A Nation’s Undesirables: Mixed-Race Children and Whiteness in the Post-Nazi Era: Intersectional Rhetorics
Autor Tracey Owens Pattonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 apr 2024
Patton takes up the twins’ story and their reckoning with their mixed-race, Black German identity to disrupt standard narratives around World War II, Black experience in Germany, and race and adoption. Combining family interviews, historical artifacts, and autoethnographic reflection, Patton composes a new narrative of women and Black German children in the postwar era. In examining the systemic racism of Germany’s efforts to move children like Lore and Lilli out of the country—and the suppression of German women’s bodily autonomy—Patton amplifies the once unacknowledged identities of these Black German children to broaden our understanding of citizenship, racism, and sexism after World War II.
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| Ohio State University Press – 15 apr 2024 | 576.80 lei 6-8 săpt. |
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259078
ISBN-10: 0814259073
Pagini: 268
Ilustrații: 31 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.37 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
ISBN-10: 0814259073
Pagini: 268
Ilustrații: 31 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.37 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
Recenzii
“Patton’s innovative use of autoethnography highlights how race and racism in the German and American contexts are intertwined in historically complex ways, detailing both the establishment of legal structures to uphold racism and how racism was experienced at the individual level.” —Nana Osei-Kofi, author of AfroSwedish Places of Belonging
“A Nation’s Undesirables makes an invaluable intervention into contemporary discussions of systemic racism and the roles of memory, postmemory, and erasure in the construction of identity. Surrounding a poignant personal narrative is an often-neglected historical account of German anti-Black racism and the ways it operated around the Second World War.” —Kendall Phillips, editor of Framing Public Memory
“A Nation’s Undesirables makes an invaluable intervention into contemporary discussions of systemic racism and the roles of memory, postmemory, and erasure in the construction of identity. Surrounding a poignant personal narrative is an often-neglected historical account of German anti-Black racism and the ways it operated around the Second World War.” —Kendall Phillips, editor of Framing Public Memory
Notă biografică
Tracey Owens Patton is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and is coauthor of Gender, Whiteness, and Power in Rodeo: Breaking Away from the Ties of Sexism and Racism.
Extras
In looking back to look forward, this book puts into practice Jeffrey Olick’s claim that “memory makers don’t always succeed in creating the images they want and in having them understood in the ways they intended. Social actors are often caught in webs of meaning they themselves participate in creating though not in ways they necessarily could have predicted.”
Lilli and Lore’s personal narratives are important additions to the existing scholarship on afrodeutsche Nachkriegskinder, and the overall understanding of identity and identity formation, during this postwar era. I use my family as an example in this case study because many Black German children, if they were adopted, tended to be adopted as infants or toddlers. This was not the case for Lilli and Lore, who have longstanding German familial connections and detailed memories of these connections. Thus Lilli and Lore’s personal narratives illuminate the experience of being born into liminality and ultimately erased from their German biological family. The lived rejection and racism these preteens experienced was transnational, spanning two continents, and ultimately affected the next generation.
In conducting a close read of the testimony of Auschwitz survivors, Giorgio Agamben found that language was incapable of bearing witness to such trauma because the language used was the language of the oppressor. Both Dylan Trigg and Ana Lee have since extended Agamben’s notions of language, trauma, and representation. Trigg, in “The Place of Trauma,” focuses on how traumatic memory takes up space and residence both in the physical site and in the haunting of the memoried experience. Lee considers collective memory-making and meaning-making and how “visual testimonies can occupy the place of non-place and transform haunting into a site for collective memory building.” Lee states that “visual testimonies . . . are . . . strategic memory sites.” I echo Agamben, Trigg, and Lee and argue that a rhetorical critique of language coupled with interview, oral communication (storytelling), and visual rhetoric serves my goal of centering and listening to liminal and erased voices that require delving into memoried and postmemory hauntings.
I also echo the work of rhetoricians Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, who remind readers that “memory was in the founding works of the rhetorical tradition—memory was, after all, one of the five ancient canons of rhetoric—[and] rhetorical studies has for years relegated memory to a background issue.” White German women and Black German children’s lives after World War II tend to be underexplored in juxtaposition to men’s war efforts. My research explores memory and postmemory through an autoethnographic centering of women and children’s lives, particularly as they relate to race, citizenship, family, and memoried erasure. Like Hirsch, my use of postmemory includes the next generation in addition to those who directly experienced a trauma. It is important to center disenfranchised and erased voices and memories not included in the memoried/historical accounting and in particular to analyze and understand the way these traumas are passed down generationally through memories. In this book, I not only demonstrate the powerful connection between memory and postmemory, but I also extend that correlation to Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism helps move postmemory into critical imagination. Afrofuturism is about centering, examining, and understanding Black representation, Black histories, Black futures, and most importantly, Black imagined futures through reframing the (memoried) past (i.e., history) in favor of a postmemory retelling. This makes room for Black agency and Black futures, which are needed in the face of continued Black oppression, violence, and erasure because they challenge the collective “official” remembrance. Afrofuturism challenges the fantasy of freedom and fights to curate a life, to curate new knowledge, and to cultivate subjectivity.
Lilli and Lore’s personal narratives are important additions to the existing scholarship on afrodeutsche Nachkriegskinder, and the overall understanding of identity and identity formation, during this postwar era. I use my family as an example in this case study because many Black German children, if they were adopted, tended to be adopted as infants or toddlers. This was not the case for Lilli and Lore, who have longstanding German familial connections and detailed memories of these connections. Thus Lilli and Lore’s personal narratives illuminate the experience of being born into liminality and ultimately erased from their German biological family. The lived rejection and racism these preteens experienced was transnational, spanning two continents, and ultimately affected the next generation.
In conducting a close read of the testimony of Auschwitz survivors, Giorgio Agamben found that language was incapable of bearing witness to such trauma because the language used was the language of the oppressor. Both Dylan Trigg and Ana Lee have since extended Agamben’s notions of language, trauma, and representation. Trigg, in “The Place of Trauma,” focuses on how traumatic memory takes up space and residence both in the physical site and in the haunting of the memoried experience. Lee considers collective memory-making and meaning-making and how “visual testimonies can occupy the place of non-place and transform haunting into a site for collective memory building.” Lee states that “visual testimonies . . . are . . . strategic memory sites.” I echo Agamben, Trigg, and Lee and argue that a rhetorical critique of language coupled with interview, oral communication (storytelling), and visual rhetoric serves my goal of centering and listening to liminal and erased voices that require delving into memoried and postmemory hauntings.
I also echo the work of rhetoricians Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, who remind readers that “memory was in the founding works of the rhetorical tradition—memory was, after all, one of the five ancient canons of rhetoric—[and] rhetorical studies has for years relegated memory to a background issue.” White German women and Black German children’s lives after World War II tend to be underexplored in juxtaposition to men’s war efforts. My research explores memory and postmemory through an autoethnographic centering of women and children’s lives, particularly as they relate to race, citizenship, family, and memoried erasure. Like Hirsch, my use of postmemory includes the next generation in addition to those who directly experienced a trauma. It is important to center disenfranchised and erased voices and memories not included in the memoried/historical accounting and in particular to analyze and understand the way these traumas are passed down generationally through memories. In this book, I not only demonstrate the powerful connection between memory and postmemory, but I also extend that correlation to Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism helps move postmemory into critical imagination. Afrofuturism is about centering, examining, and understanding Black representation, Black histories, Black futures, and most importantly, Black imagined futures through reframing the (memoried) past (i.e., history) in favor of a postmemory retelling. This makes room for Black agency and Black futures, which are needed in the face of continued Black oppression, violence, and erasure because they challenge the collective “official” remembrance. Afrofuturism challenges the fantasy of freedom and fights to curate a life, to curate new knowledge, and to cultivate subjectivity.
Cuprins
Introduction Challenging the Historical Narrative: Braiding Memory, Postmemory, and Critical Imagination
Chapter 1 Construction of Race and Nation: A History of Black Germany
Chapter 2 Jim Crow in the European Theater: Institutionalizing Anti-Blackness in Germany
Chapter 3 Womb Wars: Interracial Relationships and the Historical Construction of White German Identity
Chapter 4 Aborted out of Germany: Born, Kept, and Abandoned
Chapter 5 The Transatlantic Appeal of Jim Crow: Reclaimed, Abandoned, and Adopted
Chapter 6 A Family Reunion and Generational Trauma: A Conclusion
Chapter 1 Construction of Race and Nation: A History of Black Germany
Chapter 2 Jim Crow in the European Theater: Institutionalizing Anti-Blackness in Germany
Chapter 3 Womb Wars: Interracial Relationships and the Historical Construction of White German Identity
Chapter 4 Aborted out of Germany: Born, Kept, and Abandoned
Chapter 5 The Transatlantic Appeal of Jim Crow: Reclaimed, Abandoned, and Adopted
Chapter 6 A Family Reunion and Generational Trauma: A Conclusion
Descriere
Blends family history, rhetorical postmemory studies, critical adoption studies, and more to disrupt standard narratives around World War II, Black German experience, race, and adoption.