Pictorial Affects, Senses of Rupture: On the Poetics and Culture of Popular German Cinema, 1910–1930. By Michael Wedel. De Gruyter: Berlin, 2019. ix + 219 pages + 55 b/w illustrations. $89.99/€77,95 hardcover or e-book.

Abstract

In the case of Samy Deluxe, adopting African American tropes from the hiphop scene is far from an existential crisis “à la Leroy”; rather, it is a form of transnational self-affirmation. In this segment the author touches on an area where there is a dearth of research, namely, the transnational and transcultural affirmation of Black masculinity through rap music in Germany, thus opening a new area of research in Black German studies. “Performing Oppression and Empowerment in Real Life: Deutschland” is the title of the last chapter of the volume, which aptly propels the usually marginalized narratives of Black German teens into the center of public debate via the medium of theater. In Jamele Watkins’s chapter, by performing oppression and empowerment the Young Stars draw on diasporic connections to reclaim their body from the grips of white voyeurism. By including audience participation in their performance, they enable their public to face the uncomfortable truth about racial cleansing and the threat of white supremacy on a global scale, self-reflecting about the very fabric of a postcolonial society. Like the transnational self-affirmation of Black German masculinity and identity of Samy Deluxe, the Young Stars, in addition to rescuing their body, convey to their German audience a profound message about the German society they want to contribute to building. In highlighting the performance of the Young Stars, Jamele Watkins is indeed breaking new ground in the field of Black German studies. Rethinking Black German Studies certainly pushes the envelope in AfroGerman Studies. Its contributors travel the paths less traveled in the vast field of AfroEuropean studies, thus boldly enriching it by presenting salient, new, provocative, and topical material. While they open new doors to a new generation of scholars of Afro-European studies, they could further bolster the field by drawing parallels with previous studies conducted in the 1990s by eminent scholars such as Susanne Zantop, Carol Blackshire Belay, and Leroy Hopkins, to mention just a few.