1 Introduction
Knowledge matters. It matters because it turns matter into meaning. Any time that matter becomes meaning, some aspects are stressed whereas others are silenced. This does not just “happen” but is done – by collectives and individuals situated in intersectional social positions that are moulded by power constellations. Consequently, knowledge displays the history of power and the interests of those thus privileged. Therefore, knowledge is very much about canonizing meaning and the white heteropatriarchal supremacist makers of the knowledge. Yet no matter how strong a canonization and its canon may be, knowledge lives beyond its control, ready to be accessed and lived in. In as much as canon and knowledge are also informed by resistance and respective agencies, canons can be done and undone in a constant mode of power and resistance. Thus, the narrative matters just as much as the lexicon and its mobilization by human actors.
Wording matters, too – because, like knowledge, it turns matter into meaning. This is, however, about favouring some criteria or attributes over others. For example, you know what an apple looks like. In the end, however, we distinguish between green, yellow or red apples, even though most apples are shades of several of these hues – and each Braeburn apple, for instance, looks different. However practical it may be to order a green apple to get the very one that is predominantly green (rather than the one that is, above all, reddish), you have to ignore the fact that the green apple has yellow and reddish spots all over. Indeed, naming is about gazing and describing that gaze at the cost of ignoring other matters of matter. Thus, naming as meaning-making is always also about silencing certain aspects of matter. Once coined, terms stick and yet they are not set in stone. Often, they are adapted to new contexts while being resituated or even left behind. Of course, the terminology one uses is optional. Language is what speakers decide to do with it. Accordingly, words always display a worldview; therefore, using racist words is as political as not using them.
This chapter intends to revisit the history of how colonialism implanted racist terminology into the German language. Defining racism as white supremacy, its policy of othering is discussed genealogically. Therefore, I start from history. After all, as the Igbo saying popularized by Chinua Achebe suggests: “For drying one’s clothes, you have to go back to where the rain began to beat you” (Achebe 1994). After exploring the implementation of racism through and in language, the chapter aims to show how racism keeps affecting contemporary epistemologies, while focusing on terminology.
Delving into the wording of racism, this chapter also traces some efforts to ban racist wording in the German language. I draw from Black German resistance movements that have been intersecting with the resistance of wording in the US and the UK. As a white scholar activist, I have been socialized by many racist terms, allowing them to mould my worldviews and research. It was my journey into decolonizing my own wording that eventually set me off on a path to understand what it means to reconfigure a white German woman as a scholar of African literature. Therefore, the chapter looks at the respective role of the reconfiguration of African studies and its agency in contemporary debates about decolonizing language and subverting whiteness. In conclusion, I explore other pillars of reconfigured African studies and their efforts to undo lexical canons.
2 European Colonialism and the Politics of Othering
The year 1492 has become a symbolic caesura. This was the year in which, after many centuries of conflicting conviviality, Muslims, Christians and Jews in Al-Andalus, on the Iberian Peninsula, started to colonize parts of the globe. Queen Isabella I of Castile won the war against the Nasrid dynasty’s Emirate of
All respective European theories of “race”, however diverse they might have become throughout the centuries, agreed on one single message that was plain as well as fatal: the “white race” that embraced Christianity and was located in Europe and its settler colonies was the only superior one, ever. Thus, racism means white supremacy. Pillared on white interests as framed by white structures of domination, it was designed to define whiteness as normality. Accordingly, colonialism needed racism to claim that the colonized people were different – that is, they were “the Other”.
2.1 The Politics of Othering
States, societies and communities have always distinguished themselves from outsiders in order to assert their identity, while also building social orders as hierarchies within societies or states. Power defines a norm by setting it apart from the “Other”. In “Othering”, the suffix “-ing” emphasizes that it does not simply happen but is ongoing in a way that keeps serving those in power and their structures of domination.
Being in need of a formula that proved that Europe and its Christianity were superior, European Christianity claimed to be a “norm/ality” that was antagonistic to the Other situated outside Europe and Christianity. Said’s Orientalism and Morrison’s Africanism are very clear about this. Said’s Orientalism demonstrates how the politics of othering Africa and Asia into the racist “O-container” was first and foremost about the white Christian Self in Europe (Said 1979). Morrison argued that Africanism is about white gazes on Black people: “[T]he subject of the dream is the dreamer” (Morrison 1992: 17). In other words, European gazes on Africa and Blackness did not say anything about Black people, yet they are most suggestive of how white Christianity needed to invent itself.
These racist constructions were spread widely by disciplines such as theology and philosophy, natural sciences and anthropology, as well as by art and literature. The English eighteenth-century poet and painter, William Blake, stressed: “[T]he Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is no More. Empire follows Art and Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose” (Blake 2008: 636). Likewise, to conquer and rule, colonial officials and missionaries, traders and soldiers, settlers and royals needed knowledge about their respective subjects. This had a paradoxical effect: while local knowledges were identified, learned and taught to enable colonial governance, othering them simultaneously silenced them. An epistemic violence was at work that eventually sought to overrule and overwrite local knowledges.
This attempt to Europeanize the world did not happen in a vacuum. Even though colonized spaces were invented as empty landscapes, they were not – and not even the tabula rasa violence could ever undo local histories. Western power defined this encounter and colonialism eventually fragmented local histories, cultures, economies and political structures. But they did not kill them. The epistemologies of the global South were silenced, but not for good.
2.2 Othering the Body
The colonial politics of othering relied on “race”. One of its most influential ingredients was to map bodies while imbuing them with all sorts of mental, intellectual and cultural differences (Memmi 1994). This started with “skin colour” and then with the shape of the skull, skeleton and bones, and genes.
Relying on the long-standing claim, dating back to antique theories, that climate affects complexions and mentalities in a congruent way, “skin colour” turned out to be a most fitting ingredient for the making up of “races” and the claim of the superiority of whiteness. After all, Christian colour symbolism taught that the colour white was good, divine and pure, whereas black was evil, devilish and a peril. Through abstraction, this antithetical agenda was written onto human bodies – onto “skin colour”, to be precise. In opposition
Et, de fait, le langage du colon, quand il parle du colonisé, est un langage zoologique. On fait allusion aux mouvements de reptation du jaune, aux émanations de la ville indigène, aux hordes, à la puanteur, au pullulement, au grouillement, aux gesticulations. Le colon, quand il veut bien décrire et trouver le mot juste, se réfère constamment au bestiaire.
FANON 1961: 31
At the other end of dehumanising people by equating them with nature is exoticisation, while drawing the same statement the other way around. The othered people were represented as close to nature, a colonialist representation which denied them the ability to be part of culture.
The binary setting of culture versus nature was also, among other parallels, linked to a juxtaposition of reason and emotion. This had been identified by Aristotle but became the centrepiece of racism especially in the period of The Enlightenment. Its noble ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity were tied to beliefs in the human capacity for progress and reason. Yet these ideals were the privilege of white men only. In the ideological circle of racism, colonized
In his lectures about the history of the world, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1837), the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, wrote little about Africa because, according to him, it had neither historical change nor social dynamics. He stated: “the way we [that is, “we whites”] see them [Africans] today, is the way they have always been” (Hegel 1837). He added that Africa was not a historical part of the world, since it had no movement and development to show. Hegel understood Africa as a geographical space only, from which he unceremoniously removed the north of the continent (Hegel 1837: 49) and incorporated “into the Asiatic and European world”. As a result of the puzzle he cut to size, he claimed: “[W]hat we actually understand by Africa is that it is history-less and unenclosed, which is still entirely caught up in the natural spirit, and which merely had to be presented here at the threshold of world history”. This inability to progress or, depending on the century, modernize, was similarly attributed to other colonial spaces.
This argument holds that colonized people keep living in the past of Western civilizations. Seen the other way around, Europe is always in the future of the “not-yet” cultures, which remain stuck in the “waiting room of history”, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Chakrabarty 2009: 8). In “developing” colonial spaces, Europe elevated itself to the normative role model. And whereas Europe was supposedly always developing, all white efforts at civilizing those who were allegedly closer to nature than to humanity were held back by their inability to “progress”. Thus constructed, racism’s vicious circle argued that Europe and the white colonies were entitled to get paid for the “work of civilisation”, be it with enslaved labour or stolen territories and resources, while the colonists “segregated” themselves from BIJPoC.
These major ingredients of racializing BIJPoC – “skin colour”, presenting them as being closer to nature than culture, animalistic, a threat to humanity and stuck in the waiting room of history – informed the colonialist terminology. For one thing, the terminology defined what colonialism meant. But the term “colonialism”, strictly speaking, was a trivializing euphemism. It was not about “farming” or “settlement” (as derived from colonia in Latin) or “farming”, “cultivating” or “shaping”, as meant by the Latin colere, or about “living”, “building”, “refining” or “cultivating” (after the Latin cultura), because all this was already taking place in most parts of the world before the colonizers arrived. Rather, colonialism meant conquering foreign territories and establishing structures of rule and, often, new settlements (Mudimbe 1988: 1).
However, “conquering” was often used synonymously with “discovery”. Yet “discovery” is all about coming across something yet unknown to human beings, and what became Europe’s colonies had been known about for centuries. The term “New World”, for example, is too handy as a synonym for “the Americas”. After all, they were only “new” to those who came later, building their futures by destroying those of the alleged Other.
3 The Colonialist Politics of Silencing Knowledges and Languages
Besides being synonymous with colonialism, racism also defined how to speak about colonized peoples, their societies and their environments. A new lexicon was generated, informed by a racist servitude to colonialism. The very claim that colonized people were closer to nature than humanity necessitated the claim that BIJPoC had no (fully fledged) languages. Just as Hume declared that an educated Jamaican could only intuitively imitate knowledge, he also likened the Jamaican’s ability to speak to that of a parrot (Hume 2018: 170). Analogously, the German author Ludwig Büchner argued in his book Kraft und
And although the belief was widespread that apes were a lower species of man, who refused to speak only lest they be enslaved, conversely, the denial of language had the effect of locating colonized people as remote from humans (Koller 2009: 18). The Greeks called all those who could not understand Greek, “barbars”, deriving from “barbarophonous”, that is, “brr-bbr-sayer”. German antisemitism, in turn, referred to the Hebrew language as “mauscheln”, which translates as “mumble”. Somewhat analogously, the Dutch colonisers of southern Africa imitated various local languages there to create a vernacular, which they called “Hottentot”, which was said to “sound like” horse trappings. At most, Indigenous languages were called dialects as opposed to proper languages. While claiming that BIJPoC had no languages, though, in fact they were prohibited. What was declared to not exist was not allowed to exist. Thus, the languages of the colonized were suppressed and forbidden while the languages of the colonizers were imposed on the colonized in almost all areas of life, even under the threat of violence. Many local languages survived but many died out as a result of genocidal violence.
This is how the field of African studies was born out of colonialism – being, above all, about understanding African languages and societal dynamics, linguistics and anthropology while claiming the absence of history or literature, for example. And even though oral literature became a relevant source for these disciplines, its essence as literature, in the sense of art, was denied. Rather, epics or folktales were summarized in English, French or German, thus erasing the aesthetics and deep knowledge of these narratives.
The fact that local and indigenous languages were dismissed as non-existent in turn meant that, when mapping and naming the conquered worlds, whites systematically had to ignore local terms. In naming people and their environments, livelihoods, religions and political systems, colonialism could not borrow from local languages because doing so would have endangered the racist denial of full humanity, order and reason. Consequently, Europe invented its own terms, and since colonialism and racism were a pan-European endeavour, the terms often travelled from one language to another.
4 Linguistic Othering and Racist Neologisms
Yet Europeans could not simply transfer their own lexicon to colonized societies. Obviously, this would have contradicted the racist rhetoric of othering. Therefore, two major strategies were applied – reconceptualized borrowings
Given terms were borrowed and reconceptualized to express backwardness and/or nature by resituating them. “Bastard” and “mule” are two respective examples. Both share a rootedness in flora and fauna, while claiming the “illegitimacy” of children born to “white” and BIJPoC parentage. “Tribe” (“Stamm”) is also a reconceptualized borrowing of a nature-based term that is otherwise used in reference to a long-ago time. The term has been used to designate some types of societies, irrespective of their size and political profile. Reconceptualized borrowing, however, is also practised by attributing a hypernym. For example, German terms such as “Naturvolk” or “Naturreligion” give “Volk” (people) or “Religion” the attribute of “nature”, while using the hypernym plainly to refer to non-Christian societies. Christians are, thus, positioned as the “norm/ality”, whereas the attributes are subordinated – even more so since “nature” is the added ingredient.
Completely new terms, or neologisms, also were coined to feature a racist othering. Being racist, they employed and suggested ideas of “race” (often with reference to “skin colour” constructions) and “nature” beyond having culture and reason, with no right for the BIJPoC to own land or be human. Consequently, such neologisms insinuated backwardness and barbarism. One example is the German term “Häuptling” (a portmanteau word consisting of an ancient German word for head/head of family and the suffix-ing), which is used to designate, somehow, all types of political leadership, irrespective of the political nature of the society, the number of inhabitants and whether the person referred to is the king/queen, eldest or mayor. “Bushmen”, too, is a neologism designed to situate Africans as “part of nature” and as a threat to culture. It refers to South African hunter-gatherer societies and to the fact that it was difficult to subordinate them to colonial rule.
The German term “Eingeborene”, which is somewhat analogous to “Aborigine”, suggests a similar viewpoint. Such people may have been born in these places, yet they were regarded as closer to nature and hence not able (that is, not entitled) to own and govern the land of their birth. This idea also informs calling all Indigenous peoples in the Americas “Indian”. Columbus’s error in mistaking the Caribbean as India was detected soon afterwards but the nomenclature persists. “Indigenous”, the I-word, has become a derogative container-word that is very much indebted to colonialist fantasies. Other neologisms echo pillars of race theories by referencing to “skin colour”. Both the n-word and the m-word are vivid examples.
The “m-word”, Moor, goes back to the Greek word “mauros” or “mavro”, which can be translated as “black”, “blackened” or “charred”, while echoing Greek conceptions of “skin colour” and “norm/ality”. The Greek term for “skin colour”, andreikelon, translates verbally as “manlike”. In other words, to look like a Greek man was allegedly the only normal complexion for a human being – somehow at the centre between whiteness and blackness, just as Greece was the world’s geopolitical centre. What is more, “white” was attributed to Greek women and even philosophers.
Mavro, however, was considered the colour of evil, especially of spirits and demons, as well as of death and sorrow. It denoted black things but it also served Greek constructions of “skin colour”. People referred to as mavro lived south of Greece or in the southern Roman Empire, respectively – that is, in what is the continent of Africa today. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the African continent was subdivided into Egypt (whose merits in medicine, mathematics or architecture could not be denied easily) and the rest, namely “Ethiopia”/“Aethiopia”. Etymologically, the latter is rooted in the Greek aethio (I burn) and ops (face), thus meaning people with “burnt faces”. It fitted the ideological claim of climate theories, that hot climates would burn the skin and dry out the hair and brain (Isaac 2004: 185).
Mavro also has the connotation of being bereft of reason and intelligence while also indicating ugliness, evilness, sin, death and the horrors of “barbarism”. Although to the Greeks people constructed as black were described as “barbarians” who lacked full humanity and could hence be enslaved, the emergence of Christianity set a new tone. It consolidated the antique notion of black while revising whiteness. White was now associated with heavenly innocence, transcendence and ultimate beauty. This colour symbolism was then transferred onto bodies, or “skin colours”, to be more precise.
Whiteness, as the colour of Christianity, was meant to mark what we know today as “modern Europe”, whereas blackness was core to the othering of Europe’s east and south and their respective religions. To this Christian framing, the m-word in the Middle Ages was above all a dissociation from “heathens”, which included Islam and geographically meant the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean but radiated as far as eastern Asia, which was absorbed into the term “India”.
This narrative is represented in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early thirteenth-century chivalric romance, Parzival. Parzival’s father, Gahmuret, had fallen in love with Belacane before he met Herzeloyde, Parzival’s mother. While Herzeloyde is described as white and godlike, Belacane is constantly referred to
In due course, after reaching adulthood, Feirefiz strives to travel to and belong to Europe. He meets Parzival, fights and later joins him in seeking and finding the Holy Grail. When he cannot see it, though, he accepts Parzival’s wish that he be baptized, as a result of which he is able to see the Grail and goes on to marry the keeper of the Grail, Repanse de Schoye. But despite his total dedication to integration, to mobilize this as the contemporary terminology for the medieval context, in the end Feirefiz is expelled by Parzival, who tells him to return to where he belongs, meaning where he comes from, the “Orient”.
In the centuries to come, the m-word was used to label non-Christians as Others. In the centuries-long war between the Portuguese and Spanish Christians (supported by other European powers) and Muslim dynasties on the Iberian Peninsula, the m-word became a word weapon for Christian Catholics. According to legend, the Patron Saint of the Spanish crown, Apostle James (the Elder), appeared to the Spanish army under Ramiro I of Asturias in 844 to assist him in the battle against the army of the Emir of Córdoba. Years after the Spanish victory, Saint James became known as Santiago de “Matamoro”. Composed of “matar” (“to kill”) and the m-word, the descriptor states that his “virtue” was that he killed Muslims. The fact that Santiago still has a network of Christian pilgrimage routes dedicated to him throughout Europe remains disturbing.
The m-word persisted but underwent a slight change in meaning without losing its pejorative sense or disappearing completely from the vocabulary for “black” (in the sense of the skin colour construct) or “Africa”. Until the early seventeenth century, the m-word could also mean African people who were not Muslims. Accordingly, we find many examples of merging both words to “Black(a)moor” for Africans. The m-word could also refer to a lighter complexion. In fact, colonized First Nations, who had a lighter complexion, were sometimes referred to by the m-word – again often in linguistic compounds or attributions. As with the ancient Greek subdivision of Europe and Ethiopia, colonialist ideology was eager to claim that Africa had no history and, hence, needed to set it apart from Egypt and Arabic history. This resulted in using the m-word for North Africans (while making the idea of a lighter complexion resonate in the m-word). It was even used pejoratively in European literature, for example, in Shakespeare’s Othello. The white characters in the play use the term “Moor” only when Othello is not present or when their determined purpose is to insult him.
When Europe began to enslave Africa, Portuguese enslavers used their own word for black stemming from the Latin word “niger”, which subsequently travelled into all other European languages as a derogatory label for enslaved Africans. Deeply rooted in the Christian usage of “black”, it served the need to attest to Africans’ lack of (full) humanity. The new “n-word” became a descriptor of people from African countries and those of African origin. The more European enslavement penetrated the heart of Africa by systematically deporting West Africans to the Americas, the more the n-word was established to designate enslaved blacks. The pseudoscientific attempts of identifying and naming “human races” played a significant part in making the n-word denominate the invention of an “African race”, now also living in the African diasporas in the Americas and Europe. The n-word was specifically designed to portray blackness and enslavement as supposedly mutually dependent qualities. It has become the symbol of the European enslavement of Africans. Such enslavement, which resulted in the Maafa, led to the deportation of more than 18 million individuals. This, in turn, caused a new change in the meaning of the m-word.
6 The N-word and the M-word and Contemporary German Debates
To this day, the n-word is an insult used to attack Black people. For example, on November 24, 1990, about 60 neo-Nazis stormed a party attended by many Black people in Eberswalde in Germany, shouting that they wanted to “slap a n…”. Many were injured and Mozambican-born Amadeu Antonio was murdered.3 And even though it is widely known that racists use the n-word, many people who claim to not be racist keep insisting on their right to use the term in a non-racist way.
In 2013, the German journalist, Denis Scheck, used his TV-show “Druckfrisch” on Germany’s state-owned channel to fight for keeping the n-word in Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book series Pippi Longstocking.4 As if it were not absurd enough to try to stop a new translation from adapting a literary text to a contemporary mood (which is what translations always do), Scheck did so by dressing up in the racist tradition of blackface and minstrel shows.
Besides criticism, there was also much support for Scheck’s action throughout Germany. A survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research in 2019 showed that 75% of respondents were against removing the n-word from children’s classics, such as Pippi Longstocking.5 Most disagreed that the n-word perpetuates racism. Ignoring the structural and systematic design of
Nevertheless, the anti-racism activists Ruth and Thomas Hunstock started an initiative in Kassel to outlaw the m-word, which is still a part of German city landscapes. In 2021, their citizens’ petition was passed by the city council with a narrow majority. This made Kassel the first German city to recognize that any use of the m-word is racist. Therefore, the word should be outlawed, meaning it should no longer be used (Hermann 2021).6 Although some renaming projects and official political pronouncements in Germany largely shy away from using the word, numerous pharmacies, city emblems and streets all over Germany have the m-word in their name. Consequently, many Germans still believe that this word shows respect to black people. This is another error that they celebrate rather than challenge.
One example is the reverence for St Mauritius and his association with healing. Mauritius is said to have commanded the Theban Legion at the end of the third century CE. According to legend, many of the legion were Christians. When the Roman Emperor Maximilian ordered the legion to kill Christians in what is now Switzerland, the soldiers are said to have defied the order and paid for this with their deaths. Mauritius’s tomb became a pilgrimage site where the sick are purportedly healed. However, St Mauritius was not a doctor but a martyr. And he is honoured not because he was a black man but because he died for white Christians. Seen in this light, this legend in no way contradicts the fact that the m-word continued to be a tool of discrimination in the Middle Ages.
Although many companies have given up the m-word (often rather half-heartedly), it is still used in the names of chocolates and cafés. For example, in 1992, Claus Häring named his restaurant Mohrenkopf.7 Facing protests, he insisted that he was being discriminated against. In August 2022, Häring posted on Facebook that he “will not give in” and would stick with “his right” to keep the name of his café. Within just a few days his posts were shared and liked ten thousand times, many of the comments celebrating him as a freedom fighter while expressing hate-speech against those who spoke up against this term. Ever since, Häring has posted racist logos and symbols (disguised as sweets) on a weekly or even daily basis, including black-faced versions of himself.
7 The If Debate
Despite decolonial and civil rights movements, Germany on the whole is not debating racism to any meaningful degree. Rather, it debates if racism should be debated at all. This goes along with gaslighting. The repetition of single events is negated while each event is stated to be an exception to the rule. Consequently, structural racism is ignored and those who criticize structural racism are accused of dividing society, as if this is not what white supremacist segregation is all about. Not to blame racism for dividing people(s) and rather blaming those who criticize it (and most criticism still mostly comes from BIJPoC) is a white, racist (micro)aggression. It seeks to silence BIJPoC while accusing them of being too “affected” to be able to talk “objectively” about racism.
But since when have whites, who invented and profit from racism, not been affected by it? Racism is not an opinion. It is a mode of supremacy embedded in power and respective structures and discourses, which cannot be altered by just wanting to change it. And the systemic complexity of racism can be countered only by combatting it systemically. To intervene in racism systemically means to address it all at once and all of it in every detail. This also means that dealing with racist language is not an additional “nice-to-have” in the fight against racism but an integral part of antiracist work. Because we are what we say and how we say it, there is agency in fighting racism through language. In as much as speakers act through language, any insistence on holding onto racist terms reinforces the far-too-long history of racism.
Ultimately, it is not words that keep poisoning societies, it is the people who use the words who do so. Conversely, any renunciation of racist terms can intervene in racism. For example, by deciding independently which words to choose or avoid, people shape which words remain active in the language system, which go down the drain or which new words become available. Therefore, every speech and all the words mobilized for it display a perspective on
8 Decolonizing Language as a Pillar of Reconfiguring German-Based African Studies
German-based African studies has contributed to building colonialist castles of poisonous racist words. After having implemented this vocabulary for centuries and with epistemological force, most white German scholars of African studies do not mind using racist words. Overcoming this racist legacy and contributing to societal debates by sharing and multiplying the knowledge needed to identify and overcome racist words is core to the project of reconfiguring African studies. In accordance with the active role of inventing, moulding and advancing racist terminology, African studies has to take the lead in uprooting and undoing the terminology society-wide. For this, respective knowledge has to be shared and arguments have to be developed, probed and adjusted while pursuing an ethics that manages to speak about racism without reproducing its terms and respective codes.
In Germany, decolonial literacy can be supported by the terms of resistance generated by local civil rights movements and their global allies. Black and postcolonial studies and such figures as Frantz Fanon (2017), Toni Morrison (2007), Edward Said (1979), Walter Mignolo (2012) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) have identified how othering violates epistemologies of the global South and the respective role of language in this outcome. Racist terms have become a battlefield of decolonial resistance movements8 and civil rights movements have offered competencies and strategies for identifying and intervening in racist terminology.
9 Resistant Terminology
Colonialism has generated racist terminologies while ignoring local terminologies. And yet it has never managed to defeat them. They are still out there,
One strategy of resistance is to modify racist terms and the attributions they contain, thereby repositioning them. While the reference to “black” in the German n-word was about dehumanization, the German term “Schwarze Deutsche” emphasizes blackness as a social position. The capitalization of the adjective marks the resistance that is needed in surviving and fighting racism. In other cases, the racist word is supplemented by other word components, such as prefixes or suffixes, or complementary adjectives or nouns. The fact that the word “colour” was used to deny people full humanity is critically subverted by prefixing it with “people of”. Another procedure is to defend self-designations against racist appropriations – such as the German term “Jude”. Racist words usually throw different spaces or societies into one container by using one term for many. In order to decolonize them, new terminologies should be moulded. One example is Rom*nja or Sinti*zze now used instead of the racist label “gypsies”.
10 Naming Whiteness as a Positionality (of Knowing and Knowledge Production)
Talking about race as a social position on “racism as white supremacy” needs symmetry to counter racist othering. “Races” were invented by white people to claim whiteness as the norm/ality of superiority. This has also affected language. There are many German terms that explicitly exclude BIJPoC – for example, the word “hautfarben”, which refers to white people’s complexions only. Because of the close interlocking of European intellectual and political history with racism, many terms imply or carry a white norm without reflecting it in this way. These include, for example, words like “democracy” and “Germany” or “feminism” and “woman”. What is more, speech acts are shaped by historical power-led codes that have a major impact on who speaks (not) and who is (not) heard accordingly. For example, “whitesrupting” and “whitesplaining” refer to the long-standing tradition of whites setting the tone in structures and institutions while, thus, also moulding what is said and how. This includes feeling entitled to be the only ones who are able to understand, explain and name the world while systematically preventing others from doing so.
Thus, to address whiteness means to address racism with a keen awareness of who is responsible, privileged, in power and therefore needed to join the project of decolonization and antiracist transformations. And just as much as whiteness has performed as Africanism and African studies, and African studies has nourished the white Africanism, any reconfiguration of African studies needs to address what whiteness has done to the knowledge production. Locating white gazes and approaches as milestones of African studies is part of a decolonized research ethics within and beyond the discipline and its reconfiguration. Inasmuch as Africanism and respective constructions of “Africa” have been heavily coined by colonialism’s African studies, the discipline needs to take charge of identifying Africanism and the whiteness in African studies, in order to resituate and undo their epistemic violence. Or to put it another way – to study racism’s impact on African studies cannot be done without delving into how whiteness has affected the research priorities, objectives, theories and methodologies of white scholars of African studies. In forcing African studies to again talk about white gazes, this is not about recentring whiteness. It is about decolonizing African studies.
The Igbo proverb quoted at the start of this chapter, that one needs to know where the rain began to beat him (Achebe 1994), suggests that memory is core. Whereas Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History (1969: 357) symbolizes that the atrocities of the past paralyse new futures, the Akan knowledge of the intersectedness of past, present and futures as displayed by sankofa suggests that memory is about canonization. Remembering is about not forgetting just as much as about undoing the knowledge so as to delve into futures, undeterred. In other words, what will be depends on knowing one’s roots and routes of becoming – and on knowing how to abrogate the past on behalf of more even futures. In order to shape the future, the past must be known to be undone.
11.1 Remembering
African studies has contributed to colonialism and racism, enabling these phenomena to be actors and norm-setters of knowledge production about Africa and blackness. Until the late twentieth century, African studies was controlled primarily by a white-dominated think tank indebted to the histories of Western humanism and (in)humanities. Thus framed, African studies built racism, which also means that racism has affected the research priorities, objectives, theories, methodologies and toxic terminologies of white scholars of African studies. This knowledge production has moulded white Western narratives about African and anti-Black racism, right into the present. White Western epistemologies and their “gentrification of African studies has insidiously altered the revolutionary potential and goals of knowledge’s decolonization” (Haytem 2018). To name this, to remember this, is crucial to the essential reconfiguration of African studies. This article argues that decolonizing African studies means to name and stop the agency of whiteness in knowledge production as well as its pool of racist terms in African studies.
11.2 Towards New Futures
The project of reconfiguring African studies should, of course, be much broader and richer than leaving white (epistemic) supremacy behind. It should be complemented by a wider agenda of “moving towards”. Western epistemologies have prevailed, silencing and erasing othered epistemologies, and yet the European humanities have never encountered any vacuum – neither during colonialism nor after. Europe’s project to “Europeanize the world” (Reinhard 1994) was aggressively loud but never reached its eugenic goals. Rather, the history of colonialism is also a history of Western epistemologies being resisted
In doing so, African studies needs to be cross-regionalized and deregionalized, redisciplined and cross-disciplined. For the de-/cross-regionalization, the container labelled “Africa” needs to be redesigned. At its most conventional, African studies is an umbrella term for the study of societal, economic, cultural and religious processes throughout history in today’s 54 African countries. All these countries are diverse within and diversely related to each other and other parts of the world. Examples include Pacific East African Indians, Kenyan-Chinese relations and West Africa’s outreach into the Americas. African diasporas are another global African presence. For example, the Somali diaspora has spread from its origin country to create a global network, while reaching out rhizomatically to other African diasporas, like the Kenyan one. The Somali diaspora also, of course, affects Kenya itself. Diasporas complicate the idea of the nation-state, offer supranational structures of identity and belonging and affect societal, economic, political, cultural and religious structures in African nation-states just as much as elsewhere. The reconfiguration of African studies will be able to focus on specific places on the continent while rethinking them in context with other places within and beyond Africa.
Yet becoming more global is just one way of thinking outside the continent-container logic. This wider gaze needs to be complemented by a narrower focus on the continent. Nigerian studies, for example, could include Hausa studies, Yoruba studies, Igbo studies or Anglophone Nigerian studies. In thus deregionalizing Africa, given entanglements should become part and parcel of cross-regionalizations.
The same applies to African studies being redisciplined and cross-disciplined. To date, African studies follows an area-studies logic as a container for studying the global South. There is no equivalent for European studies. Of course, European cultures are studied. Yet this is done according to disciplines that stress a methodology, like history or sociology or literary studies. Here, the core approaches and methods inform the discipline’s name. Many of these disciplines pursue a focus on the global North without even bothering to mark this “unwritten normality”. African studies, though, takes a region as a discipline, while hosting history, sociology or literary studies approaches.
This is not a plea to end African studies. The academic silencing of Africa cannot be undone by dissolving African studies. Nevertheless, societal and cultural dynamics in African societies and countries should become a “normal” part of disciplines such as sociology and history, albeit using the expertise
The reconfiguration of African studies is a project that will not only redirect given disciplinary epistemologies but also host a revolutionary transformation of knowledge-making. In the conversation between epistemologies it would offer space to provincialize Kant while giving new emphasis to the work of Amo and Fanon. What is more, intersectionality suggests centring African feminist and womanist knowledge production as a reliable host of innovative future-making against injustices and for equality in freedom. To me as a white scholar it means to provincialize my privileges in terms of knowledge production. To ask myself, what do I know and why, is a call to look for knowledge that I have ignored. But to provincialize my privileges is also about investing in them to eventually decolonize them and sow them into the given complexity of rhizomatic knowing that keeps growing by overcoming the canons of racism.
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For an extension of this argument, see Arndt (2021).
“Wîz und swarzer varwe er schein …/Als ein agelster wart gevar/sîn hâr und ouch sîn vel vil gar” (I.1 57 17, 27–28, S. 100/101).
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For more information about such debates, see Arndt (2021, 2022) and Sow (2018).