating account of the venture to start cotton plantations in Togo, undertaken by the German Colonial Committee with the help of Booker T. Washington. [They] reveal the many interactions of Africans and African Americans with the German-speaking world, thus offering fresh and suggestive interracial perspectives on German cultural history in broader contexts." - Werner Sollors, Harvard University
"The organization of the book is exemplary. The introduction presents a very important theoretical construct for this and future investigations of the phenomenon of race in the German-speaking world...the chapters assembled in this anthology are excellent...I have no doubt this volume will quickly become a vital part of the growing body of research on Afro-German interactions." - Leroy Hopkins, Millersville University
"This is an important collection that takes a large step forward in advancing knowledge about people of the African diaspora in Germany." - Sara Lennox, University of Massachusetts Amherst