Abstract
Highlighting the mobile, transnational, and translingual character of Afrodiasporic literatures in Germany, this article illustrates how contemporary Anglophone literary texts of the African diaspora in Germany not only challenge conventional understandings of what German-ness and ‘German literature’ means but also how their representations of (im)mobilities go beyond narratives of migration. By example of Olumide Popoola’s play Also by Mail (2013) and Musa Okwonga’s novel In the End, It Was All about Love (2021), I analyse how these texts depict Black characters as quotidian mobile subjects, addressing the plurality and relationality of practices and politics of (im)mobility in order to explore how these are intertwined with regimes of belonging and processes of racialisation in modern Europe. From a mobility studies perspective, the article employs the notion of friction to read the primary texts under scrutiny as fictions of everyday mobility that draw attention to the material conditions and embodied experiences of mobility and immobilisation while thinking (im)mobility also in terms of literary form.
1 Introduction
In recent years, scholarship in African European studies has increasingly addressed the complex entanglements between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, questioning not only ‘what’ but also ‘where’ Europe is.1 Similarly, the transnational and translingual character of many African European literatures invites us to challenge methodological nationalist perspectives of analysis2 as well as monolingual normativities3 in literary studies. Querying conventional understandings of ‘German literature,’ this article investigates contemporary Anglophone literary texts of the African diaspora in Germany and reads them as fictions of everyday mobility. Drawing attention to the role of frictions of mobility in 21st-century literatures of the African diaspora in Germany, I4 illustrate how these texts go beyond narratives of migration and instead address the plurality and relationality of practices and politics of (im)mobility5 as well as their entanglements with regimes of belonging and processes of racialisation. From a mobility studies perspective, the article thus responds to recent calls for the need to study (the literary representation of) mobility, movement, and the tangible experiences of being on the move (and, indeed, of being immobilised) instead of concentrating mainly on the “outcome of movement.”6
After discussing the entangled politics of race and mobility in the African diaspora in Europe and Germany and elaborating on the notion of fictions of everyday mobility, I will direct my attention towards two literary texts, the play Also by Mail (2013) by Olumide Popoola and the novel In the End, It Was All about Love (2021; hereafter: In the End) by Musa Okwonga, in order to explore how contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany “translate” (im)mobility and friction “into literary form.”7 The selected texts illustrate the ways in which contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany not only negotiate the role of friction as a tool for managing and policing mobility but also reflect on how race can be understood as a consequence of racialised mobility politics in modern Europe. While Popoola’s play explores racial profiling as a form of regulating and controlling mobility that produces racialised subject positions, Okwonga’s novel focuses on the material conditions and the narrator’s embodied experiences of urban everyday (im)mobility affected by racial stress.
By juxtaposing two Anglophone texts that engage with regimes of mobility and belonging in Germany – one that was published in Germany by a Black German author who lives in London and one that was published in the UK by a Black British author who lives in Berlin – the article aims to highlight the transnational and translingual character of contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany,8 while also expanding the study of Anglophone Afrodiasporic fiction in Europe beyond the remit of the UK. Alexander Scherr, Nadia Butt, and Ansgar Nünning have described the contemporary “field of Anglophone fiction as a surprisingly mobile formation without clear-cut borders.”9 Distancing themselves from 20th-century notions that differentiate Anglophone literature into ‘British’, ‘American’, and ‘Commonwealth’, ‘new English’, or ‘postcolonial’ literatures, they urge us to consider contemporary “Anglophone literature in a transnational, planetary perspective” (12). Taking a cue from their approach, this essay demonstrates how literatures of the African diaspora in Germany “emphasise global transactions beyond the borders of the nation state” (14) both in the production of the literary works and within the texts themselves. Challenging traditional ideas of a national literature, literary works of the African diaspora in Germany trouble the boundaries of signifiers such as ‘German literature,’ while inscribing themselves into the transcultural strands of ‘Anglophone literature’ described by Scherr et al. Thus, they also highlight the transnational, transcultural, and translingual dimensions of African European literatures on a broader scale, in which
Africa and Europe – and Africa in Europe – are continuously set against each other in an effort to problematize what the two continents mean to each other, how they interact and give place to new syncretic cultural formations.10
Similarly, African diasporic literatures in Germany are – to different extents – (1) transnational and transcultural, i.e. they are not only produced by authors from different nationalities and have forged transnational alliances, but also engage with the interconnected world of the 21st century by depicting Germany as a transcultural place and articulating ‘glocal’ concerns, as well as (2) translingual, i.e. they employ and often intertwine a number of different languages, most frequently including, but not exclusively limited to, German and English.11 Indeed, as Asoka Esuruoso and Philipp Khabo Koepsell have emphasised, several authors from the African diaspora in Germany
do not fall in the category of Afro Germans (German citizens who were born and raised in Germany) but [are] rather Black people from Africa and the African Diaspora in Germany (including those who may not have been born or have citizenship here, but who live in Germany and have come to see it as their home).12
Moreover, inviting us to understand ‘German literature’ not only as designating texts written (predominantly) in German,13 the continuously growing body of Anglophone Afrodiasporic literature in Germany reminds us that (Black) German literature can be, has been, and is also being written in English.
2 Moving through Public Spaces While Black: Fictions of Everyday Mobility of the African Diaspora in Germany
As scholars such as Tina Campt and Carol Blackshire-Belay have shown, people of the African diaspora in Germany do not share a collective history of migration or displacement but primarily trace their history “to a number of individual journeys of [Black people] over two centuries from different nations.”14 Nevertheless, they share a “similarity of experiences,”15 which can also be placed in a larger European context. Regarding the conceptualisation of African diasporas in Europe, Michael McEachrane has urged us to focus on “similar or overlapping socio-political conditions”16 that “include […], but go […] beyond, matters of identity and culture” (2):
For instance, the ambiguous visibility and endemic vulnerability of being over-concentrated at the lower ranks of every major political, economic, and social hierarchy; living in countries where the predominant political and public explanation of such disparities is deficient skills and culture; the endemic othering and racialisation of Black people in the face of mainstream views that race is not relevant to European societies; a widespread denial of the relevance of colonial and imperial legacies; and having civil society organisations in their countries that mobilise Black people for Black empowerment and social justice […]. (17)
Delineating a “shared sense of vulnerability […] in the face of […] white supremacy”,17 part of these shared experiences in African diasporas in Europe are everyday forms of racism, which Priscilla Layne – in reference to the critically acclaimed novel 1000 Serpentinen Angst (1000 Coils of Fear) published in 2020 by the Black German author and dramatist Olivia Wenzel – has also referred to as “banal racism” (46). As a form of racism that “permeates every aspect of a Black subject’s life” (40), banal racism “is not arson attacks or beatings or killings” but “the banality of racism in everyday life” (46), i.e.
the everyday things that white Germans do to maintain a white supremacist society, but which they either deny or fail to acknowledge as such because they regard themselves as too tolerant and enlightened to be racist, thus mirroring the ‘colorblind racism’ that Bonilla-Silva describes in American society. (46)
Additionally, Layne has shown how banal racism also relates to what Darryl Dickson-Carr has described as “the horror that frequently intersects with ‘living while black,’ a colloquial expression that itself summarizes how […] racism pathologizes and criminalizes even the most mundane aspects of black lives.”18 As research in clinical psychology has shown, such discriminatory experiences can lead to racial stress, i.e. “a psychological response that comprises physiological (e.g., heart racing, eyes narrowing), behavioral (e.g., fight or flight), and emotional response (e.g., feeling afraid or unsafe) to stimuli that tax resources and/or threaten the individual based on perceived race or ethnicity.”19
Building on Layne, who observes a shared concern with banal racism between Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and African American literature in the age of Black Lives Matter, this article focuses on the literary representation of forms of banal racism that occur during and/or affect everyday practices of mobility. This focus is motivated by the fact that in contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany (i.e. both in Anglophone and in Germanophone texts as well as in those that move across languages) representations of banal racism on public transport and in other public spaces constitute a common theme and recurrent narrative pattern. Everyday forms of mobility play a significant role here: as the Black protagonists of the texts move through public spaces and in buses, trains, or subways, they are frequently exposed to violent encounters that hinder, disrupt, or even impede their mobility. The discriminatory incidents they are subjected to range from violent racial attacks, as experienced also by Wenzel’s narrator in 1000 Serpentinen Angst, to cases of racial profiling on public transport or in shops, as for example in Olumide Popoola’s play Also by Mail (see 2.1), the poem Suspicious (2014) by Trish P. Schultz, or the short story collection Winter Shorts (2015) edited by Clementine Burnley and Sharon Dodua Otoo. Additionally, contemporary Afrodiasporic literatures in Germany also address a variety of other manifestations of banal racism related to everyday forms of mobility, including being exposed to voyeuristic white gazes, racial slurs, and others forms of racial harassment, which we can find not only in texts like Musa Okwonga’s novel In the End (see 2.2) but also – among others – in the novella the things i am thinking while smiling politely (2012) by Sharon Dodua Otoo, in the short story Kinderaugen (Children’s Eyes, 2014) by Winnie Modesto, in poems such as Weißfahren (Driving/Travelling by Public Transport While White, 2017) by Bahati or James geht mit dem Messer joggen (James Goes Jogging with the Knife, 2010) by Philipp Khabo Koepsell, as well as in the poetry collection Buchstabengefühle (Feelings of/in Letters, 2018) by Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo.20 In other words, reading contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany through the lens of mobility studies shows that a notable number of these texts not only depict Black characters as ‘mobile subjects’21 but also draw attention to the material conditions and embodied experiences of their everyday mobility – and enforced immobilisations thereof – by exploring how politics of mobility, race, and belonging are intertwined in complex, mutually dependent ways.
As such, texts like the abovementioned could be read as what Carolin Gebauer has referred to as “fictions of mobility,”22 i.e. a “strand of Anglophone fiction” (84) that foregrounds the lived experiences of being on the move and “envisage[s] mobility as a distinctive feature of contemporary global societies” (97). However, in contrast to the texts described by Gebauer, contemporary literary works of the African diaspora in Germany not only address international border crossings, but principally engage with small-scale, mundane practices of (trans)local mobility. Indeed, most of the characters do not primarily appear as (clandestine) migrants or refugees – many of the protagonists have been born in Germany and frequently also have a German passport – but as quotidian travellers and daily “movers.”23 Moreover, even if a character (such as the protagonist in Musa Okwonga’s In the End) has migrated, it is nevertheless most often their ordinary, everyday (im)mobilities that are foregrounded in the literary works. I therefore suggest reading texts like the abovementioned as ‘fictions of everyday mobility.’
The purpose of this term is not to reproduce exceptionalist narratives of migration, which have positioned migration as outside the norm and contributed to how certain categories of mobile people are criminalised, vilified, or regarded as a ‘problem’ to be dealt with,24 but rather to highlight how the literary texts in question focus on the (im)mobilities of (Black) mobile subjects beyond migration. This is neither to say that migration and everyday mobilities are entirely incongruent and never overlap in the literary texts, or that anti-migration discourses do not also sometimes define the ways in which the Black characters are perceived by others and, thus, shape their experiences of mobility. Indeed, as Michelle M. Wright has shown, “Afro-Germans must [often] confront a racist discourse directed at Africans rather than Afro-Germans,”25 which constructs Black subjects in Germany not only as ‘Other’ but also as ‘foreign’ (more see 2.1). In view of these sort of discourses, which remain prevalent until today,26 my understanding of fictions of everyday mobility aims to contribute to a “de-migranticized view on African [and Afrodiasporic] mobility within Europe”27 and, more specifically, Germany. According to Joris Schapendonk, such a “de-migranticized” approach “is highly needed” not only to move away from the “master narrative of migration” (4), but also to move beyond reductionist linear stories of migration (196) and to draw our attention, instead, to the multiple mobilities (and imposed immobilities) of African diasporic subjects in Europe.28 What is more, instead of creating yet another new label or generic category for literary texts, I understand the notion of ‘fictions of everyday mobility’ as a heuristic, analytical tool that serves as a conceptual lens with which we can read literary texts (also beyond literatures of the African diaspora in Germany) in order to bring their representations of everyday forms of mobility – which have frequently been neglected in postcolonial literary analyses29 – to the fore.
From a mobility studies perspective, the interruptions and impediments of mobility that the Black characters in fictions of everyday mobility of the African diaspora in Germany are confronted with can be understood as “productions of variable friction.”30 As defined by Tim Cresswell, friction describes “a force which works to slow or stop mobilities on the one hand, and make the very fact of mobility possible on the other” (109). Stressing that “[t]he practice of power is […] often about the management of friction – increasing it for some and erasing it for others” (111), Cresswell understands friction as
a social cultural phenomenon that is lived and felt as you are stopped while driving though a city, or encounter suspicion at check-in at an international airport. The significance of friction is in the way it draws our attention to the way in which people, things and ideas are slowed down or stopped. (108)
For instance, as technologies for the differential management of friction, ticket and passport controls serve to enable as well as to slow down or stop mobility. In literary works of the African diaspora in Germany, Black characters usually experience increased friction (as compared to white characters) when moving through public spaces and on public transport – for example, when racial profiling subjects them not only to ticket inspections while travelling but also to unfounded identity controls (as in Olumide Popoola’s Also by Mail; see 2.1), or when their everyday capacity to be mobile is inhibited due to the persistent racial stress they experience in public spaces (as in Musa Okwonga’s In the End; see 2.2).
In contrast to fiction that features migratory newcomers,31 the protagonists of contemporary literature of the African diaspora in Germany are typically able to navigate the space that they have to pass through itself with relative ease, as they tend to be portrayed as knowing subjects in relation to these spaces (even if they are migrants like Musa Okwonga’s narrator in In the End). But although they usually do not have problems finding their way through the public transportation network and other public spaces, their physical mobility is often everything but the “easy-going and smooth”32 mobility typically associated with Afropolitan travellers, since racialised encounters create obstacles and immobilisations in their pathways. Illustrating how mobility is interrupted or slowed down for elite and nonelite Afrodiasporic subjects alike – i.e. not only for the impoverished and/or undocumented, but also for the ordinary Black mobile subject –, many contemporary literary texts of the African diaspora in Germany reflect on everyday processes of racialisation as they relate to politics of mobility and belonging in Germany. More specifically, they bear witness to how the differential management of friction constitutes an important device in the production and maintenance of what Nina Glick Schiller and Noel Salazar have referred to as “regimes of mobility”, i.e. intersecting regulatory structures, governmental policies, and hegemonic narratives that “normalise the movements of some travellers while criminalising and entrapping the ventures of others.”33 For example, while (the freedom) to move from one place to another in an everyday context is largely normalised – especially for white, heterosexual able-bodied cis-men –, quotidian mobilities such as commuting or travelling for shopping or leisure are frequently (sometimes even violently) disrupted for marginalised subjects. In this context, Afrodiasporic fictions of everyday mobility in Germany negotiate how practices of racial profiling – in which “racially marked mobile subjects (air travelers, drivers, even pedestrians) [are] targeted, surveilled, and detained under the rubrics of crime prevention or antiterrorism”34 – and other forms of banal racism that slow, stop, or inhibit the mobility of Afrodiasporic subjects – such as the experience of racial stress – serve to buttress white supremacy by producing racialised subject positions and relegating those positioned as nonwhite “to a lesser status of belonging” (231). Thus, they portray mobility as “a racialized form of capital” that “can express […] national belonging” (233).
As Tim Cresswell and Mimi Sheller have shown, citizens are not only defined by belonging to a particular nation but also by their right to move,35 transforming citizenship into “a key site for the differential management of transnational mobilities” and, in turn, “cross-borders mobilities [into] a key site for the production of the nation itself.”36 In relation to Europe, Fatima El-Tayeb has demonstrated how whiteness is constructed as an invisible norm “against which ethnicization is read as a tool of differentiation between insiders and outsiders”37 that determines dominant citizenship narratives. Similarly, Jamie Schearer and Hadija Haruna argue that “[b]eing German today is still associated with being white and having a white German heritage.”38 What is more, “[w]hite people often play the role of the Ausländerbehörde (German immigration control office) and check the extent to which ‘others’ belong to ‘their’ society.”39 In their introduction to Olumide Popoola’s play Also by Mail, Schearer and Haruna illustrate how a 2012 ruling by the administrative court in Koblenz on a case of racial profiling (temporarily) declared the practice to be “a legitimate police procedure”40 when “perceived non-white skin color and ‘non-German ethnic origin’ are the main criteria for the selection of persons who are asked for identification” (11) during checks for illegalised immigrants. Thus, Schearer and Haruna conclude, the court “officially declared” Black people and people of colour as “the ones who do not belong in the self ascribed [sic] picture of the white, homogenous society” (12) in Germany. This ruling – which was later declared to be void by a higher court, also thanks to the efforts of the Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany, ISD) – is also referenced in Popoola’s play. Together with my reading of Musa Okwonga’s novel In the End, the following sections analyse how the selected literary texts not only represent embodied practices and regimes of mobility and belonging as “highly racialized” but also facilitate an understanding of “the very concept of race as a consequence of mobility.”41 As such, my examination of the two texts can only provide an exemplary insight into the complex, multi-layered, and diverse poetics and politics of everyday mobility in contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany.
2.1 Navigating Eurospace in the Face of Racial Profiling: Also by Mail by Olumide Popoola
Born and raised in Germany as the daughter of a German mother and a Nigerian father, Olumide Popoola moved to London in her late twenties. For her poetry, the author and spoken word artist, who writes and performs in English, received the May Ayim Award for Black Literature in Germany in 2004.42 Her texts, which encompass various genres, have been published in Germany and the UK. Besides this, Popoola has also co-edited the anthology Talking Home: Heimat aus unserer eigenen Feder (Home from Our Own Pen, 1999) and curated the 2018 literary festival Writing in Migration: African Book Festival Berlin. Her play Also by Mail was published in 2013 as the second instalment of the English-language book series Witnessed based at the Münster publishing house Edition Assemblage. Edited by the award-winning author, curator, and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo, the Witnessed Series “target[s] English speaking readers in order to make an understanding of the Black experience in Germany more accessible in an international context.”43 Encouraging a transcultural, transnational, and translingual understanding of the African diaspora in Germany, the book series aims to promote “literature of Black authors who have lived in Germany,” stressing how people of the African diaspora – “[f]rom African-American GI s to Ghanaian exchange students, from African-Caribbean nurses to Black German musicians, from Black British IT specialist to African-Asian artists – […] have lived in, shaped and have been shaped by Germany.”44 As such, the book series constitutes a significant contribution to and an important space for fostering Anglophone literatures of the African diaspora in Germany.
Addressing the tensions between different generations of African and Afrodiasporic subjects in the context of the Black experience in Germany, Also by Mail negotiates processes of racialisation as well as strategies of resisting racism in Germany. Frictions of mobility constitute an important motif and aesthetic element in this context. In the first act, a sequence of scenes that is central to the play and the protagonist’s character development45 explores racial profiling as a form of regulating and controlling mobility that produces racialised subject positions. As such, the text highlights the role of mobility, particularly the management of differential friction, both in institutional forms of racism and in the constitution of subjectivity. In doing so, it demonstrates how mobility is “intrinsic […] to the production of race”46 not only in the US – as scholars like Tim Cresswell, Sarah Sharma, and Armand Towns have shown – but also in a German context. Reflecting on how “[r]ace organizes the space in which people live and through which they move,”47 the play attests to the ways in which Afrodiasporic subjects have to navigate what Joris Schapendonk calls “Eurospace,”48 i.e. “an imagined geography of Europe” (4) that “is characterized by cross-border mobility (Schengen) and by its fight against it (Dublin)” (193).
The plot follows two Black German siblings on their journeys between Germany and Nigeria as they attend their father’s funeral in Lagos. After a fight with his younger sister Funke, Wale returns home to Germany. On his train ride from the airport to his home city, the (white) ticket inspector alerts his colleagues – apparently for no other reason than Wale’s physical appearance:
TICKET INSPECTOR. Tickets please.
WALE. (Already holding the ticket out) Are we going to be picking up on the delay? I’m catching a connecting train in Dahstadt.
TICKET INSPECTOR. I don’t think that should be your biggest worry.
WALE. Excuse me?
TICKET INSPECTOR. (Calls into a two-way radio) Hello Horst. Ja, I have someone here. […] Yes, someone here, second compartment. […] You can’t miss him, it’s all empty. Yes, probably thought we wouldn’t come that far if he went all the way to the back. His ticket is fine. Even managed to get a Bahncard. Clever boy. But I don’t think he will be so clever once we call out his scam.49
Entering Wale’s compartment, the ticket inspector immediately assumes that Wale can only be in Germany illegally, suggesting that he is trying to “scam” the officials by getting a valid train ticket and a Bahncard (a subscription-based discount card from Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national rail operator) while trying to avoid being caught by sitting in the back of the train. Suggesting that Wale somehow sticks out among the passengers, the ticket inspector’s utterances, which we overhear from “backstage through the radio that he has left on by mistake”,50 already imply that the ongoing events probably constitute a case of racial profiling. While his condescending remark “Clever boy” serves to enact his superiority by infantilising Wale, the fact that he has accidentally left on his radio – for Wale and the audience to overhear his racist presumptions – simultaneously undermines his authority. Likewise, also the (again white) policeman who enters the scene shortly afterwards struggles to hide the racist motivations behind the identity check:
POLICEMAN. I’m not interested in your train ticket. I want to see your identification papers. Passport, anything identifying you.
WALE. Here’s my Bahncard. It has my picture, my name, everything.
POLICEMAN. Papers, I want ze papers.
WALE. I’m not showing you my papers. There is absolutely no reason for that. Do you ask every passenger or just the Black ones?
POLICEMAN. When there is reason for suspicion we ask.
WALE. Suspicion of what?
POLICEMAN. That’s we know. You will have to follow the law, the German law. I will not only say it the once more time: I want your identification papers for inspection.
WALE. You haven’t given me a good reason. In fact you haven’t given me any at all.
POLICEMAN. Because you behave yourself suspicious to us. Your conduction is suspiciously. So we check that everything is in ze right order. One never knows, with ze peoples like you. You could be … (catches himself and stops).51
Completely disregarding Wale’s valid ticket, the policeman immediately demands his passport. When confronted with Wale’s incessant questioning, he cannot explain why he only wants to see Wale’s identity documents but none of the other passengers’. Based on Wale’s skin colour, both the ticket inspector and the policeman not only assume that Wale cannot be German, but also that he most certainly lacks travel documents that would allow him to legally cross the Schengen border. Thus, they performatively produce him as what Michelle Wright has described as ‘Other-from-within from without,’ while criminalising his mobility:
Whereas African Americans function in white American racist discourse as the Other-from-within (they are recognized as having been born and raised in the United States, even if racists believe they do not belong there), a significant number of white Germans insistently and consistently misrecognize Afro-Germans as Africans, or Others-from-without, even though they obviously share the same language and culture.52
Since “the Afro-German is both an Other-from-Within (a member of that country) and the Other-from-without (misrecognized as African),”53 Wright refers to this othering process that characterises the “Afro-German experience” (298) as constructing “Others-from-within from without” (296).
Testifying to the fact that similar discourses are also prevalent in 21st-century Germany, Also by Mail delineates the intricate mechanisms that serve to exclude the (nonwhite) Other as something inevitably external and alien (to both the self and the nation-state), while casting “migration as a recent phenomenon that threatens the order of Europe.”54 Illustrating how processes of racialisation, the management of differential friction, and embodied experiences of mobility are mutually dependent, the play describes a split between the Black traveller and the white ticket inspector and policeman that constructs the Black German citizen as an intruding Other-from-without whose mobility must be controlled. Based on his skin colour, Wale is positioned not only as a “suspicious person”55 – as he is referred to by the police officer while speaking to his colleagues on his radio –, but also as a (potentially criminal) non-EU citizen – as he is suspected to have entered the Schengen area without the necessary documents. Wale is thus both misrecognised as non-German and vilified by the white officials. This encounter creates increased friction for Wale (as compared to other white passengers, who are not subjected to similar identity controls) as his experiential mobility is interrupted. As such, it attests to the ways in which whiteness exerts power in “transforming the spatial and temporal dynamics”56 of mobility: although the train – with Wale and the other passengers – keeps moving on, Wale “experience[s] and feel[s] immobility,”57 as he is not allowed to travel on smoothly but has to defend his right to be in and move through Germany and to have crossed European Schengen borders.
This is not a new or singular experience for Wale. As we learn, he has been subjected to racial profiling in Germany several times already: “Every time the same thing. I can’t believe it. I wish you would just come up with some new excuse. At least hide it a little, geez, don’t you have any sort of manners whatsoever?”,58 he angrily retorts to the policeman’s repeated demand to see “ze correct papers” (41). Refusing to present any identity document beyond his Bahncard, Wale is finally forced to leave the train by the police officer, who thus stops his mobility altogether. On the platform, policemen frisk Wale’s backpack and his pockets, which draws the attention of other travellers who start recording the incident. With his penultimate utterance, “OK, refugee, now let’s your illegal papers seeing” (42), the policeman once more, and this time most explicitly, interpellates Wale as an illegalised immigrant and refugee. As such, the scene pointedly attests to the ways in which the racialised politics of belonging in Germany are frequently negotiated “along pathways of movement.”59
Indeed, understanding racialised regimes of mobility in the context of racialised politics of belonging in Europe and Germany can help us to tease out concomitant patterns of “ecologies of belonging and possibilities of mobility”60 in modern Europe. Through the assumption that Wale cannot be a German citizen based on the sight of his skin colour, Wale – irrespective of his social status or class – is subjected to what Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu, and Mark Stein have called “contingent belonging.”61 According to them, “European publics engender and naturalise [structures of] normative whiteness” in which people of colour face “a conditional belonging that is strategically granted and revoked, meted out by ‘white Europe’ when useful to its own interests.”62 While highly performing, successful sportspeople of colour are, for example, more readily accepted as part of the national community, in everyday encounters this is much more unlikely. Similarly, in the 1980s, Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, and Dagmar Schultz had already noted that the Black German barely exists in the predominantly white German imagination.63 Michelle Wright goes even so far as to argue that, in the dominant German imagination, “the Afro-German identity is not the antithesis in the dialectic of (white) German subjectivity: it is simply nonexistent,”64 because
many white Germans, especially those from rural areas, seem psychologically incapable of conceiving of someone who is both Black and German. White Germans, even after a detailed explanation from their nonwhite interlocutor, still attempt to determine what African country the subject comes from.65
Scholars of African European and Black German studies have illustrated how similar discourses are also present in several countries in contemporary Europe including Germany specifically. For many Black Europeans, this leads to the experience of “embodying an identity that is declared impossible even though lived by millions.”66
Building on Peter Adey’s relational politics of (im)mobilities67 and scholarship on racialised mobility control, it becomes apparent how these hegemonic narratives of national belonging need those designated as racialised ‘Others’ to be (relatively) immobilised, fixed, and controlled so they can produce white subjectivity and normalise white mobility. As Sarah Sharma and Armond Towns have argued, the “practices of mobility that form white subjectivity […] are tied to the control of the mobility of others […]. To be white assumes a material relationship to autonomous movement while simultaneously controlling the movement of Others.”68 As a form of exerting power, racialised practices of mobility control thus serve to create the very “object necessary to produce white subjectivity.”69 In Also by Mail, this becomes visible in the sequence of scenes analysed above, which address how racialised regimes of mobility – and specifically racial profiling – produce not only racialised subject positions but also reinforce white superiority as some (read white) bodies exert mobility control over other (read nonwhite) bodies by producing differential friction and experiential as well as embodied immobilities.
At the same time, however, the production of white supremacy and the policeman’s performatively enacted official authority is also undermined – even ridiculed – when he is portrayed as speaking in broken English as he grows increasingly impatient. This places him in stark contrast to Wale, who defends himself confidently and directly confronts the policeman with the racist implications of his actions. Depicting the policeman as speaking in a faulty English with a heavy German accent, Popoola subversively translates the linguistic patterns that typically characterise border encounters between a white nation-state actor and a Black traveller in Germany and the power dynamics inherent to the different languages and language variations employed by the speakers into an Anglophone text. In the stage directions preceding the dialogue on the train, the text makes its intentions very clear:
The POLICEMAN later in the scene speaks English with a heavy German accent (and grammar) to highlight the frequent assumption that Black people aren’t able to speak German and addressing them in (usually very poor) English, although they initiated a conversation in German. (40, orig. italics)
Popoola’s translation process of a bilingual scenario into an almost exclusively English text and its implications for the racialised power dynamics portrayed in this scene and its literary aesthetics of mobility merit closer investigation. While Wale’s utterances adhere to the correct word order and grammar of Standard English, the policeman repeatedly confuses the adjectival and adverbial use of ‘suspicious,’ creating a humorous, ridiculing effect via the immediate repetition of this mistake. Among others, he also transposes German phrasing into his faulty English: while “Because you behave yourself suspicious to us” mirrors the phrase “Weil Sie sich uns gegenüber verdächtig verhalten,” “I will not only say it the once more time” is an almost but not quite literal translation of “Das werde ich nicht noch einmal sagen,” and “now let’s your illegal papers seeing” equals the German “Jetzt lass’ uns deine illegalen Dokumente ansehen.” Additionally, the policeman fails to pronounce the dental fricative [ð] in words like ‘the’, which is a frequent mistake by German-speaking learners of English, some of whom tend to pronounce ‘th’ as [s] or [z]. In the dialogue, this is indicated by spelling words like ‘the’ with ‘z’ instead of ‘th.’ Via the linguistic design of the dialogue between Wale and the policeman, the text thus subverts the unequal power relations between the white officer and the Black traveller whose mobility and belonging are being controlled and policed. Drawing on established connotations of language competence and proficiency, the policeman’s broken English also serves to underpin the narrow-mindedness and racist prejudice that become visible in his actions. Thus, the play finds a literary form that not only formulates an implicit critique of the racialised regimes of mobility that are addressed thematically in the text but also creates friction in the process of reading. Especially the officer’s weird English phrasing forces the reader to stop in order to reconsider and (re)translate his utterances into German – if their language competences allow them to do so. As an aesthetic effect in the reception of the literary text, friction is thus mobilised as “a tactic of resistance”70 against racialised power structures and regimes of mobility and contingent belonging in Germany.
In the play, this critique is made explicit in a subsequent scene. While the policeman repeatedly insists that he is following and enacting German law, Wale’s lawyer later clarifies that German law indeed protects – or should protect – Wale from being
“[…] disfavoured because of sex, parentage, (emphasizes) race, language …” and even more specifically, listen to this: “homeland and origin”. So even if this is a popular route for people to enter the country illegally, our basic law forbids making an assumption based on skin colour only, or the inkling that a person is not from within Germany. Let alone of course the fact that it’s time to accept the diversity of Germany’s citizens (pauses exhausted). (45, orig. italics)
By illustrating how the production of race is tied to mobility, Also by Mail lays bare, defamiliarises, and criticises the racialised regimes of mobility and contingent belonging within “a Europe that, in potential, facilitates cross-border mobility”71 but where (the control of) mobility in fact constitutes “one of the mechanisms by which people are raced.”72 In doing so, it not only formulates an empowering claim to belonging that reimagines and expands dominant citizenship narratives but also finds a literary form that makes visible the potential of change and resistance inherent in the notion of friction.
2.2 Urban (Im)Mobilities Affected by Racial Stress: In the End, It Was All about Love by Musa Okwonga
The novel In the End, It Was All about Love, published by Musa Okwonga in 2021 with the London-based publishing venture Rough Trade Books, serves as a second example of contemporary fiction of everyday mobility of the African diaspora in Germany. Besides the poetry collection Eating Roses for Dinner (2015) and the memoir One of Them: An Eton College Memoir (2021), the British-born author of Ugandan parentage has also written essays and commentaries for newspapers such as The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, The New York Times, taz, and ZEIT. Since 2014, Okwonga has lived in Berlin. Inspired by autobiographical experiences, his debut novel In the End was one of the five books that were discussed at the 2023-edition of the literary festival Resonanzen – Schwarze Literatur und Lesarten (Resonances – Black Literature and Readings) curated by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Patricia Eckermann, which centres and celebrates Black literature in Germany. Following the protagonist’s movements through Berlin, the novel foregrounds the theme of everyday mobilities in the city. As such, it constitutes a typical example of contemporary literature of the African diaspora in Germany, the majority of which are set in urban spaces. This corresponds to the social conditions of the African diaspora in Germany, which “is mainly present in Germany’s big cities.”73
Divided into three parts, the novel is told by a second person singular narrator, who “struggles to make sense of the postcolonial metropolis”74 as a Black bisexual man confronted with processes of racialisation and discriminatory encounters. As he has already made Berlin his own and claims belonging in the city, his struggle is not so much related to having to learn to find his way through the German capital. On the contrary, the nameless narrator presents himself as an expert of Berlin,75 who is able to give his readers advice as to how to live and survive as a “dark-skinned black male in [this] major European city” (85), in which he is racially harassed on the streets and subjected to hostile stares on public transport on a regular basis. As a writer76 who also publishes articles online – we assume, on issues of race, as he mentions how they draw the anger of white supremacists – the narrator also receives death threats on the internet. The representation of Black people in the news and on social media do the rest to make his “skin colour feel […] like an existential threat” (75), forcing him to painfully realise that “there are places in your own town where you cannot walk after dark, places elsewhere in this country where you would be attacked on sight” (71). In his therapy sessions with Dr. Oppong, he not only talks about his fear of racism, homophobia, and loneliness but also shares his dream about running away from a group of white neo-Nazis after they have murdered two of his Black male friends in front of his eyes.
Highlighting the “anxious aspects of […] everyday mobilities”77 in a predominantly white Europe, the novel reflects not only on the banality of Black vulnerability and quotidian violence in everyday urban life as connected to regimes of mobility in the city, but also on “the pervasiveness of the interlinking of race and mobility”78 in Germany. Thus, it attests to the ways in which “[r]ace and mobility are socially produced in a constantly iterative and circular manner. Each is implicated in the construction of the other.”79 Illustrating how whiteness is linked with being able to move freely in public spaces and public modes of transport (mostly without taking notice of this privilege), the short chapters, in which we follow the protagonist through Berlin, repeatedly address how Black subjects are, in turn, disproportionately policed irrespective of their nationality or residency status. In the novel, the repeated racist incidents that the narrator experiences not only produce increased frictions in both his experiential and his embodied mobility but also fundamentally restrict his capacity to be mobile. Amounting to a constant sense of threat, the narrator is at times immobilised for weeks due to his anxiety induced by racial stress. Because of his unbearable fear of being racially harassed, he sometimes does not even dare to leave his flat:
Don’t leave the flat. Remember that time you saw the bus driver wearing the neo-Nazi dress code, the Thor Steinar baseball cap. Remember the time you were racially abused by two white women at the top of your road. Remember when they put their hands on you – they actually touched you. Don’t leave the flat.80
As part of his “short, simple twelve-step programme” (85) on how to survive in Berlin as a Black subject – or, as the narrator wittily puts it, on “How To Play The Race Card” (85) –, the advice “Don’t leave the flat” comments on the condition of living under the constant threat of experiencing a physical racial attack or forms of banal racism in public spaces with biting sarcasm. As an Afrodiasporic subject, the narrator does not “feel safe in Germany” (93), which significantly restricts his ability to move freely in public spaces, thus limiting his capacity for embodied mobility. This sense of immobility and being stuck is reinforced on the level of literary form via the use of repetition, parallelism, and anaphora – stylistic devices that are employed throughout the text. Framing the memories of the threatening and racially abusive incidents that the narrator has had to live through, the sentence “Don’t leave the flat” is repeated twice. Introducing and concluding his recollections, all of which are introduced by the appellative construction “Remember …”, the identical repetition of “Don’t leave the flat” creates a sense of definiteness. For the narrator, there seems to be no way out of being trapped inside his flat and of the immobilising effects of racial stress at this moment.
Within his twelve-step programme of “How To Play The Race Card”, the reinterpretation of the idiomatic phrase ‘playing the race card’ (which usually refers to the exploitation of anti-racist attitudes to gain an advantage) in order to speak to the bare survival (both physical and psychological) as a Black person in Berlin/Germany formulates an implicit critique of accusations of ‘playing the race card’ frequently used to dismiss concerns about racism. As such, it also comments on the widespread tendency in Germany to negate the existence of racism as a structural form and everyday practice of violence with pervasive material implications. As Priscilla Layne puts it: For “a white public […] there is never enough evidence to prove that racism still exists because it understands racism solely in terms of violent spectacle, as opposed to something that transpires in everyday life.”81 As a consequence, the more hidden structures of racialised regimes of mobility such as the causation of racial stress and its impact on the embodied and experiential mobility of Black subjects are almost entirely excluded from public discourse.82 In light of this, Okwonga’s novel in general and the narrator’s twelve-step programme more specifically draw the readers’ attention to the burden of having to deal with the constant threat of suffering racial violence and demonstrate its immobilising effects.
Additionally, it exposes the absurdity of having to adapt oneself to racist attitudes in a pre-emptive way, which puts the blame on the victim rather than on the perpetrator. Enumerating suggestions such as “Make sure there aren’t too many of you living in your apartment block,” “Make sure there are not too many exotic emissions from your flat,” or “When going through Customs, don’t look too cocky. You’ll get stop-searched if you look too free, if you’re too gleefully crossing borders” (85), the first bullet points on the list might, to some, initially seem like exaggerated, almost ridiculing accounts of ‘living while Black.’ A closer look, however, reveals how the narrator employs descriptions of reality deceivingly dressed up as hyperbole to create a poignant portrayal of social conditions while generating a humoristic effect that simultaneously functions as a sort of comic relief. Addressing the differential management of friction in different kinds of cross-border mobilities, the above-quoted points describe both embodied and disembodied immobilisations that not only limit Black people in the crossing of national borders but also restrict their housing options and their ways of living in their domestic space, as even the smell of their food should not penetrate the borders of their private home. As such, the different phrases pertain not only to experiences of racial profiling but also to racist discrimination on the housing market, pejorative discourses of ghettoisation, and related issues of city planning, as well as to the imperative of integration and essentialist conceptions of cultures as containers that are, by nature, inherently different. While the sentence “You’ll get stop-searched if you look too free, if you’re too gleefully crossing borders” speaks to the arbitrariness of racial profiling and how it can affect any Black person, irrespective of their social status or class, the similarly absurd sounding recommendation “Make sure there are not too many exotic emissions from your flat” appropriates the language of positive racism inherent in exoticist discourses on racial minorities from the Global South in order to formulate an implicit critique of these discourses. Heightened to the point of absurdity, the phrases thus also attest to the wittiness of the narrator in the face of adversity.
Indeed, throughout the novel, the use of sarcasm, humour, and word play often serves as a way of coping with the cruelty of the situation and frequently harbours subversive and transformative potential. For example, in the fourth step of the programme, the narrator mocks the way in which white people tend to avoid sitting next to Black people – especially men – on public transport and invites his brothers and sisters to laugh about what he calls the phenomenon of “the Black Gap”:
If you are sitting on a crowded train yet everyone refuses to sit next to you, take advantage of the resultant space. Make a show of it. Manspread. Take a photo of the space and post it on social media, as an example of the Black Gap, the mystical force-field that often seems to appear around post-puberty black men in public. (86)
At the same time, the text does not sugarcoat the hurtful, devastating effects of racist violence to which the protagonist, as an adult Black man, is exposed. Having internalised racial stereotypes of the criminal Black male, he strives to differentiate himself from other Black men moving through public spaces and how they are seen by the white majority. Simultaneously, he is shocked at how he perceives himself:
[…] What a time to have migrant body. What a time to live within this terrifying vehicle, this dark bulk.
What a time to be in this migrant body. When there are several of you in a particular train carriage in Hamburg, a cluster of dark-skinned men of African heritage, you begin to think: are there too many of us to make them comfortable? There are five of you, sitting in adjacent booths. Five! The other men are strangers but they have just boarded the same train and in their dress, Puffa jackets, oversized trousers and trainers, they are indistinguishable from you. Maybe if you dressed differently from these black men, the other people in the carriage would feel safer, that you were not part of a pack. Maybe you would feel safer, because you would not be seen as one of Them.
Look at the way you think about yourself now. African. Dark-skinned. Migrant. […] (28)
While the narrator seems to be taking on, and at the same time rejecting, the racist discourse that produces him as a de-individualised, dehumanised “migrant body,” the passage formulates a differentiated, multi-layered critique of the intricate workings of racism. Referencing his own body as a “terrifying vehicle” and “dark bulk,” in which he feels trapped, the narrator appears to have internalised the dehumanising narratives that construct (as few as) five co-present Black men as an “indistinguishable […] pack” and therefore does not want to be (seen as) one of “Them.” Moreover, as a technology of mobility, the vehicle as a metaphor for the (racialised) body that reads the corporeal body as an organic ‘auto-mobile’83 vehicle further showcases the interdependent structures between race and mobility, illustrating how they produce the (Black) body both as “a subject of control of its movement” and as “subjected to forms of power.”84 While a vehicle typically affords mobility, the juxtaposed image of the narrator’s body as a “bulk” conjures up associations of being fixed and immobile. Simultaneously constructed as something that moves and something that is static and immobilised, or that might even create friction for others (the bulk as an obstacle), his dehumanised Black body is perceived and produced as a threat within dominant racist discourses. Worried about how white people will view him as dangerous, the narrator therefore tries to adapt his behaviour and appearance in a way that would make prejudiced white people feel more comfortable in the presence of Black men as a means to protect himself from potential racist violence. This constant preoccupation with the well-being of the (potential) perpetrators constitutes another example of how the experience of the narrator’s everyday mobility is restricted and disrupted in fundamental ways. The above-quoted passage can not only be read as a critique of these unequal racialised regimes of mobility but also translates the narrator’s sense of being immobilised on an everyday basis into literary form. Via the novel’s characteristic use of repetition and parallelism (“What a time to …”, “Maybe …”), it creates the sense of being stuck in a vicious cycle of racist projections and internalised prejudices.
However, the passage also critically distances itself from the internalised racist discourse it seems to appropriate. Exposing the narratives by which racism is frequently legitimised, “Them” is spelled in capital letters, which makes visible the dehumanising othering process involved in the production of racialised and migranticised bodies as “a pack.” As the narrator appears to reprimand himself for his thoughts (“Look at the way you think about yourself now”), the passage criticises not so much the narrator himself but rather racist societal structures, which have taught him not only to think about himself in imposed labels such as ‘African,’ ‘dark-skinned,’ or ‘migrant,’ but also to internalise racist discourses and to find the fault within himself, reversing – once again – the roles of victim and perpetrator. As such, the passage reveals racial stress to be not so much a self-inflicted friction in the narrator’s everyday mobility but rather one that is produced by the racialised regimes of mobility and belonging within the white majority society in Germany. In this context, the novel also reflects on how modern unequal regimes of mobility are grounded in global histories that have “structured the boundaries of whiteness and non-whiteness in material ways,”85 emphasising how we “cannot understand new mobilities […] without understanding old mobilities.”86 From European colonialism (“literally Europeans forcefully moving into space”87), the Berlin conference (“That forum of eighteen-eighty four, / Where parts of Africa had been handed out to attendees, / A whole continent pressed into gleeful palms”88), and the transatlantic slave trade (“a paradoxical mix of extreme enforced transoceanic mobility and equally extreme enforced bodily immobility”89) to today’s deaths in the Mediterranean Sea (which reveal the “racialized politics of borderization”90 in modern Europe) and everyday forms of racial profiling (thanks to which “a normal train ride can [quickly] take a turn for the worse”91 for Black people in Germany) – the traumatic histories of racialised mobility regimes continue to haunt the protagonist’s (im)mobilities in Berlin.
Finally, the text’s critical stance towards the racialised regimes of mobility and belonging it portrays on the level of content is also reinforced by its narrative perspective. Positioning the audience as the ‘you’ that struggles to move through Berlin, the second person narration creates opportunities of identification for and solidarities among Black readers (and other readers of colour) while putting white readers in the shoes of the Black protagonist. Following his thoughts in a detailed, at times almost minute manner, readers are invited to and can sometimes hardly escape ‘feeling’ what the protagonists feels, to ‘experience’ (or imagine experiencing) what he experiences – and are thus urged to query their own mobile privileges and, if applicable, by extension their whiteness. Inviting readers to – quite literally, at least within their imagination – walk in the Black character’s shoes as he moves through and experiences immobilisations in Berlin, the second person narration enables the readers to relive and retrace both his embodied and his experiential (im)mobilities by situating them and their imagination in the “affective vehicle” of the narrator’s corporeal body, “through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies.”92 Mobilising the ‘you’ as an affective narrative vehicle, the novel’s narrative form thus constitutes yet another way in which the text negotiates the racialised politics of mobility not only on a thematic level but also in terms of its literary aesthetics.
3 Conclusion
Following Alexander Scherr, Nadia Butt, and Ansgar Nünning, contemporary Anglophone literature is located “in diverse Anglophone contexts.”93 As this article has illustrated, the African diaspora in Germany constitutes one of these contexts – one that has not yet received enough critical attention. Clearly, studying the Anglophone literatures of the African diaspora in Germany is a task for English studies scholars as much as one for those who locate themselves in the discipline of German studies, requiring us to reflect on the limitations and blind spots that emerge when categories of nation-state and language are used to produce clear-cut delineations of these disciplines. Additionally, employing a mobility studies perspective to these texts enables us to move beyond limiting notions such as ‘literature of migration’ and to address the literary negotiation of the plurality and relationality of concrete practices and related politics of (im)mobility. As “a key site through which […] mobilities are constructed, conceived, and challenged,”94 literary representations of such (im)mobilities can “contribute to the process of making sense of real-life mobilities, and render experienced, embodied mobilities more tangible.”95 Building on these arguments, this article has shown how contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany reflect on how the mundane mobility of Black subjects is restricted and interrupted by racialised regimes of mobility in modern Europe and how these politics of mobility and contingent belonging produce racialised subject positions.
One of my aims, in this context, was to demonstrate how reading texts like Also by Mail by Olumide Popoola and In the End by Musa Okwonga as fictions of everyday mobility encourages us not only to pay attention to the diverse strategies96 that contemporary literatures of the African diaspora in Germany employ to negotiate everyday forms of (im)mobility, but also to understand Afrodiasporic daily movers and their literary counterparts as “active creators”97 of both European-ness and German-ness. In order to do so, I have chosen to analyse two texts that, in my eyes, demonstrate the transnational character of contemporary Anglophone literatures of the African diaspora in Germany (see section 1). However, since both of the works discussed here focus on the experiences of able-bodied male subjects (one of them bisexual), this text selection has occluded literary negotiations of other intersectional experiences. This highlights the need for further research on fictions of everyday mobility of the African diaspora in Germany that engage with the experiences of (im)mobility of female, non-binary, queer, disabled, or otherwise (potentially multiply) marginalised characters by authors such as Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, SchwarzRund, or Olivia Wenzel, to name but a few.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michelle Stork, the co-editor of this special issue, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and precise comments and questions that significantly enriched the creation of this article.
Cf. Oholi, 2024: 12.
Cf. Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003: 576–610; Beck, 2007: 286–290.
Cf. Yildiz, 2013.
I write about and engage with these issues from the mostly privileged position of a cis-female able-bodied white Austrian national, socialised in the heteropatriarchal middle-class structures of rural Austria and educated in predominantly white Austrian schools and academia. It is from this position that I aim to take responsibility for my entanglements in the hegemonic structures of society and their implications for my engagement with the topics and primary texts that I analyse in this article.
Migration constitutes one but not the only form of mobility (cf. Hui, 2016: 71). With Tim Cresswell, the latter can be defined as an “act of moving between locations” that is “socially produced” (2006: 2 and 3). Whereas migration studies “usually take mobility into account as an in-between phase between a place of origin and a place of destination”, which often contributes to a “reductionist and sedentarist understanding of migrants’ mobility” (Schapendonk, 2020: 3), mobility studies is interested in the plurality and relationality of routes, representations, and practices of mobility (cf. Cresswell, 2006: 3).
Aguiar, Mathieson, and Pearce, 2019: 19; cf. also Toivanen, 2021: 1.
Toivanen, 2021: 209.
Drawing on M. Moustapha Diallo’s and Mariam Muwanga’s understanding of “narratives of diaspora” as providing “an emic (i.e., insider) perspective” on diasporic formations (2023: 74, orig. italics), I speak of ‘literatures of the African diaspora in Germany’ in order to describe the (transnational and translingual) corpus of texts in which I locate the works under scrutiny in this article.
Scherr, Butt, and Nünning, 2023: 12. Further page references are in the main text.
Brancato, 2008: 11, orig. italics.
For a more detailed analysis of the translingual aspects of the literatures of the African diaspora in Germany see Koepsell, 2014; Oholi, 2019: 347–365; Sackl, 2025a (upcoming); and Sackl, 2025b (upcoming): 35–53.
Esuruoso and Koepsell, 2014: 12, orig. italics.
Of course, multilinguality has always been part of German literature; cf. Yildiz, 2013.
Campt, 2003: 290.
Blackshire-Belay, 1996: ix.
McEachrane, 2021: 15. Further page references are in the main text.
Layne, 2022: 40. Further page references are in the main text.
Dickson-Carr, 2017: 791, qtd. in Layne, 2022: 41.
Holmes et al., 2024: 78.
Whereas Otoo’s novella, among other things, reflects on the subjectivising functions of the white gaze in relation to the subject positions of the tourist and the resident, Modesto’s short story recounts the protagonist’s experience of racialisation in the face of a racist interpellation by a child on the subway. Similar discourses are negotiated in Aukongo’s poems, one of which addresses racialised stares and interpellation while the lyrical speaker is shopping for groceries. Koepsell’s poem, in turn, speaks to the restrictions of mobility imposed by (the danger of) racial violence, while Bahati’s poem uses subversive word play and neologisms to address a phenomenon that Okwonga’s narrator refers to as ‘the Black Gap’ (see 2.2.).
See also Schapendonk, 2020: 2.
Gebauer, 2023: 83. Further page references are in the main text. For the purposes of this essay, I understand fiction not in a narrow sense as a generic denominator (as a type of prose writing) but rather as encompassing imaginary narratives that might be articulated in any sort of medium of aesthetic expression including, for example, poetry, drama, comics, film, etc.
Schapendonk, 2020: 4.
See Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013: 184–185.
Wright, 2004: 191.
See Koepsell, 2015; Schearer and Haruna, 2013: 10–13.
Schapendonk, 2020: 4. Further page references are in the main text.
As noted by Anna-Leena Toivanen, “not that much critical attention has been devoted to literary portrayals of concrete, tangible forms of mobility” within African and Afrodiasporic literatures, which she attributes to “a rather restricted understanding of what ‘mobility’ means” within postcolonial studies and the dominance of the figure of the migrant as the “axiomatic representative of globalised postcoloniality” (2021: 1). As a consequence, she argues, “postcolonial subjects are not recognised as mobile subjects or travellers – beyond being migrants” (1). Instead of “reducing mobility to a vague metaphoric/migrant displacement” (3), she urges us to focus on representations of concrete forms of mobility. Joris Schapendonk makes a similar point as to “African movers” (2020: 2) in Europe. In regard to literary texts of the African diaspora in Germany, a further reason to move away from a migration-centred framework is that literature by nonwhite authors in Germany has frequently – and sometimes misleadingly – been discussed under the reductionist heading of ‘Migrationsliteratur’ (literature of migration), which tends to obscure other forms of mobility in the texts.
Cf. Toivanen, 2021: 107.
Cresswell, 2013: 110. Further page references are in the main text.
See Anna-Leena Toivanen’s analysis of ‘practical cosmopolitanisms’ in Michèle Rakotoson’s 1996 novel Elle, au printemps (cf. 2021: 89–90).
Toivanen, 2021: 13.
Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013: 189.
Seiler, 2009: 233. Further page references are in the main text.
See Cresswell, 2009: 260.
Sheller, 2018: 115.
El-Tayeb, 2011: xiv.
Schearer and Haruna, 2013: 12.
Burnley and Otoo, 2015: 14, orig. italics.
Schearer and Haruna, 2013: 12. Further page references are in the main text.
Seiler, 2009: 232 and 230, orig. italics. Cf. also Nicholson and Sheller, 2016: 5.
Named after one of the central icons of Black literature and activism in Germany, the May Ayim Award is the first international award for Black literature in Germany.
Otoo, 2013a: 9.
Otoo, 2013b: 93.
Wale is disappointed by his (recently deceased) father not only because he feels that he was not there for him enough during his childhood, but also because he “always pretended there wasn’t any racism [in Germany …] as long as you didn’t draw any unnecessary attention to yourself” (Popoola, 2013: 46). Wale’s experiences of anti-Black racism, i.a. being subjected to racial profiling on a regular basis, not only counteract his father’s narrative but also constitute an important moment for Wale to decide to “stand up for [him]self” (46) and to fight back against the racist regimes of mobility in German society by filing a court complaint against his most recent incident of racial profiling (see below).
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 29.
Seiler, 2009: 231.
Schapendonk, 2020: 4. Further page references are in the main text.
Popoola, 2013: 40, orig. italics.
Popoola, 2013: 40, orig. italics.
Popoola, 2013: 41, orig. italics.
Wright, 2004: 191.
Wright, 2003: 297. Further page references are in the main text.
Espinoza Garrido, Koegler, Nyangulu, and Stein, 2020: 3.
Popoola, 2013: 41–42.
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 27. For a more detailed discussion of the entanglements between spatial and temporal relations in differential experiences of mobility see Adey, 2006: 83–84.
Adey, 2006: 83, my italics.
Popoola, 2013: 41.
Schapendonk, 2020: 4.
Grossberg, 2019: 61.
Espinoza Garrido et al., 2020: 2.
Espinoza Garrido et al., 2020: 2.
Cf. Oguntoye, Ayim, and Schultz 2020 [1986].
Wright, 2004: 191, orig. italics.
Wright, 2004: 191.
Carvalho, Roldão, Candido, Raposo, Varela, Lima, and Matias, 2019: 10.
Cf. Adey, 2006.
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 28, orig. italics.
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 31.
Cresswell, 2013: 114.
Schapendonk, 2020: 4.
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 28.
Diallo and Muwanga, 2023: 78.
Toivanen, 2021: 109.
Throughout the novel, the narrator offers poignant descriptions of the city that provide evidence of his expertise on Berlin, e.g. “Berlin is an introvert fiercely disguised as an extrovert” (Okwonga, 2021: 56) or: “Sooner or later Berlin will punch you in the stomach. When it does, please try not to take this personally – instead, try to treat it as a passport stamp, as a sign of your arrival. You won’t get on here if you don’t” (9). Further page references are in the main text.
Some passages in the novel even suggest that we are reading the protagonist’s own writing: “[…] you start to type. In The End, you begin, It Was All About Love” (84).
Toivanen, 2021: 109.
Cresswell, 2016: 21.
Cresswell, 2016: 21.
Okwonga, 2021: 86–87. Further page references are in the main text.
Layne, 2022: 41.
Cf. also Schearer and Haruna, who describe racial profiling as “one of the […] untold, silenced German stories” (2013: 11).
Cf. Mavhunga, 2016: 74–93.
Mavhunga, Cuvelier, and Pype, 2016: 50.
Sharma and Towns, 2013: 29.
Cresswell, 2010: 29.
Sharma and Towns, 2016: 29, orig. italics.
Okwonga, 2021: 69.
Cresswell, 2016: 22.
Ehrmann, 2021: 420.
Schearer and Haruna, 2013: 11.
Sheller and Urry, 2006: 216.
Scherr et al., 2023: 21.
Aguiar et al., 2019: 12.
Toivanen, 2021: 2.
A comprehensive analysis of all the strategies used in the two primary texts under scrutiny as well as a systematic overview of the literary strategies employed in other contemporary works of the African diaspora in Germany would have gone beyond the scope of this article. To further explore these questions is one of the aims of my ongoing dissertation project.
Schapendonk, 2020: 3.
Works Cited
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