Introduction: Special Issue on Afro-Americanophilia in Germany

Abstract

From a ‘provincial’ and (hopefully) self-aware European perspective, it is clear that cultural forms or practices that originated among African Americans have, beyond their value to African Americans themselves and people elsewhere, contributed tremendously to life on the European continent. Those contributions include everything from the political imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, through philosophical thought, to literature, film, television, theatre, dance, sports, visual culture and everyday aesthetics. Most prominent, perhaps, have been forms of music—blues and jazz to r’n’b, rap, and hybrid electronic music forms—all of which have ‘furnished’ European listeners’ lives, whatever their so-called race. While deeply embedded racism can run through these processes of cultural flow, transfer, and appropriation, and numerous forms of exploitation are at work, in many cases there is also an ambiguous love for Black diasporic culture, at least according to the appropriating subjects’ view of themselves, which manifests itself in admiration, desire, a sense of affinity or connection, and sometimes in fantasies of ‘becoming black.’ This issue’s papers, which present case studies of what we will call Afro-Americanophilia, address the forms, ambiguities and politics involved in these cultural processes in 20th-century Germany.