Afro-Germans and the Remaking of Twentieth-Century German History

Abstract

“There are at least two different ways of thinking about cultural identity,” Stuart Hall writes in his seminal 1990 essay, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” The first approach locates cultural identity in the past. In this formulation, cultural identity functions as “one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’” that communities have often turned to as a tool of resistance against oppression. Unfortunately, Hall warns, its essentializing properties often exclude members of a community from its own definition. But Hall proposes another, more promising interpretation of cultural identity that continues to resonate with us: “Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past.” Tiffany Florvil’s book Mobilizing Black ­­Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a ­­Transnational Movement is a thrilling work that takes Hall’s latter and more aspirational definition of...