Hybrid Cultures - Nervous States : Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World [1 ed.] 9789042032293, 9789042032286

Citation preview

Hybrid Cultures − Nervous States

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

129 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Hybrid Cultures − Nervous States Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World

Edited by

Ulrike Lindner, Maren Möhring, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover design: Gordon Collier and Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3228-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3229-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations

vii ix

Introduction

ULRIKE LINDNER, MAREN MÖHRING, MARK STEIN, & SILKE STROH

xi

From Postcolonial to Transnational Approaches in German Studies SARA LENNOX

xlvii

SECTION I: (POST)COLONIAL IDENTIFICATIONS, COLONIAL TRADITIONS, AND CULTURES OF MEMORY

Encounters Over the Border: The Shaping of Colonial Identities in Neighbouring British and German Colonies in Southern Africa ULRIKE LINDNER

The Colonial Order Upside Down? British and Germans in East African Prisoner-of-War Camps During World War I MICHAEL PESEK

Jack, Peter and the Beast: Postcolonial Perspectives on Sexual Murder and the Construction of White Masculinity in Britain and Germany at the Turn of the Twentieth Century EVA BISCHOFF

Decolonization of the Public Space? (Post)Colonial Culture of Remembrance in Germany JOACHIM ZELLER

3

23

43

65

“Setting the Record Straight”?: Imperial History in Postcolonial British Public Culture ELIZABETH BUETTNER

89

SECTION II: (TRANS)NATIONAL CONSUMER CULTURES: FROM ‘KOLONIALWAREN’ TO ‘ETHNIC CUISINE’

(Trans)National Consumer Cultures: Coffee as a Colonial Product in the German Empire LAURA JULIA RISCHBIETER

107

Transcultural Tea Times: An Overview of Tea in Colonial History CHRISTINE VOGT–WILLIAM

127

Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures MAREN MÖHRING

A Cultural Politics of Curry: The Transnational Spaces of Contemporary Commodity Culture PETER JACKSON

151

167

SECTION III: MULTICULTURALISM FAILED? CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND THE DEBATES ON NATIONAL BELONGING

Knowledges of (Un)Belonging: Epistemic Change as a Defining Mode for Black Women’s Activism in Germany MAUREEN MAISHA EGGERS

“I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today DEIRDRE OSBORNE

Muslims, the Discourse on (Failed) Integration in Britain, and Kenneth Glenaan’s Film Yasmin SILKE STROH

The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany: Spatiality, Gender, and the Boundaries of the National Gaze

189

203

229

MARKUS SCHMITZ

253

Works Cited Notes on Editors and Contributors Index

277 319 327

Acknowledgements

This volume was first conceived during an international conference of the same title which took place at the University of Münster, Germany, from 10 to 12 May 2007. We would like to thank our sponsors, the University of Münster and the University BW Munich, for their generosity. We would also like to acknowledge the crucial support of the academic network “Postcolonial Germany and Britain,” especially of Eva Bischoff, Christoph Ramm, and Laura Rischbieter, when planning the conference. Joachim Zeller and The Guardian have granted permission to reproduce pictures. We are grateful to our contributors for their dedication to this project – and for their patience.



Illustrations

In Joachim Zeller’s chapter: 1.

79

Hermann von Wissmann monument, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa (today Tanzania), erected 1909, contemporary picture postcard Author’s collection 2.

80

Students attempting to destroy the Wissmann memorial, Hamburg, 1967 Photo: Hamburger Abendblatt, 9 August 1967 3.

81

Bismarck tower at Cap Nachtigal, Victoria (Limbe), Cameroon, erected 1901 Photo: Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (1906): 121 4.

82

‘Kolonial-Ehrenmal‘, Bremen, erected 1932 Photo: author’s collection 5.

83

Saxonian colonial war memorial, Dresden, 1913 Photo: Stadtplanungsamt Dresden 6.

84

Commemorative action by the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Peoples) at the South-West Africa memorial, Göttingen, 2004 Photo: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker e.V., Göttingen 7.

85

Colonial war memorial, Düsseldorf, with added plaque commemorating genocide in German South-West Africa. Photo: A. Neumann 8.

86

Windhoek rider monument, Namibia Photo: Joachim Zeller

x

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

9.

87

Protest against insufficient commemoration of colonial crimes, Berlin, June 2004 Photo: U. Winkler 10.

88

Dr Victor Dzidzonou at the Berlin memorial which commemorates the West Africa conference of 1884–85 and the genocide against the Herero and Nama 1904–1908. Photo: Joachim Zeller

In Laura Julia Rischbieter’s chapter: 1.

110

Annual consumption of coffee per capita and imports of coffee in Germany Diagram by Laura Julia Rischbieter, based on: Statistisches Reichsamt, ed. Die Statistik des Deutschen Reichs im Jahre (1880–1934); Ernst Neumann, Der Kaffee: Seine geographische Verbreitung, Gesamtproduktion und Konsumption (Greifswald: Graph. Inst. Paul Funk, 1930): 144. 2.

111

Companies and employees in the coffee industry Table by Laura Julia Rischbieter, based on Albert Hesse, Gewerbestatistik (1904; Jena: Fischer, 1914): 263. 3.

120

Coffee brand item from J. Kaufmann, Hildesheim, 1900 Source: Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Warenzeichenblatt 7 (1900): 146 (No. 41719) 4.

121

Coffee advertisement statistics Table by Laura Julia Rischbieter, based on Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Warenzeichenblatt (1895, 1899, 1912) 5.

122

Coffee brand item from Paul Herm. Schneider, Zeitz, 1904 Source: Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Warenzeichenblatt 11 (1904): 265 (No. 66084)

In Peter Jackson’s chapter: 1.

176

“What does this dish say about Britain?” The Guardian, 25 August 1998

Introduction U LRIKE L INDNER , M AREN M ÖHRING , M ARK S TEIN , AND S ILKE S TROH

M

U L T I C U L T U R E I S A C K N O W L E D G E D as an almost incontrovertible feature of contemporary social reality in Britain and Germany, two countries that – in different ways – belong to a postcolonial and an increasingly globalized world. This fact deserves public, political and academic recognition.1 While cultural diversity and hybridity have often been celebrated, they also pose challenges to traditional concepts of national and cultural identity – challenges which have caused considerable anxiety on various levels. Recent years have already seen a marked increase in academic research on these phenomena, both in the humanities and in the social sciences. However, the various disciplines involved have often pursued their inquiries into cultural hybridity, multiculturalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and their impact on discourses of national identity in relative isolation from each other and with little direct interdisciplinary cooperation. For instance, much current research on these matters – in social science as well as in literary and cultural studies – tends to concentrate on current discourses at the expense of the historical dimensions of these debates. However, as this volume suggests, the fundamental debates and anxieties connected with today’s multiculture and insecure national identities develop from both past and present social experiences (as well as from memories and representations) of colonialism and postcolonialism, migration history as well as econo-

In this context, see also, for example, Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004; Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2006), and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland, ed. Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai & Sheila Mysorekar (Münster: Unrast, 2007). 1

xii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

mic and cultural globalization. This interconnectedness between past and present also needs to be reflected more strongly in academic research on these phenomena. Another deficit of much existing research in this area is a tendency towards over-theorization and sweeping generalization without sufficient attention to regional and historical specificity. This is especially so in literary and cultural studies – for instance, in the field of postcolonialism, as has been noted by many critics. Greater interdisciplinary cooperation might help to counter this deficit. Another problem frequently discussed but rarely remedied in postcolonial studies is the relative scarcity of sustained comparisons, particularly between different former empires, but also across language boundaries.2 This book provides such comparative perspectives, linking historically and locally specific case studies with more abstract and general theoretical discussions, working at the disciplinary interfaces between postcolonial literary and cultural studies; the history of colonialism; social science approaches to multiculturalism and nationhood; geography; as well as globalization studies. An interdisciplinary outlook can extend the critical perspective beyond political definitions of national and cultural identity to include consumer culture, literature, film, and journalism. Thus, cultural and social practices that construct, represent, and reflect personal and collective identities move into the focus of analysis. Accordingly, this volume explores correlations between these practices, on the one hand, and the processes and strategies of their construction, representation, and performance, on the other. In this process, we hope to generate a productive dialogue across the distinct and highly diverse colonial and migration histories of Germany and the U K , to highlight divergent concepts of cultural difference, but also to explore similarities, entanglements, and transnational developments.3 Close comparison is faciliMuch literature in postcolonial studies focuses on the British Empire and on postcolonial societies in its former colonies – see, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), and Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1997): 223–90. Comparative approaches are rare. 3 A general treatment of the development of comparative studies in different disciplines can be found in Hartmut Kaelble, “Die interdisziplinären Debatten über Vergleich und Transfer,” in Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Hartmut Kaelble & Jürgen Schriewer (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003): 469–94. On comparative approaches in German historiography, see Jürgen Kocka, “Historische Komparatistik in Deutschland,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse 2



Introduction

xiii

tated in two ways: by individual chapters which directly discuss both countries and by pairings of chapters which study similar phenomena in one of the countries respectively. Several chapters analyze explicitly transnational or transimperial phenomena, focusing on connections or on people and products that cross borders – between empires, between postcolonial societies, between metropoles and peripheries.4 Some chapters refer to the concept of cultural transfer and dwell on the exchange between different colonial and postcolonial societies and cultures.5 Other chapters use the approach of histoire croisée (entangled histories), employing multiple views on their subjects as analytical tools and combining comparison with the exploration of transfers.6

international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Heinz–Gerhard Haupt & Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996): 47–60. On the relatively limited significance of comparative history in British historiography, see Geoffrey Crossick, “And what should they know of England? Die vergleichende Geschichtsschreibung im heutigen Grossbritannien,” in Geschichte und Vergleich, ed. Haupt & Kocka, 61–77; a recent transnational approach on empires is provided by Imperial Formations, ed. Carole McGranaham, Peter C. Perdue & Ann Laura Stoler (Santa Fe N M : School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). 4 For a recent discussion of transnational moments in the British Empire, see Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism c. 1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine & Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For a transnational approach to the German Empire, see Sebastian Conrad & Jürgen Osterhammel, “Einleitung,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, ed. Conrad & Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004): 7–28. 5 On the concept of cultural transfer, see Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels francoallemands: Perspectives germaniques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), and Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649–85. On cultural transfers between Germany and Britain, see Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann & Willibald Steinmetz, “Brücken über den Kanal? Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Grossbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Aneignung und Abwehr, ed. Muhs, Paulmann & Steinmetz (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998): 7–20. 6 For a discussion of entangled histories, see Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten: Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Conrad & Randeria (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002): 9–49, and Shalini Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Norbert Jegelka, Hanna Leitgeb & Jörn Rüsen (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000): 87–96. On the concept of histoire croisée, see Michael Werner & Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der

xiv

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Thus, interactions as well as processes of demarcation within postcolonial societies, between metropoles and colonies or between the respective metropoles can be addressed. These comparative and transnational approaches will help us to explore the complexities of multiculture in colonial and postcolonial societies. In order to chart the interdisciplinary terrain of this book for a diverse readership from distinct disciplinary backgrounds, this introduction will proceed to outline certain theoretical and conceptual issues which are central to the project of this book, as well as delineating some important features of Britain’s and Germany’s colonial and postcolonial histories – and their national identity discourses – that provide a wider framework for the more specialized studies presented in this volume. Moreover, this introduction will discuss the different disciplinary trajectories of postcolonial British and German studies, before concluding with an overview of the structure and content of this book.

Key Concepts An important set of key issues and concepts which are central to our project revolves around the relationship between multiculture, national identities, and the state. Culture and representation have, of course, always played a key role in projects and ideologies of state power. While this has been true irrespective of historical period or state form, the emergence of the modern nation-state entailed a new emphasis on the cultural homogeneity of the state’s population, a homogeneity which was deemed necessary to bind the ‘imagined community’ of the nation together.7 Since the actual cultural realities of the national territory were often much more complex than the doctrine of national unity and homogeneity required (or even admitted), the development of nation-states often entailed a hierarchization of extant cultural forms, with the desired ‘national standard’ at the top and the ‘lower’, less desirable cultural forms subject to marginalization as well as to considerable efforts at ‘adaptation to standard’ (e.g., via education, pressure through discrimination, homogenization programmes or, in the most extreme cases,

Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607–36. 7 See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, rev. ed. 1991; London & New York: Verso, 2006).



Introduction

xv

genocide). A hierarchization of cultures characterized not only such internal state policies but also external policies in the modern state’s approach to other societies and their cultures, whether in chauvinist proclamations of the superiority of one’s own nation over other nation-states (an approach also to be found among neighbouring nations within Europe which, in other contexts, considered themselves to be equally or at least similarly ‘civilized’) or in overseas colonial ventures and ‘civilizing missions’. Claims to cultural superiority were used to legitimize colonial domination over ‘less civilized’ peoples, and thus constituted a key element of the colonizers’ sense of identity. The political, military, and economic successes of the colonial project in turn were enlisted to conform to the doctrine of the colonizers’ national, cultural and/or racial superiority. Colonial education tended to aim at a unilateral transmission of elements of the colonizer’s culture to the colonized in order to effect at least a partial adaptation of the latter to the colonizer’s standards.8 The colonizer’s culture, by contrast, was supposed to remain uninfluenced by the colonized, preserving its integrity and superiority unruffled by the encounter with the Other. Ideals of national cultural homogeneity, and partly also of a hierarchy of cultural merit, continued to inform public debates, even after decolonization and substantial post-World War II immigration required a reconfiguration of certain European national identities. In this context, the issue of hybridity plays a central (and often unsettling or disruptive) role: whereas colonial and traditional nationalist discourses on culture and identity, for obvious reasons, have often projected an image of cultures as essentially static, neatly bounded, mutually exclusive and hierarchized, cultural realities have always been much more complex, with multiplicity, border-crossing, border-permeability, intermixture, and dynamic change being the actual norm rather than an exception. Manifestations and open acknowledgements of this, however, could be a threat to established concepts of ethnic or national identity and unity, to the binary distinction between colonizer and colonized, as well as to the colonizer’s sense of superiority. Anxieties about the challenge of hybridity are also reflected in recent debates about the relationship between immigrant minorities, multicul-

Complete erasure of the differences, however, was rarely desired, because this would have threatened the colonizer’s sense of supremacy. See Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (1984), repr. in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85–92. 8

xvi

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

turalism and the nation-state.9 Thus, we understand multiculture not in the sense of a simultaneous existence of neatly distinguishable (but equally respected) cultures within the same space, but in the sense that cultural boundaries are by necessity blurred as hybridity is an integral part of this set-up.10 Another issue which might require some explanation is our understanding and combined use of the concepts ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ in the present volume. We believe that, in order to understand current debates and problems related to national identity, multiculturalism, and racism, it is helpful to see them in connection with their rootedness in colonial history.11 This is precisely what this volume sets out to do – for instance, by linking contemporary to historical perspectives and multiculturalism to colonialism. The oftcited slogan ‘we are here because you were there’ is only one illustration of the link between colonial history, immigration, and multiculture in Western countries. Moreover, while the age of old-style colonial empires is, of course, over, new forms of imperialism (often with similar discursive paradigms) can be identified in contemporary Western politics. As James Clifford has put it: “There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments, tactics, discourses […]. Post- is always shadowed by neo-.”12 Prominent contemporary 9 On hybridity, see the following works by Homi K. Bhabha: “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817” (1985), repr. in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1986): 173–77, 181; “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 1990): 4, 6; “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 291–322; and The Location of Culture, 37–39, 66–67; as well as Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995): esp. 1–28; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 14. 10 See, for example, Young, Colonial Desire, 5; Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (London, Thousand Oaks C A & New York: Sage, 1996): 56, and Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999): 194–213. 11 This has, for instance, also been pointed out by Barnor Hesse, “Introduction: Un/Settled Multiculturalisms,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 11–13, 16–18, as well as Gilroy, After Empire (for example, 2–4, 52, 158, 162, 164–66), and “Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘War on Terror’,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.4 (2005): 432, 437. 12 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 328.



Introduction

xvii

phenomena which are frequently discussed as examples of such neocolonial tendencies include the global ‘war on terror’ and its various textualizations. Partly the revival of imperial ideologies and policies (e.g., the role of the U K as a junior partner in U S military ventures) can be seen as a direct response to anxieties about the combined loss of empire, geopolitical clout, and ‘national greatness’; about the fluidities and uncertainties of the postcolonial world as well as about the integrity of the nation in times of immigrationinduced multiculturalism, British devolution and the revival of a multicultural, multinational image of white European culture.13 This also justifies postcolonial scholarly approaches to politics, literature, and culture that explore connections between historical and contemporary phenomena. Yet, in spite of various continuities und blurred boundaries between the colonial and the postcolonial, the latter also marks “real, if incomplete, ruptures with past structures of domination, sites of current struggle and imagined futures.”14 Like the complex relationship between the colonial, the postcolonial, and the neocolonial, the present and future predicament of the nation-state is characterized by a complicated system of ruptures and continuities: in addition to the aforementioned challenges posed by mass migration, other recent developments have likewise threatened traditional concepts of the nationstate. Challenges ‘from above’ include globalization in general, as well as trends towards supra-national political organization (e.g., in the E U ). These developments have sometimes led to assumptions that the nation-state is facing disappearance altogether. However, there are also arguments suggesting the persistence or even resurgence of the nation-state. For instance, challenges to existing nation-states ‘from below’ include the survival and revival of hitherto subnational ethnic identities now clamouring for secession and ever more and ever smaller nation-states of their own. Moreover, the nation-state is arguably “being strengthened by the new priority attached to security [… and] has emerged once more as the focus of geopolitical conflicts”15 – albeit accompanied by redefinition.16 These ongoing anxieties and 13 See also, for example, Gilroy, After Empire, 2–3, 21, 25, 52, 66, 103–104, 110, 115, 156–57, & “Multiculture, Double Consciousness,” 432–34, 437.

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 328. Gilroy, After Empire, 65. 16 See, for example, Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou & Richard Zapata–Barrero, “European Challenges to Multicultural Citizenship: Muslims, Secularism and Beyond,” in 14 15

xviii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

controversies about the nation state and its redefinition provide a further rationale for the academic study of the historical and contemporary developments – both social and cultural – that have shaped and changed concepts of national identity in two major European states. Our concept of ‘nervous states’ hints at these issues.17 In addition to the aforementioned forms of nervousness and anxiety which always threaten national identities (e.g., because of the omnipresence of internal heterogeneity), as well as threatening colonizers’ individual and collective identities (e.g., because of the challenge of colonial hybridity), the concept also relates to the ‘nervousness’ of European imperial states in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century. Such nervousness was exacerbated by the rapid development of means of communication and transport (telegraphs, railways, steamships, aviation), intensifying economic and cultural globalization, and the increasing rivalry between extensive but precarious colonial empires that characterized the period around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.18 In this context, the pessimism in the Edwardian empire after the South African War has often been discussed. Likewise, a growing anxiety and nervousness has been identified in the German Empire before World War I.19 More recent instances of ‘nervous statehood’ induced by the challenge of hybridity can be identified in German and British reactions to post-World War II immigration and multiculturalism (see below). We thus hope that this volume will succeed in charting some of the complex and much-debated terrain that links past, present, and future social experiences and textual representations of colonialism, postcolonialism, migration, multiculture, national identity and statehood in Britain and Germany.

Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. Modood, Triandafyllidou & Zapata–Barrero (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 11. 17 The title of this book is inspired by Homi Bhabha’s essay “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 201–17. 18 On the acceleration of globalization, see Chris Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), and Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009): 1010–37. 19 Ronald Hyam, “The British Empire in the Edwardian Era,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brown & William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 50; Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Hanser, 1998): 375–88.



Introduction

xix

Colonial and Postcolonial Histories in Germany and the UK National identities in Europe – which have been so profoundly challenged by increased migration and cultural diversification since the second half of the twentieth century – evolved in close connection with overseas colonialism and colonial empires.20 With the growing discussions on globalization, immigration and multiculturalism, colonialism and empire have recently become hugely popular topics in Europe, not only in historiography and in cultural studies but also in public debate.21 If we now turn to the development of the two nations which provide the focus of this book, we find a highly diverse history. For British history, many scholars – especially Catherine Hall and John M. MacKenzie – have long been working on the topics of national identity and empire/colonialism and have shown how British identity and culture were shaped in conjunction with its colonies and how imperial nationalism helped to create a national consciousness in Britain, especially since the second half of the nineteenth century.22 Edward Said has gone so far as to suggest that the imperial project and British national culture are mutually constitutive.23 But the imperial 20 See, for example, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall & Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006). 21 See the essay by Elizabeth Buettner in this volume. Also see the discussion at the Neale Conference “Race, Nation and Empire: The Writing of Modern British Histories,” University College London, 24–26 April 2008. For a popular revisionist history of the British Empire, see Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 22 See Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the 19th and 20th Century, ed. Catherine Hall (New York: Routledge, 2000); Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. J.M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1986); Antoinette M. Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003); and Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the MidNineteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2005). For a far more critical position, see Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006), which denies any strong influence of imperialism on British culture and identity. 23 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). While there are, of course, important distinctions between discourses of Britishness and constructions of a pan-British national identity, on the one hand, and discourses focusing on one or more of the different nationalities which constitute Britain (e.g., Englishness, Scottishness etc.), on the other, the present volume focuses mainly on Britishness, not least because the complex pattern of different (sometimes concentric, sometimes com-

xx

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

project was connected not only with pride and triumph but also with pessimism, especially since the Edwardian era. At the turn of the century, the South African War (1899–1902) against the Boer republics turned out to be a humiliating and sobering experience for the British and was connected with a new consciousness and nervousness about the alleged decline of national strength.24 Despite its enormous size, the British Empire continued to expand after World War I, as new territories were added through the Versailles Treaty. At the same time, signs of imperial decline and a corresponding national ‘nervousness’ became more apparent, especially with the stirring of independence movements in India.25 The idea of creating a ‘third empire’ with independent states loosely connected under the umbrella of the Commonwealth gained momentum in the 1920s and was then institutionalized (as ‘dominion status’) in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, which affirmed that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Irish Free State possessed the right to self-determination in domestic and foreign policy.26 However, World War II accelerated the decolonization movement, which culminated in the following decades with most of the remaining colonies peting) British nationalities has no real equivalent in the German context and would thus transcend the comparative framework of this volume. Moreover, the study of the different experiences and discursive positionings of the intra-British nationalities with regard to colonialism, postcolonialism, immigration, and multiculture are so complex that they would require a number of separate volumes to do them justice. However, a number of useful discussions of intra-British national differences with regard to colonial and postcolonial identities have already been published elsewhere – for instance, in Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Graham McPhee & Prem Poddar (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007). For a view that stresses divisions between British and English imperial identities, see Krishan Kumar, “Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 575–608. 24 Hyam, “British Empire.” On the South African War, see: Iain R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War 1899–1902 (London: Longman, 1996); Andrew N. Porter, The Origins of the South African War: Joseph Chamberlain and the Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1895–99 (New York: St Martin’s, 1980). The best example of the new consciousness about national decline is the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Cmnd. 2175, Parliamentary Papers, London: HMSO 1904. 25 See, for example, Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1985). 26 D.K. Fieldhouse, “A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, 64–87.



Introduction

xxi

gaining independence, first in India, then in the Middle East, and finally in Africa and the Caribbean.27 In view of Britain’s long imperial history, and the complex and protracted nature of the decolonization process, British national identity was considerably shaken by the loss of empire and became subject to substantial questionings and revisions. Immigration from the colonies and former colonies has shaped British society to a growing extent from the 1950s onwards. Postwar and contemporary British anxieties about national and cultural identity with regard to immigration and multiculturalism have roots in the loss of empire and of British geopolitical clout. Another significant aspect is the fact that post-colonial diasporas have the potential to serve as a reminder of a moral guilt associated with the now discredited colonial history which some members of the white post-imperial mainstream would prefer to forget. There is a failure to come to terms psychologically with the cruelties of empire,28 and considerable difficulty in adjusting to the loss of colonial hierarchies and segregation.29 Germany provides quite a different case: The German colonial empire was, in fact, a very brief enterprise lasting only thirty years; and in European and American historical discourse it was mostly regarded as rather marginal.30 However, as recent research has shown, not only did the colonies become highly important prestige objects in German imperial policy, but colonialism was also intrinsically connected with the racial and national discourses that shaped German society. Furthermore, everyday culture of the 27 The vast literature on decolonization includes: Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization: The Making of the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 1998); D. George Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire 1775–1997 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) & The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982); Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown, 1994); David W. McIntyre, British Decolonization, 1946–1997: When, Why and How Did the British Empire Fall? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 28 See Gilroy, After Empire, 13, 103, 110, & “Multiculture, Double Consciousness,” 433– 34, 437. 29 On the latter, see Hesse, “Introduction: Un/Settled Multiculturalisms,” 5, 11. 30 See, for example, Lewis H. Gann, “Marginal Colonialism: The German Case,” in Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History, ed. L.H. Gann & Arthur J. Knoll (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1987): 1–18.

xxii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Kaiserreich (German Empire, 1871–1918) was strongly shaped by colonial imaginations.31 Germany’s career as a colonial empire ended abruptly in 1918, when it lost its colonies as a consequence of World War I and the Versailles Treaty. This was followed by a strong wave of colonial revisionism during the 1920s, which was closely intertwined with the broad movement against the Versailles Treaty in general.32 An important aspect of colonial discourse in Germany was the occupation of the Rhineland by French troops that consisted partly of black soldiers. The occupation was perceived by most Germans as an extreme dishonour – called the Schwarze Schmach (black disgrace). It was seen as inverted colonialism and added momentum to the movement of colonial revisionism.33 The Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) in particular promoted the recovery of the German overseas colonies; Germany still had a colonial ministry during the 1920s despite the absence of colonies.34 In German politics during the Weimar period, colonialism and the regaining of overseas colonies were certainly not at the centre of attention, as other political and social problems were more pressing.35 However, a powerful ‘colonial desire’ has been identified as an important feature of German culture (at least) until World War

See, for example, Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000), David M. Ciarlo, “Rasse konsumieren: Von der exotischen zur kolonialen Imagination in der Bildreklame des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs,” in Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Birthe Kundrus (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003): 136–79, and Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2001). 32 See Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism 1919–1945 (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1964): 2–11. 33 Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Berne & New York: Peter Lang, 2005). On the concept of Schwarze Schmach, see Iris Wigger, Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007); see also Sandra Mass, Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006): 71–120. 34 Dirk van Laak, Über alles in der Welt: Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005): 109. 35 See, for example, Winfried Speitkamp, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Ditzingen: Philip Reclam jun., 2005). 31



Introduction

xxiii

II.36 When the National Socialists took over in 1933, their attitude towards overseas colonialism remained ambivalent. They had partly supported colonial revisionism during the 1920s, but the regaining of former colonies was soon abandoned in favour of expansion to the east. The question of the degree to which this eastward expansion can be interpreted as colonialism is a focus of intense historical debate.37 Some scholars stress the point that eastern Europe and especially Poland have been the ‘real’ German colonial empire since the Kaiserreich.38 After World War II, German interest in the country’s history of overseas colonialism remained minimal because it had been limited to a comparatively short period, and because Germany did not experience a prolonged phase of decolonization (a fact which was regularly considered one of the few blessings of German history). Immigration to Germany was never a strong movement from former colonies, but happened in the form of labour migration from southern Europe. The lack of experience of a decolonization period and of successful colonial revolts produced a highly peculiar view of the former colonies – as Uta Poiger put it, “Germans developed a particularly sentimental attitude toward former colonial subjects.”39 Despite these differences, both ‘Britishness’ and ‘Germanness’ developed – albeit to different degrees – in a process of differentiation and negotiation

The discussion started with the volume The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox & Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998). For other publications, see Phantasiereiche, ed. Kundrus, and Mass, Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger. 37 For a general analysis of the ambivalent Nazi policy towards colonialism, see Klaus Hildebrandt, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, N S D A P und koloniale Frage 1919–1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969). On National Socialism as colonialism in the east, see: Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998); David Bruce Furber, “Near as Far in the Colonies: The Nazi Occupation of Poland,” International Historical Review 26.3 (2004): 541–79; Dietmut Majer, “Das besetzte Osteuropa als deutsche Kolonie (1939–1944): Die Pläne der NS-Führung zur Beherrschung Osteuropas,” in Gesetzliches Unrecht: Rassistisches Recht im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005): 111–34. 38 See also Philip Ther, “Imperial Instead of National History: Positioning Modern German History on the Map of European Empires,” in Imperial Rule, ed. Alexei Miller & Alfred Rieber (Budapest: Central European U P , 2004): 47–68. 39 Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History & Memory 17 (2005): 124. 36

xxiv

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

in which the national ‘self’ was defined against colonial ‘others’.40 Various indeterminacies and unstable identifications undermined cultural and racial distinctions in both countries; the relationship between colonizers and colonized was always highly precarious and produced unstable imperial identities.41 Also, internal racism played an important role for the development of a national identity in both countries: The dominant identity was challenged not only by the colonized but also by groups within the society of the ‘mother countries’ that were perceived to deviate from accepted norms. These groups were often drawn into a colonial discourse; they were addressed and treated very similarly to the colonized on the periphery.42 British and German national identities were defined in distinction to various ‘others’: first, overseas colonial populations; second, internal ‘others’ within European colonizing societies; and third, other European colonial powers that were rivals for hegemony (while at the same time cooperating as imperial neighbours). Both nations used the example of the ‘other colonizer’ to style and demarcate their colonial identity in a transnational way.43 Taking into consideration these various processes of identity-formation, as well as the insecurities and instabilities within these developments, European states can already be seen as ‘nervous’ nation-states by the end of the nineteenth century. Joachim Radkau has famously interpreted the German Empire as a “nervous state.” While he has done so mainly in the sense of a general medicalization of politics, he has also pointed at the connections between nervousness and imperial policy in Europe before World War I.44 These complex connections between national identity, empire, cultural boundaries, and hybridity also persisted (albeit with various permutations) into the twentieth century and beyond. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 2005). 41 Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper & Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 1–56. 42 See, for example, the discourses on the Poles in Germany, the ‘Celtic fringes’ in Britain, and the ongoing discourse on Sinti and Roma in both countries. See also Eva Bischoff’s contribution to the present volume, which addresses a highly ‘deviant’ group. 43 This aspect of identity-formation is addressed in Ulrike Lindner’s and Michael Pesek’s essays in this volume. 44 Radkau, Zeitalter der Nervosität, 375–88; see also Volker Ullrich, Die nervöse Grossmacht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1997). 40



Introduction

xxv

Scholarly Discussions of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: A Brief Overview Looking at scholarly interest in colonialism and imperialism, we can also observe two divergent national cases. In British scholarship, imperial history – studies on the Empire and on British colonies – has occupied an important place since the nineteenth century.45 Furthermore, enormous public interest in the history of the British Empire has arisen, especially during the last two decades, something that is discussed in detail in Elizabeth Buettner’s chapter in this book. With regard to English studies, interest in the literature and culture of Britain’s former colonies increased markedly from the 1960s onwards, leading to the emergence of a new research field entitled ‘Commonwealth literature’. Subsequently, alternative labels emerged, such as ‘new literatures in English’. At the same time, interest in ‘colonial discourse analysis’ arose, entailing critical re-readings of British texts which directly or indirectly reflected on colonial expansion and imperialism. The emergence of ‘colonial discourse analysis’ signalled an increasing politicization and theorization of modes of reading which also resulted in a shift away from designations like ‘Commonwealth literature’ or ‘new literatures in English’ towards ‘postcolonial studies’. From the 1990s onwards, it was mainly the label ‘postcolonial studies’ that was attached to this increasingly institutionalized and ‘mainstreamed’ cluster of academic interests.46 During the same period, there has been a change of emphasis away from colonizer/colonized or mainstream/ periphery dichotomies and towards an ever-increasing preoccupation with hybridity and transculturalism. Ever since the 1960s, the study of colonial and postcolonial literatures and cultures has also paid considerable attention to constructions of ethnic and national identity, cultural and social hierarchies, and relations between minorities and mainstreams, albeit with shifting focalizations and emphases. In recent years, postcolonial studies has partaken of the generally increased interest in migration, diasporas, trans45 For an overview, see Christopher Bayly, “The Second British Empire,” The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography, ed. Robin Winks (1999): 54–72; also see the discussion in footnotes 20 and 21. 46 On these issues of disciplinary history, see, for example, Frank Schulze–Engler, “Theoretical Approaches: Commonwealth Literature – New Literatures in English – Postcolonial Literature,” in Postcolonial Theory: The Emergence of a Critical Discourse. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004): 3–10.

xxvi

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

nationalism, and globalization, their implications for national identity and the nation-state, and the rootedness of these phenomena in colonial history. In research focusing on the English-speaking world, many issues informing the present volume are thus relatively established, both in literary and cultural studies and in historical inquiry – although comparative, multilingual contextualizations of these anglophone frameworks are still quite rare. In scholarship focusing on Germany, by contrast, colonial history – and its impact on German literature and culture – was for a long time marginalized. However, recent research originating in German studies in the U S A has ‘rediscovered’ colonialism as an important influence on many aspects of German culture and society, both in the Kaiserreich and beyond.47 Sara Lennox’s chapter, which follows our introduction, provides a detailed explanation of these developments with regard to postcolonialism in German studies and German History. In our introduction, we will thus indicate only one issue that has recently gained much attention. In discussions of German colonialism, there has been a close focus on continuities and discontinuities between colonial racial policies, colonial wars, and National Socialism – not surprisingly, given that the Holocaust was “the defining event, the mark par excellence, of race and racially inscribed histories.”48 Especially when the Herero and Nama War in German South-West Africa was brought back into historical discussion through a volume edited by Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller in 200349 and through the anniversary of the war in 2004, the debate about colonial genocide intensified. Since then, Jürgen Zimmerer and Benjamin Madley in particular have supported the thesis of a direct connection between the genocide against the Hereros and the Holocaust, identifying the former as an important forerunner of the latter. This has prompted heated discussion of the term ‘genocide’, of a possible new Sonderweg (special path) in German history, and of the importance of colonial experiences in German history in general.50 Other historians, such as Birthe See Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox & Susanne Zantop’s “Introduction” to their volume The Imperialist Imagination, 1–32. 48 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Europeanization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29.2 (2006): 336. 49 Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, ed. Zeller & Zimmerer (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2003). 50 See: Zimmerer, “Die Geburt des ‘Ostlandes’ aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus: Ein postkolonialer Blick auf die NS-Eroberungs- und Vernichtungspolitik,” Sozial.Geschichte (2004): 10–43, and “Kolonialer Genozid? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer historischen 47



Introduction

xxvii

Kundrus and Pascal Grosse, have doubted such a strong causal link and stressed the difference between colonial rule and colonial wars in Africa and National Socialist rule in Europe.51 This was also supported by a recent article by Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski which denies a strong influence of colonial war and genocide on National Socialism, rather referring to World War I as the most important turning point in the German development towards National Socialism.52 However, even if Madley and Zimmerer’s focus on connections and strong personal ties is not always easy to follow, their thesis has opened up a whole range of valuable discussions on German colonialism as well as on National Socialism. Without doubt, colonialism can serve as a highly useful interpretative framework for many aspects of National Socialism and especially for the occupation in the east. In the present volume, however, we do not wish to contribute to this already somewhat overheated discussion on continuities and discontinuities between colonialism and National Socialism. Rather, we focus on topics and points that have been neglected in the discussion of German colonialism and its cultural repercussions: i.e. comparative and transnational approaches to German colonialism, to colonial and imperial culture, and their impact on and consequences for the twentieth century as a whole.53 Our approach also Kategorie,” in Enteignet – vertrieben – ermordet: Beiträge zur Genozidforschung, ed. Dominik J. Schaller (Zurich: Chronos, 2004): 109–28; Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35.3 (2005): 429–64. 51 Kundrus, “Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen: Überlegungen zur ‘Kolonialisierung’ des Nationalsozialismus,” Werkstatt Geschichte 43 (2006): 45–62, & “Von den Herero zum Holocaust? Einige Bemerkungen zur aktuellen Debatte,” Mittelweg (2005): 82–91; Grosse, “What Does German Colonialism have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 2005): 115–34. In her article on racial policy in German South West Africa and in the Third Reich, Kundrus focuses especially on the different means for establishing a racial order (“Von Windhoek nach Nürnberg? Koloniale ‘Mischehenverbote’ und die nationalsozialistische Rassengesetzgebung,” in Phantasiereiche, ed. Kundrus, 125–26). 52 Gerwarth & Malinowski, “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33 (2007): 439–66. 53 A comparative study of colonialism is particularly taken up in Michael Pesek’s and Ulrike Lindner’s chapters in this volume. For one of the few comparative books on colonialism to have come out in recent years, see Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserungen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Boris Barth & Jürgen Osterhammel (Constance:

xxviii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

ties in with recent developments in British and German research: British historiography has also started to develop broader perspectives on empire – and on cultures of empire in colonial and postcolonial Britain – that compare different parts, phases or aspects within one empire, as well as studying connections between them or between different empires.54 A similar trend can be observed in German historiography, where a comparative, transnational approach to colonial history and its lingering consequences has been equally called for.55 With a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to colonial and postcolonial Germany and Britain, we thus aim to highlight connections between discourses that take place in the two societies, and to contribute to the study of colonialism in a European context. We also aim to analyze recent and contemporary ‘cultures of memory’ that deal with Germany’s and Britain’s colonial history. Whereas colonial history might feature more largely in current British identity-discourses than in German ones, it is nonetheless also possible to conceive of a distinctly German ‘postcolonial mind-set’. Comparisons between and conjunctions with postcolonial perspectives on Britain and its former colonies thus promise useful insights. It should also be added that the emergence of postcolonial literary and cultural studies has played an important part in rekindling the interest of historians in colonial situations, something that had completely lapsed by the 1970s. This earlier central instance of cross-fertilization between our fields of interest illustrates the positive potential for interdisciplinary postcolonial studies which the present volume is designed to develop further.

U V K , 2005). It would be also worthwhile to see if and how colonial experiences and knowledge from other European empires were used by National Socialists. 54 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London & New York: Routledge, 2001); Burton, After the Imperial Turn; David Lambert & Alan Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006); At Home, ed. Hall & Rose. 55 Conrad & Osterhammel, “Einleitung,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational; Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006); Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus, ed. Thoralf Klein & Frank Schumacher (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006).



Introduction

xxix

Postcolonial Society, Multiculture, Immigration and the Nation: The UK and Germany As already suggested, in addition to colonial and postcolonial experiences, another – though partly related – factor that has had a significant impact on national anxieties and on debates about cultural identity in both Britain and Germany is immigration, especially during the period since World War II.56 Besides the ongoing migration from Ireland, Britain in the 1950s and 1960s experienced substantial immigration from colonies and former colonies, especially from the West Indies, but also from India, Pakistan, and Africa. Migrants from the Commonwealth held British passports, thanks to the British Nationality Act of 1948, which confirmed the British citizenship of all Commonwealth subjects. The issue of immigration and its impact on British culture and society have been at the forefront of recurrent heated public debate, and already in the 1950s racial violence occurred in several British cities. With the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, immigration from Commonwealth countries was curtailed.57 Nevertheless, since the late 1960s the debates on the topic have intensified, partly triggered by Enoch Powell’s controversial ‘rivers of blood’ speech of 1968, in which he objected to the anti-discriminatory Race Relations Act and warned his audience of the consequences of ongoing immigration. So, in comparison to 56 See, for example, Karen Schönwälder, Einwanderung und ethnische Pluralität: Politische Entscheidungen und öffentliche Debatten in Grossbritannien und der Bundesrepublik von den 1950er bis zu den 1970er Jahren (Essen: Klartext, 2001). 57 On the politics of British citizenship, see Randall Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act,” Twentieth Century British History 10.1 (1999): 67–95. Comparative perspectives can be found in Christian Joppke, Multiculturalism and Immigration: A Comparison of the United States, Germany, and Britain (Badia Fiesolana: European University Institute, 1995); and (on U K immigration policies in comparison to France) Imke Sturm–Martin, Zuwanderungspolitik in Grossbritannien und Frankreich: Ein historischer Vergleich, 1945–1962 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2001). On multicultural Britain, see also, for example, Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 1984), Schönwälder, Einwanderung, 367–402; Mike & Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 2002), G. Gordon Betts, The Twilight of Britain: Cultural Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Toleration (New Brunswick N J : Transaction, 2001), and Ben Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

xxx

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

other European countries, in Britain racist anti-immigration discourses came to the forefront quite early, with Germany and France following suit in the 1970s and 1980s.58 With the (Commonwealth) Immigration Acts of 1968 and 1971, immigration was further curtailed and the early postwar laissezfaire phase ultimately came to an end.59 As is well known, this change was reflected in cultural production, where a politicization and radicalization can be observed – for example, from V.S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage and Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dread Beat an Blood,60 and in the works of Kamau Brathwaite and other members of the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement. Studies and manifestoes by cultural critics, such as Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis, Hazel Carby’s “White Woman Listen!,” Paul Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, and Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s “Britain’s Gulags,”61 have commented incisively on this period. The heightened visibility of minority groups, and the political pressure they exerted, triggered intense debates about multicultural Britain, with Tony Blair’s Labour government adopting multiculturalism as an official policy in the late 1990s. Such an embrace of multiculturalism could also imply substantial redefinitions of national identity. In cultural criticism, these developments were reflected in, for example, Homi K. Bhabha’s 1997 manifesto “Re-inventing Britain.”62 In politics, the media, and popular culture, there were also conscious efforts to reconceptualize British national identity 58

See Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 1870–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001):

176–77. 59 Immigration did not come to a halt, though. For instance, in 1972 the Ugandan dictator General Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of African Asians who had been encouraged to settle in that country during the days of empire and held British passports. After the expulsion, many of these people fled to Britain. 60 V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (London: André Deutsch, 1962); Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Alan Wingate, 1956); Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, Beat and Blood (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975). On literary history, see also C.L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2002). 61 Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982): 212–35; Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; repr. with new intro. London & New York: Routledge, 2002); Ambalavaner Sivanandan, “Britain’s Gulags,” Race & Class 27.3 (1980): 81–85. 62 Bhabha, “The Manifesto,” Wasafiri 29 (1999): 38.



Introduction

xxxi

into a more inclusive construct capable of accommodating selected aspects of multiracial multiculture. However, many of these efforts to promote a multicultural concept of Britishness have been criticized for being too limited – for instance, focusing on only a few selected factors (such as certain easily commodifiable aspects of Black and Asian youth culture or ‘ethnic food’),63 or including only a highly successful minority segment of the country’s non-white population while little has changed for the rest, as, in fact, British national identity is still highly racialized and is still shaped by the heritage of colonialism and imperialism.64 After all, the embrace of multiculturalism still sits alongside a more openly traditional and homogeneous concept of national identity.65 Some have feared that multiculturalism will marginalize the white mainstream, which allegedly is in danger of becoming the only group in the U K without a visible, strongly celebrated cultural identity.66 There has also been concern that multiculturalism might threaten the maintenance of at least a minimum consensus on social norms (which, in turn, are often envisaged in ‘traditionally British’ terms). Such fears have been reflected in continuing 63 Elizabeth Poole, Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002): 253–54. 64 See, for example, Hesse, “Introduction: Un/Settled Multiculturalisms,” 11–12, Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question,” Un/settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Hesse, 222, Paul Gilroy, new “Introduction: Race is Ordinary” to the Routledge Classics edition of ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’ (London & New York: Routledge, 1992, repr. with this new intro. 2002): xxiii, xxx–xxxi, and Gilroy, After Empire, vii. In fact, it has been suggested that the failure to properly come to terms with immigration, non-white minorities, and the need for a more thoroughgoing adjustment of national identity to these issues may in itself be prompted by white British anxieties based on the loss of the Empire and the U K ’s former position of global hegemony (e.g., Gilroy, “Introduction: Race is Ordinary,” xxxvii). This also ties in with this volume’s project of uniting perspectives on colonial history with discussions of contemporary issues. 65 See also, for example, Arun Kundnani, “The Rise and Fall of British Multiculturalism,” in Resituating Culture, ed. Gavan Titley (Strasbourg: Directorate of Youth and Sport, Council of Europe, 2004): 107. 66 This is suggested by, for example, a report by Greenwich Council in connection with racist violence: the report claims that young white people “seem like cultural ghosts, haunting as mere absences the richly decorated corridors of multicultural society.” Quoted from Nasar Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’: Print Media, Public Intellectuals and Muslims in Britain,” Journalism Studies 7.1 (2006): 48; who in turn quotes from Melanie Phillips, “Death Wish U K ,” Daily Mail (21 February 2004).

xxxii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

calls for the assimilation of immigrants and their descendants, as well as for an oath of allegiance and English-language tests for immigrants. They have also been reflected in the tightening of immigration policy. All this happened simultaneously with the Labour government’s embrace of multiculturalism. These issues have also been influenced by political fears that the transnational affiliations of migrants and their descendants might make it impossible for these people to feel sufficient respect for and undivided national loyalty towards the British state, its laws, and its monopoly on force. Thus, cultural diversity and transnational affiliations are seen to always harbour a danger of unruliness and political unreliability. This perception has increased further since 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings, with increasing fear of terrorist activities.67 Thus, at the time of writing, twelve years after New Labour came to power, little of the optimism – and official support – for multiculturalism survives. Nor have these liberal tenets been translated into popular and widely held positions; nor do politicians or cultural institutions any longer appreciate these principles. Trevor Phillips (former Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality) called for the idea of multiculturalism to be dropped, and Blair’s segue from embracing multiculturalism to denouncing it is symptomatic here. While some critics’ assertions that the government has, in effect, discarded multiculturalism altogether68 may be overly pessimistic, it is certainly true that government discourse has expressed increasing anxiety about the viability of multiculturalism and its commensurability with the integrity of the nation-state. In the U K , multiculturalism is thus, if not officially discarded, at least strongly problematized, and there are attempts at

67 See, for example, Tony Blair, “The Duty to Integrate: Shared British Values” (fifth lecture in an eight-part lecture series on “Our Nation’s Future”), 8 December 2006, transcript on www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page10563.asp (accessed 14 December 2009); Our Shared Future (final report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, advisory body under the U K Secretary of State for Community and Local Government, 14 June 2007), 142 pp, http://collections.europarchive.org/tna/20080726153624/http:/ /www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/~/media/assets/www.integrationandcohesion.org. uk/our_shared_future%20pdf.ashx (accessed 14 December 2009): 28; Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (The Cantle Report, Home Office, December 2001), http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2001/12/11/community cohesionreport.pdf (accessed 14 December 2009): 9, 12, 18–20, 23–24. 68 See, for example, Kundnani, “Rise and Fall,” 105.



Introduction

xxxiii

redefining it in a way which places a stronger emphasis on loyalty to the state and on community cohesion.69 Unlike Britain, Germany never adopted multiculturalism as an official policy. The country, despite its long history of immigration, transmigration, and forced labour migration, has until very recently been an immigration country in denial.70 In post-World War II West German experiences with immigration, people from the country’s former colonies featured not as strongly as was the case in Britain, France or the Netherlands. Instead, Germany experienced, at first (1945–61), the mass migration of millions of refugees from former Eastern territories of the Reich and from the Soviet occupation zone which subsequently became the G D R . Secondly, there was extensive recruitment of labour migrants from 1955 to 197371 – ‘guest workers’ who (as the term suggests) were reduced to their economic function as workers and meant to return to their home countries after several years of work in Germany, an assumption that in many cases proved false. From 1955 to 1960, guest workers were recruited mainly from Italy; later on, the labour pool diversified when bilateral recruitment treaties were signed with Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. Since the early 1970s, Turks have clearly dominated the migrant population of West Germany. At this time, the first Turkish guest-worker characters appeared in German literary productions, in such diverse works as Heinrich Böll’s Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady) and Aras Ören’s Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse (‘What’s Niyazi Doing on Naunyn Street?’).72 These cultural representations mark the beginnings of a shift of public debate away from a mainly economic perspective on (temporary) migration that considered guest workers as ‘others’ who did not belong to German society and whose ethnic and religious differences were only of marginal Arun Kundnani, “The Death of Multiculturalism,” Institute of Race Relations website, 1 April 2002, www.irr.org.uk (accessed 16 December 2009); Blair, “Duty.” 70 See, for example, Mark Terkessidis, Migranten (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt & Rotbuch, 2000). 71 On the history of the recruitment stop, see Karen Schönwälder, “The Difficult Task of Managing Migration: The 1973 Recruitment Stop,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer & Mark Roseman (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P ): 252–67. 72 Heinrich Böll, Group Portrait with Lady, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Gruppenbild mit Dame, 1971; New York: McGraw–Hill, 1973); Aras Ören, Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse: Ein Poem (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973). 69

xxxiv

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

interest.73 At the end of the 1970s, guest workers were re-labelled ausländische Mitbürger (foreign fellow citizens) – a problematic term that seemed to include migrants as citizens, but still maintained the distinction between ‘real’ German citizens and ‘foreign fellow citizens’ who, in fact, hardly ever held German passports. This shift went hand in hand with a new focus on integration, understood in ethno-cultural rather than political or economic terms.74 The greatest problem for successful integration, so the argument went (and still goes today), was the Turkish or, more precisely, the Muslim migrant.75 The anxiety and nervousness regarding the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants was exemplified by the widely circulated news magazine Der Spiegel when, in 1973, it ran a cover story ironically entitled “The Turks Are Coming – Run for Your Lives.”76 Despite the focus on integration since the late 1970s, immigration was not accepted as a social reality: Ausländerpolitik (policy towards foreigners) remained rigid and neglected many urgent problems until the end of the twentieth century. Members of diasporic communities regularly retained their ancestral citizenship, since German ius sanguinis prevented the naturalization even of the children of guest workers. An exception to this rule were the Aussiedler, ethnic Germans from eastern Europe, who were considered German (from a legal perspective) and therefore had access to privileged treatment by the authorities.77 This notion of Germanness as based on bloodline descent, with its foundation in the infamous 1913 Citizenship Law, has come under attack only in recent years. In 1998, the law was significantly revised: ius soli now prevails, making German citizenship available to descendants of migrants. However, dual citizenship – for which the Social Democratic and

The key distinction in the phase of labour recruitment was the difference between migrants from member states of the European Community (e.g., Italy) and those from ‘third countries’. 74 On German Ausländerpolitik in the 1970s and 1980s, see Stephen Castles, “The Guests who Stayed: The Debate on ‘Foreigners Policy’ in the German Federal Republic,” International Migration Review 19.3 (1985): 517–34. 75 In this sense, David Goldberg is correct when he diagnoses a shift of resentment from the figure of the Jew, prominent in political racism before 1945, to the figure of the Muslim in post-war Europe (“Racial Europeanization,” 349). 76 “Die Türken kommen – rette sich wer kann,” Der Spiegel (26 March 1973). 77 Aussiedler: Deutsche Einwanderer aus Osteuropa, ed. Klaus J. Bade & Jochen Oltmer (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1999). 73



Introduction

xxxv

Green government had originally voted – was not implemented and is only granted to citizens of the European Union.78 Nevertheless, the ‘Germanness’ even of the naturalized is still contested, not only by right-wing politicians. Hybrid identities which display a political edge and challenge social inequalities have not yet been fully accepted. However, from the 1990s onwards, many artists have addressed Germany’s everyday hybrid cultures. Distinguishing themselves sharply from the classic Gastarbeiter (guest-worker) image, the works of authors such as Feridun Zaimolu (Kanak Sprak, 1995) and Wladimir Kaminer (Russendisko, 2000), as well as film-makers like Fatih Akın (Kurz und Schmerzlos / Short Sharp Shocked, 1998; Gegen die Wand / Head On, 2004), challenge the notion of a homogeneous and ‘authentic’ German culture.79 German literary and cultural studies have taken up this challenge to traditional notions of culture and have increasingly integrated postcolonial perspectives, as is pointed out in Sara Lennox’s chapter in the present volume.80 In historical research, migration has been considered a comparatively marginal issue and was relegated to the separate field of migration studies

78 On the transformation of citizenship in Germany, see: Brett Klopp, German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship (Westport C T : Praeger, 2002); Simon Green, The Politics of Exclusion: Institutions and Immigration Policy in Contemporary Germany (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2004). For a comparative perspective, see The Integration of Immigrants in European Societies: National Differences and Trends of Convergence, ed. Friedrich Heckmann & Dominique Schnapper (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2003). 79 Feridun Zaimolu, Kanak Sprak 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995); Wladimir Kaminer, Russendisko (Munich: Manhattan, 2000); the films Kurz und Schmerzlos / Short Sharp Shocked (1998) and Gegen die Wand / Head On (2004), both dir. Fatih Akın (both Wüste Filmproduktion; D V D s by Universal 1998 & 2005). See also Sandra Hestermann, “The German-Turkish Diaspora and Multicultural German Identity: Hyphenated and Alternative Discourses of Identity in the Works of Zafer Şenocak and Feridun Zaimoğlu,” in Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, ed. Monika Fludernik (Cross / Cultures 66; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 329–73. 80 Examples can be found in Literaturkritik 10.6 (2008); this issue of the German literary studies journal was specifically dedicated to Postcolonial Studies. On the earlier concept of interkulturelle Germanistik (intercultural German studies), based on the dichotomy of German (self) and migrant (other), see Alois Wierlacher, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte und Systematik interkultureller Germanistik (1984–1994),” Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 20 (1994): 37–56.

xxxvi

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

without much impact on the dominant narratives of West German history.81 Only in recent years have substantial historical studies on postwar immigration appeared,82 though still mainly focusing on the social history of the Gastarbeiter and thus often neglecting the cultural aspects and implications of labour migration on society as a whole. In their thought-provoking analysis of German history, Shattered Past, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer have pointed out that there is indeed a lack of studies that take into account the transformations of German society and culture which have resulted from the presence of migrants83 – transformative presences that mark a central sociocultural difference between western and eastern Germany even today. Certainly a major aspect to be addressed in this context is the internationalization of food-consumption habits, which is not only the result of the increasing globalization of markets as well as the emergence of mass tourism, but is also due to migrant entrepreneurs who have acquainted Germans (and Britons) with ‘foreign’ cuisines. Analyzing the impact of ‘foreign’ foods on the foodways of Britain and Germany offers fresh perspectives on colonial, postcolonial, and migrant belonging as well as on reconfigurations of national and ethnic identities. The intensity with which not only political but also wider public debates about multiculture and integration have been conducted in Germany, Britain, and many other European countries in recent years is partly due to the increased visibility of migrant and diasporic communities and the corresponding prominence of cultural hybridity and multiculture in social and 81

Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge U P ,

2007): 13.

Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001); Karin Hunn, “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück…”: Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005); Monika Mattes, “Gastarbeiterinnen” in der Bundesrepublik: Anwerbepolitik, Migration und Geschlecht in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2005); 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik – 50 Jahre Einwanderung: Nachkriegsgeschichte als Migrationsgeschichte, ed. Jan Motte (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 1999). For a rare example of a British–German comparison, see Schönwälder, Einwanderung; for a long-term and European perspective on migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). 83 Michael Geyer & Konrad R. Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2003): 219. 82



Introduction

xxxvii

cultural life. The feasibility and desirability of multicultural coexistence are at issue here, along with the potential for conflict due to ‘failed integration’, as well as the successes and failures of multiculturalism as a programme of social policy and national identity-politics. These complex debates have intensified even more since 9/11 and the onset of the ‘war on terror’, when several states seem to have become increasingly nervous about the potential risks, threats, and conflicts posed by hybrid cultures and multicultural realities. This nervousness is not only caused by direct material threats to national security posed by terrorist activity, but also by the ideological ‘threat’ which multicultural realities pose to traditional notions of national and cultural homogeneity.84 In Germany, such anxieties are reflected in calls for a national Leitkultur (leading culture) and the rejection of what is considered a Parallelgesellschaft (parallel society) of mainly Muslim migrants who are said to live in Germany without substantial social contacts outside of their own community, following their own laws and thus challenging the country’s democratic system. In the aftermath of 9/11, the concern about the ‘cultural alienness’ of migrants has been re-defined in religious terms, resulting in an increasing ‘islamization’ of the substantial Turkish minority in Germany. Similar processes can be observed elsewhere. As already suggested above, the British government has likewise become sceptical about multiculturalism, with a heightened perception of Muslim extremism and Britain’s role as a major partner of the U S A in the ‘war on terror’.85 Despite this transnational dimension of the engagement with issues of migration and multiculturalism, cultural differences are perceived and articulated in quite distinct ways in Britain, Germany, and other countries respectively. The understanding of cultural differences varies as a result of these countries’ different colonial legacies and national migration regimes. Britain’s and Germany’s approaches to migration have much in common, reflecting the transnational exchange of information on and ideas about policies on

Anderson, Imagined Communities; Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha. On ‘the Muslim question’ in Europe, see Bhikhu Parekh, “Europe, Liberalism and the ‘Muslim Question’,” in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship, ed. Modood et al., 179– 203. A main focus in both German and British discourses on Islam is gender, especially concerning the perceived or real oppression of women, the veil, forced marriage, and honour killings. See also the chapters by Silke Stroh and Markus Schmitz in the present volume. 84 85

xxxviii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

these issues. But despite Europe’s integration process,86 differences with respect to the conceptualization, management, and legislation of cultural difference, ‘race’ and ethnicity – and, consequently, multiculturalisms – still persist.87 Postcolonial migrants coming to the U K were to a great extent (seen as) ‘coloured’, and the issue of ‘race’ was at the forefront of the migration issue from the very beginning. Postwar labour migration to Germany, by contrast, was mainly a (southern) European migration movement. Whereas the guest workers in Germany were also visibly different, the differences between ‘them’ and ‘the Germans’ were formulated more on grounds of culture and, in the context of the Turkish migrants, religion than on grounds of skin colour.88 Although in the immediate postwar years ideas of a ‘black and white’ dichotomy (especially concerning ‘the black G I ’ and ‘the white woman’89) figured prominently in debates on race and also on gender, the ‘black and white’ binary did not govern postwar racist thought in Germany; instead, it was the opposition of Germans and Ausländer (foreigners) that became increasingly important in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. ‘The foreigner’ was (and is), above all, someone coming from the outside, and he or she was defined as fremd, as strange and unfamiliar – with severe consequences for German understanding of national and cultural belonging, for ‘the foreigner’ rendered invisible “the longer historical experience of native racial diversity within the German nation.”90 In a way, this is 86 For a European perspective on current migration movements, see Migration in Europa: Historische Entwicklung, aktuelle Trends und politische Reaktionen, ed. Heinz Fassmann (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 1996). 87 In Germany, the term ‘multiculturalism’ gained common currency only in the late 1980s. On the debates whether Germany was a multicultural society or not, see Chin, Guest Worker Question, 191–248; on the current debates on multiculturalism in Germany (in comparison with Australia) see Polyculturalism and Discourse, ed. Anja Schwarz & Russell West–Pavlov (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007). 88 On the interconnections between ‘race’ and religion in the U K in the 1950s and 1960s, see Imke Sturm–Martin, “ ‘ Race, Colour or Religion’: Der politische Blick auf Minderheitenreligionen in Grossbritannien seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 3.2 (2005), www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Sturm-3-2005 89 See Maria Höhn, G I s and Fräuleins: The German–American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2002). 90 Heide Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2005): 13. See also Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, Heide



Introduction

xxxix

also an outcome of the process in which the category of ‘race’ was extinguished from public discourse in post-fascist Germany, with the peculiar consequence that racism could not be addressed as such, but was – if at all – discussed as Ausländerfeindlichkeit (xenophobia).91 Instead of ‘race’, a variety of replacements have been used and are still circulating in Germany today, such as Abstammung (ancestry), Volk, and Ethnizität (ethnicity). All of these concepts can assume the sense of ‘racial’ in certain contexts; the German popular reception of ethnicity, addressing the question of common ancestry, can have a markedly biological accentuation, and although biological and cultural differentialisms are “racism’s two registers,” as Stuart Hall famously put it,92 it nevertheless makes a difference when, why, and by whom these two registers are referred to. Despite the fact that in Britain, as well, ‘racial’ distinctions have increasingly been re-framed in terms of ethnic and cultural difference, giving birth to a “new racism,”93 the differences in the use and understanding of these categories still remain, complicating translations from British (or American) into German contexts and vice versa. These complications and complexities, however, form a substantial – and in our view highly instructive – part of what is at stake in transnational as well as interdisciplinary studies of colonial and postcolonial multiculture.

Structure and Contents of this Book: An Overview This volume originated in an international conference of the same title which took place at the University of Münster, Germany, from 10 to 12 May 2007. The conference was organized by the academic network “Postcolonial Germany and Britain” (founded in 2005), which aims at investigating different Fehrenbach & Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2009). 91 Likewise, critical race studies constitute a relatively new field of research in Germany. 92 See, for example, Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question,” 223. 93 Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London: Junction, 1980). On the core and the divergences of the concepts of nation, race, and ethnicity, above all in the U S A and the U K , see Steve Fenton, Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). In comparison to Germany, but also to France, in Britain the concept of race was used much more explicitly: public discourse revolved around ‘race relations’ rather than ‘the foreigner problem’. Despite these differences in terminology and policy, ideological outcomes were quite similar, with migrants being perceived as “an ongoing danger to the democratic values of the host country” (Chin, Guest Worker Question, 269).

xl

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

aspects of colonialism and postcolonialism in German and British society and culture from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.94 Most of the chapters in this book have been selected from papers which were presented and discussed at the conference, while other contributions have been especially commissioned. The present general introduction to this collection is followed by a second introductory chapter which gives further details on the disciplinary history of postcolonial German studies, with particular emphasis on literary and cultural studies. Whereas postcolonial and transnational approaches to anglophone societies and their literatures and cultures are by now so well-established that a detailed introduction to the history of that field might be unnecessary to most readers of this volume, postcolonial and transnational German studies are, as outlined above, in a much more marginal position, so that a more detailed introductory survey is necessary to contextualize the internationally comparative postcolonial framework of this book. The introductions to this volume are followed by three interlinked sections which offer selected case studies that are both historically grounded and relevant to more recent and contemporary issues. Each section approaches an overarching topic that is tackled from different disciplinary positions, but through related theoretical approaches. The three sections are: I ) “(Post)Colonial Identifications and Cultures of Memory,” II ) “(Trans)National Consumer Cultures: From ‘Kolonialwaren’ to ‘Ethnic Cuisine’,” and III ) “Multiculturalism Failed? Cultural Difference and the Debates on National Belonging.” Section I probes the historical and contemporary role of colonial experience and its remembrance in the construction of national identities. Section II traces the reflections of colonialism, postcolonialism, and migration in the specific field of consumer culture with its distinct forms of constructing cultural differences. Section I I I centres on (especially recent) debates on multiculture and Leitkultur in various discursive fields, including politics and social movements as well as journalism, literature, film, and theatre. Section I , “(Post)Colonial Identifications, Colonial Traditions and Cultures of Memory,” focuses on a diachronic historical analysis of colonial and postcolonial processes of identification in Britain and Germany, covering the period between the peak of nineteenth-century European imperialist expansion and the early years of the twenty-first century. British and German colo94

For more information on the network, see http://hybrid-cultures.eu/



Introduction

xli

nial and postcolonial national identities – and their entangled histories in various social, political, and geographical spaces, located between colonies and imperial centres – are the focus of this section. The chapters also address colonial memories that became part of national cultures of memory in Germany, Britain, and their former colonies. These cultures of memory are often dominated by romanticizing and/or revisionist discourses, but they have also increasingly been questioned as a result of decolonization, postcolonial nation-building, and migration after World War II, thereby prompting new perspectives on colonial memories and the heritage of colonialism. The first two chapters tackle processes of colonial identification in German and British colonies in Africa before and during World War I, address entanglements between periphery and metropolis, and point to the colonies as hybrid zones. U L R I K E L I N D N E R focuses on the shaping of colonial identities in German South-West Africa and the British Cape Colony during the last two decades preceding World War I. During this time, interactions between the neighbouring colonies intensified and were characterized by mutual support during conflicts, by growing labour migration across borders, and by technologically improved communications between the colonies. In this context, the chapter analyzes how perceptions of each other’s colonial practices as well as exchanges across colonial borders were able to shape the self-definitions of British and German colonizers, both on the periphery and in the metropolis. In the colonial situation, the colonized were certainly the primary means of defining the colonizer, but observations of the other imperial power had a considerable impact on colonizers’ identificationprocesses. The chapter explores such aspects of the transnational formation of colonial identities. M I C H A E L P E S E K follows on with a chapter on East Africa and World War I. He shows that the East African campaign of World War I tightened, on the one hand, the grip of colonial rule over Africans, but saw, on the other hand, a partial erosion of the colonial order. The concentration on the war bound most of the resources of both colonial states. The colonial order was a fragile entity, based on local trade-offs and compromises, and was mainly safeguarded by the ability of the colonial state to demonstrate its power and enforce its will. This ability was weakening during the war, especially in the case of German East Africa. The chapter not only describes the impact of the war on Europe’s colonial order in Eastern Africa but also compares the ways in which this order was defined by the two colonial powers during the war.

xlii

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

The third chapter, by E V A B I S C H O F F , looks at sexual murder and the construction of white masculinity in Britain and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century through a postcolonial perspective, thereby also addressing the issue of internal racism. This chapter traces the processes by which sex killers in Germany and Britain were often cast as cannibals and presents a postcolonial perspective on medical reports and literature, on psychiatric interviews and criminal files. The chapter argues that the cannibal was a central aspect of the explanatory model with which the sexual criminals were interpreted. It reconstructs historical entanglements between metropolis and colony by demonstrating that the construction of hegemonic masculinity relied on racist concepts of sexuality which originated in colonial discourses in anthropological and medical studies. The two remaining chapters of the section explore imperial and colonial discourses within postcolonial cultures of remembrance in post-World War II Britain and Germany. Both contributions focus on public cultures of remembrance as highly contested spaces. J O A C H I M Z E L L E R emphasizes the fact that Germany – with or without formal colonial possessions – has been closely connected to the European colonial project for centuries and that this entanglement continues to have an important impact on Germany’s public culture. His chapter examines Germany’s remembrance culture, concentrating on commemorative culture and symbolic practices and addressing the engagement with colonial monuments in German towns. Further, it analyzes in detail the debates inspired by commemorative initiatives, and investigates how public space is sought out and used as a site for politicized discussions of history. The chapter proposes that postcolonial commemorative culture in Germany can only be understood in the context of a “globalized culture of remembrance.” E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R ’s chapter explores narratives of British imperial history written in the aftermath of empire which academic historians have largely failed to take seriously: namely, those which count as ‘popular history’ and have reached a wide audience in Britain since the 1970s. Often (but by no means exclusively) written by Britons who were once participants in empire themselves, such revisionist renditions of empire foreground positive assessments of Britain’s overseas history and do much to perpetuate a ‘mythology of benevolent imperialism’ within public culture. Colonizing Britons are portrayed as heroic, selfless hard workers on behalf of an empire which was overwhelmingly beneficial for colonized peoples. Such accounts deliberately seek to counter critical portrayals focused on British racism, op-



Introduction

xliii

pression, exploitation, and personal gain. The attempt to ‘set the record straight’ has been highly influential in shaping public understandings of the imperial past within Britain, and scholars urgently need to recognize, and contend with, their ongoing impact. Section II , “(Trans)National Consumer Cultures: From ‘Kolonialwaren’ to ‘Ethnic Cuisine’,” centres on the crucial role of food-consumption practices in the production of cultural identities and differences in modern societies. Food plays an especially important part in processes of identity-formation, since food is not only an existential form of consumption but also implies a very strong concern with the body and the self (owing to the ingestion of a consumer product). Especially when partaking of ‘alien’ food items imported from abroad, the perception and construction of self and other are shaped. Section II therefore focuses on these ‘exotic’ consumer items, investigating their marketing and consumption from a broad historical perspective. The first two chapters deal with Kolonialwaren (the German name for colonial goods that were initially sold in special shops called Kolonialwarenläden). These terms were in use from the late-nineteenth century to the 1960s, when this kind of reference to colonialism was no longer acceptable.95 ‘Ethnic cuisine’, on the other hand, is a term that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and in the U K is often used to refer to non-European foods. Two terms are in use in Germany: exotische Küche (‘exotic cuisine’) refers to nonEuropean dishes, whereas ausländische Küche covers ‘foreign’ food, both from Europe and beyond. “From Kolonialwaren to ‘Ethnic Cuisine’” thus points not only to the long history of foreign foods in Europe but also to distinct national consumer cultures with their own forms of appropriation and naming of consumer products from abroad. Through a comparative analysis of the specific national consumer markets in Britain and Germany, this section examines the complex intercultural transfers of food items and the processes of cultural negotiation involved. Food is certainly one of the most prominent fields when it comes to celebrating multiculture and hybridity, mostly without taking political or social issues into consideration.96 See Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism,” in Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980, ed. Axel Schildt & Detlef Siegfried (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2006): 162. 96 Kien Nghi Ha, Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). 95

xliv

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

The first two chapters, by L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R and C H R I S V O G T – W I L L I A M , investigate coffee and tea as colonial products, focusing on their marketing and acquisition as non-European products in imperial Germany and the British Empire. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, producer countries as well as consumer cultures have changed dramatically; what were once luxury products have become mass consumer goods. Rischbieter examines the relevance and function of coffee consumption in German society around 1900 and discusses the question of who consumed coffee and which class-specific ideas as well as body images were connected with it. Taking into consideration the basic economic and political structures of the coffee trade as well as the national marketing and advertising strategies, she explores the ideas and stereotypes of self and other that were tied to coffee as a colonial product. Vogt–William’s chapter asks how tea has contributed historically to the shaping of British culture since the seventeenth century. She also addresses the commodification and consumption of the beverage, focusing on new domains of desire that gave rise to cultural observances where issues of class and gender played significant roles. The comparative analysis of the symbolism of coffee and tea consumption brings out common aspects with regard to the construction of European stereotypes of the ‘Other’. Moreover, it investigates national characteristics concerning the handling of cultural difference and links them to socio-historical changes in consumption practices. Demonstrating how the colonial practices of marketing altered and new practices of acquisition emerged during the twentieth century, the two remaining contributions to Section II examine the consumption of ethnic food in contemporary Britain and Germany. M A R E N M Ö H R I N G analyzes the invention, function, and re-configurations of döner kebab, the most successful fast food in Germany today. She traces the translocal history of the döner and explores its changing meanings within consumer and popular cultures in Germany, specifically taking into account the spatial politics and the invention of tradition involved. Similarly, P E T E R J A C K S O N focuses on the invention and circulation of an archetypically transnational dish, chicken tikka masala, which in 2001 was proclaimed by the then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as a symbol of New Labour’s commitment to multiculturalism. Examining the material and symbolic geographies of curry, sold through supermarkets as well as at ‘Indian’ restaurants, Jackson traces the trajectories of ‘Indian’ food in the U K , connecting the colonial and postcolonial histories of subcontinental cuisine in London and Mumbai. Both TINE



Introduction

xlv

Möhring and Jackson stress the significance of so-called ethnic food for the debates on multiculturalism and the definition and re-negotiation of national identities. Section III , “Multiculturalism Failed? Cultural Difference and the Debates on National Belonging,” continues this exploration of recent and contemporary developments, focusing on the different ways in which controversies about multiculture, integration, Leitkultur, and the conceptualization of national identities have been negotiated in politics and social movements, as well as in literature, film, theatre, and journalism. Discursive authority, and the struggle over it, are also central issues. The chapters follow the trajectories of two major markers of difference – phenotype (skin colour) and religion. Here, phenotype is mainly addressed through studying the black diaspora, its changing relationships to the white British and German mainstream, and articulations of unbelonging and belonging. These are explored through case studies of black female activism and scholarship in Germany, as well as black British theatre. Religion is addressed through case studies of discourses on islamophobia and Muslim communities – the Turkish diaspora in Germany and South Asian communities in Britain. Special emphasis is placed on Orientalist legacies of colonial discourse traditions in recent debates about gender, ‘parallel societies’, and religious extremism; as well as on attempts to deconstruct such discourses and replace them with alternative, more open and hybrid concepts of identity. M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S ’s chapter surveys key factors, figures, and organizations in the development of the black German community – the way it is conceptualized from the inside and outside as well as its changing relationship to the white mainstream, mainly from the 1980s onwards but also with some reference to earlier periods. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and diaspora-studies approaches, she focuses especially on the black women’s movement, the relationship between social activism and intellectual work, and the importance of alternative knowledge production and epistemic change. The importance of narration is illustrated with reference to poetry, autobiography, scholarship (e.g., historical research), and the media. D E I R D R E O S B O R N E ’s essay explores the changing relationships between blackness, a white European mainstream, and national identity through case studies of contemporary black British drama. Osborne discusses the increasing ‘mainstreaming’ of black British drama, as well as its continuing circumscription by (but also subversive engagement with, and deconstruction of) the mainstream’s stereotyped expectations of blackness – e.g., with

xlvi

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

regard to urban vs. rural spaces, gender, cross-‘race’ relationships, crime, and sports. Further, she explores the conflicting demands of artistic individualism, on the one hand, and group representation, on the other. Both chapters also point to connections and influences beyond the U K and Germany – for example, with respect to America, Africa, and New Zealand. The chapters by S I L K E S T R O H and M A R K U S S C H M I T Z explore discourses on Muslims, ‘parallel societies’, hybridity, gender, and veiling. Stroh focuses on the representation of Asian British Muslims in Kenneth Glenaan’s feature film Yasmin (2004), as well as the film’s relationship to broader social debates (e.g., in politics and the media). Other central issues include ‘failed integration’, terror, crime, and the function of the female body as a cultural and discursive battleground. Analyzing Glenaan’s attempts at deconstructing binarisms and stereotypes, the chapter also discusses the limitations of his approach and surveys the film’s reception in both the U K and Germany. In addition to the aspects listed above, Schmitz explores the relation between the Muslim diasporic presence in Germany and a crisis in the mainstream’s image of national self-hood and otherness; state policies of assimilation and integration; constructions of space (e.g., urban spaces of colonial cities and today’s multicultural Berlin); the visibility or invisibility of otherness; the media and popular culture; agency and social activism by members of diasporic minorities; and hybrid self-representations by figures such as the Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimolu. This collection opens up a spectrum of materials and investigative approaches which will help to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue in the fields of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, the history of colonialism and globalization, and comparative studies in literature and historiography.



From Postcolonial to Transnational Approaches in German Studies S ARA L ENNOX

I

N A P R I L 2 0 0 5 , critical Latin American scholars hosted a conference entitled “Mapping the Decolonial Turn: Post/Trans-Continental Interventions in Philosophy, Theory, and Critique” at the University of California, Berkeley. These scholars, who include such well-known figures as Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano, and Arturo Escobar, and who are loosely organized together in a project called “Modernidad/ Colonialidad/Descolonialidad,” collectively argue that European modernity has been legitimated and fuelled not just by increasingly globalized capitalism but also by what they term the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano), the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, to justify white Europeans’ domination over other global populations. The “decolonial turn” of the conference title refers to these scholars’ efforts to promote an epistemic shift by dismantling the eurocentric assumptions that underwrite the coloniality of power and elaborating their own “decolonial critique” that derives from and speaks on behalf of subalternized and silenced knowledges. To my knowledge, no one apart from this group of Latin American scholars has adopted the descriptor “decolonial turn” to characterize the paradigm shift to which their own scholarship contributes, yet it appears to me that many scholars in many fields are similarly engaged in decolonial critique and that their work likewise draws inspiration and sustenance from subordinated voices in the global South and North. For various obvious and not so obvious historical reasons, the disciplines that make up German studies have not in the past distinguished themselves by their attention to submerged knowledges and voices. However, I want to argue here that German studies

xlviii

S A R A L E N N O X 

today is also undertaking its own decolonial turn, in the passage from postcolonial to transnational approaches elaborating increasingly incisive challenges to the eurocentric assumptions on which the study of German history and culture had hitherto been premissed. To be sure, as so often in German history, the developments I want to trace here are belated. In a 2001 review article on postcolonial approaches in German historiography, Sebastian Conrad, the German historian most responsible for introducing transnational and postcolonial approaches to Germany, observed: “While [the postcolonial studies] approach is established in England and France, with few exceptions it scarcely exists in research on Germany, even less so in research undertaken on the German research terrain.”1 In an article published early in 2002, Conrad similarly remarked: “German historiography has scarcely been touched by the globalization wave. The interpretation of the German past stops, as a rule, at the German borders. The hegemony of this germanocentric paradigm probably just intensified after 1989.”2 However, as I want to show in this chapter, within German studies in Germany and elsewhere, that research terrain has undergone remarkable transformations in the years that have passed since Conrad made those comments, in part as a consequence of his own efforts. Here I want to trace the steps by which a postcolonial approach first emerged in U S German studies and was then adopted by German historians and Germanists in Germany itself. I will then show how, under the influence of postcolonial studies and the emergence of transnational approaches within other national histories, transnational history has become what the U S historian of Germany Michael Geyer calls “the new consensus”3 in German history. I 1 “Während sich in England oder Frankreich dieser Ansatz inzwischen etabliert hat, bleibt er in der auf Deutschland bezogenen Forschung, und erst recht in der deutschen Forschungslandschaft, bislang auf wenige Ausnahmen beschränkt.” Sebastian Conrad, “Schlägt das Empire zurück? Postkoloniale Ansätze in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung,” WerkstattGeschichte 30 (2001): 82. 2 “Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung ist von der Globalisierungswelle kaum erfasst worden. Die Interpretation der deutschen Vergangenheit macht in der Regel nach wie vor an den nationalen Grenzzäunen halt. Die Hegemonie dieses germanozentrischen Paradigmas dürfte sich nach 1989 sogar eher noch verstärkt haben.” Sebastian Conrad, “Doppelte Maginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 145. 3 Michael Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in Theory and Practice,” German Studies Association Newsletter 31.2 (2006): 29.



From Postcolonial to Transnational

xlix

conclude by exploring why transnational approaches have made almost no impact on German literary and cultural studies, despite the importance of postcolonial studies, and speculate on how German cultural studies might be transformed to accommodate transnationalism. Let me preface my analysis, however, with a few disclaimers and caveats. As is widely known, there is no consensus at all on what the term ‘postcolonial’ means, and transnational approaches are so new that appropriate methods for them are still being elaborated. Neither postcolonial nor transnational approaches are necessarily decolonial, though whether they are or not also depends on what ‘decolonial’ means. It’s likely, though that remains to be explored, that the interdisciplinary field of German studies has appropriated these terms differently than other area-studies groups, and within German studies at least two quite different academic disciplines, history and literary and cultural studies, which communicate badly if at all with each other, have contributed to the elaboration of these approaches. Finally, this topic seems itself to cry out for a transnational analysis, but, though it is quite clear that the new approaches did not originate ab ovo in Germany, it is not yet possible to ascertain clearly the precise routes by which influences from without were able to act upon scholars of German studies to convince them that postcolonial and transnational categories could also illuminate the study of Germany. German studies scholars, of course, readily acknowledge that the impulses informing postcolonial analyses of German colonialism and its legacy derive from anglophone writers and theorists: Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, a 2002 collection edited by Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, intended to introduce German scholars to the new methods, contains ten essays previously published in English and only one original essay in German, and the editors remark of the essays: “They could also contribute to a reception of these discussions in Germany, which to date has hardly taken place except in literary scholarship.”4 To be sure, these approaches also had antecedents in German scholarship. In an essay on “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Ger“Sie könnten zu einer Rezeption dieser Diskussionen auch in Deutschland beitragen, die bislang ausserhalb der Literaturwissenschaft […] noch kaum stattgefunden hat.” Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichtsund Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 10. 4

l

S A R A L E N N O X 

many,” the historian Uta Poiger notes: “Numerous soon-to-be prominent historians addressed colonialism and imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s,”5 and another, very scholarly, upsurge of interest in Germany’s colonial history occurred in 1984–85, the centenary of Germany’s acquisition of colonies. These anti-imperialist studies were doubtless motivated by the international anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, most centrally provoked by the anti-Vietnam War movement but likely also inspired at least in indirect ways by national liberation movements and the U S civil-rights movement. However, Poiger also observes correctly: “It is striking from today’s perspective that these histories of German colonialism rarely talked about race and that they were largely histories of colonialism without the colonized.”6 Hence, these studies could not be termed ‘decolonial’ in Quijano’s sense of the word. By contrast, more recent scholarship on colonialism, Poiger maintains, has made race central to examining links between colonialism and German society, influenced, she argues, “by the rise of racist violence in Germany since the 1980s, greater attention to the Third Reich as a racial state, and the rise of postcolonial scholarship in the academy.”7 Poiger’s arguments about these influences are certainly correct, but I would also argue that the interest of U S feminist Germanists (and other ‘others’ outside the U S German studies mainstream – Jews, U S -Americans of colour, gays) in race and ethnicity was also motivated by debates within American feminism, as U S women of colour challenged white feminists to renounce their essentializing claims about all women and acknowledge actual women’s heterogeneity. (Sabine Broeck also made an intervention to this effect at the 1983 and subsequent conferences of Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft (Women in Literary Studies) that, so far as I can tell, was ignored by German feminists, at least for the better part of the next decade.8) Feminist Germanists located in the U S A (though possibly German in national origin) thus took the lead in making multicultural issues a central focus of U S German studies, Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History and Memory 17.1 (2005): 119. 6 Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” 120. 7 “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” 120. 8 See Sabine Bröck & Anna Koenen, “Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Any More: Toni Morrison als Repräsentantin afroamerikanischer Erzählerinnen,” in Frauen Literatur Politik, ed. Annegret Pelz, Marianne Schuller, Inge Stephan, Sigrid Weigel & Kerstin Wilhelms (Hamburg: Argument, 1988): 180–88. 5



From Postcolonial to Transnational

li

in the forefront of efforts to interrogate German constructions of otherness, to challenge Germans’ conception of themselves as inhabitants of a monocultural country, and to make the literary and cultural productions of ethnic minorities in Germany a visible presence within German Studies.9

By the 1994 German Studies Association conference, Frank Trommler was able to maintain that “multiculturalism now marks the American–German Studies moral frontier.”10 In Quijano’s sense, such efforts are decolonial, in that they enable the emergence of hitherto suppressed voices, but in my observation the new emphases were scarcely transnational at all, even in the case of migrant writers mostly investigating their contributions to German culture and literature rather than exploring what they might have brought to Germany from elsewhere. In my view, the same group of U S Germanists was responsible for introducing postcolonial approaches to German studies in the late 1990s for many of the same reasons. Although the Amherst Colloquium volume “Neue Welt” (1994), edited by Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan L. Cocalis,11 was motivated less by postcolonial studies and more by widely publicized indigenous outrage about celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the emphases of the volume bear witness to these particularly American concerns; I was bemused to discover that, in the same year that Americans were decrying Spanish colonialism, Spain was featured as the country of emphasis at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The late Susanne Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies, published in 1997,12 was the first book-length study to train a postcolonial lens on German cultural production when she argued that, despite Germany’s late formal acquisition of colonies, powerful fantasies about Germans’ particular talent for colonization informed German self-understanding from the seventeenth century to the colonial period. A year later, in 1998, Zantop, Sara Friedrichsmeyer and I published the edited

9 Sara Lennox, “Feminisms in Transit: American Feminist Germanists Construct a Multicultural Germany,” in Multiculturalism in Transit: A German-American Exchange, ed. Klaus J. Milich & Jeffrey M. Peck (New York: Berghahn, 1998): 88. 10 Lennox, “Feminisms in Transit,” 91. 11 “Neue Welt” – “Dritte Welt”: Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik (Tübingen: Francke, 1994). 12 Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1997).

lii

S A R A L E N N O X 

volume The Imperialist Imagination,13 intended to show (though we could not then have used that terminology) that the ‘coloniality of power’ was also foundational for German culture from the colonial era to the present. The response of historians to that volume was interesting and revealing. Although some, I think not incorrectly, complained that the essays of the volume were “little burdened by deeper knowledge of the hands-on realities of colonial domination,”14 they also noted that “these studies, primarily indebted to literary criticism, offer a wealth of new impulses about the construction and representation of difference, race, and gender.”15 Regarding both volumes, Sebastian Conrad raised the vexed question of the “relationships between literary production and a colonial dispositif,”16 and the issue of what precisely an examination of rather canonical literary texts using methods of literary analysis authorizes scholars to conclude about colonial attitudes in the larger German population remains unanswered – in fact, scarcely even posed in the field of literary studies. Conrad unkindly but correctly observes that the editors of The Imperialist Imagination represent themselves as the “proclaimers of a new message of salvation. The need for German historiography to catch up in the matter of postcolonialism is simply announced rather than argued and American scholars are accorded a pioneering role, practically a cultural mission.”17 Conrad’s comments are directed at a section of the introduction that I wrote, and I can only say – well, yes. Because a particular political and moral agenda often informed U S feminist Germanists’ appropriation of postcolonial approaches, we responded with 13

The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan

P , 1998). 14 “Oft wenig belastet von tieferen Kenntnissen der handgreiflichen Realitäten kolonialer Herrschaft”; Andreas Eckert & Albert Wirz, “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch: Deutschland und der Kolonialismus,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 376. 15 “Bieten diese vornehmlich dem literary criticism verpflichteten Studien dennoch eine Fülle neuer Anregungen etwa zum Konstruktions- und Inszenierungscharakter von Differenz, Rasse und ‘Geschlecht’,” Eckert & Wirz, “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch,” 377. 16 “Die Verbindungen zwischen literarischer Produktion und einem kolonialen Dispositiv”; Conrad, “Schlägt das Empire zurück?” 79. 17 “Eher wie Verkünderinnen einer neuen Heilslehre [....]. Der Nachholbedarf der deutschen Historiographie in Sachen Postkolonialismus wird hier schlicht konstatiert anstatt begründet und den amerikanischen Wissenschaftlern wird eine ‘Vorreiterrolle’, eine regelrechte Kulturmission, zugesprochen”; Conrad, “Schlägt das Empire zurück?” 76–77.



From Postcolonial to Transnational

liii

some indignation to other U S -based postcolonial studies that came to contrary conclusions. Paul Michael Lützeler published two volumes in Germany18 that define the “postcolonial gaze” as “a post-Marxist, post-modern, skeptical approach to ‘otherness’,”19 thus can designate Peter Schneider, Martin Walser, and Günter Grass, among others, as postcolonial writers. In Enlightenment or Empire,20 Russell Berman sets out to rescue the German Enlightenment from accusations of complicity in colonialism, concluding that also in this regard Germany pursued a Sonderweg (special path) characterized by a ‘particular openness’ towards foreign cultures (Conrad inquires sarcastically: “Might the author be thinking of the treatment of the Herero here?”21). Berman’s exculpatory posture is enabled by a selective reading of precolonial texts by thinkers like Herder and Forster and seems not relevant to actual German colonial attitudes and practices. In the mid-1990s, as the above books were being conceived, the interest in matters colonial and postcolonial reached something of a fever pitch among U S Germanists: at the 1994 M L A convention, the three sessions of the M L A division on nineteenth- and early-twentieth century German literature addressed colonialism, and, at the 1995 convention, the three nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century divisional sessions focused on colonial fantasies, while one twentieth-century forum and a special session considered postcolonial perspectives.22 By the turn of the century, the initial enthusiasm had abated somewhat. As early as 1997 Nina Berman had published Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne, documenting the extensiveness of German and Austrian allegiance to Orientalist constructions that Edward Said’s own book had downplayed;23 in 2004 she pursued Germany’s investments in Africa up to the present day in Impossible Missions?, and Todd Kontje was able to trace German Orientalist appropriations from the Middle Ages to the 18 Der postkoloniale Blick (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), and Schriftsteller und ‘Dritte Welt’: Studien zum postkolonialen Blick (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998). 19 Rex Clark & Oliver Lubrich, “German Studies Go Postcolonial,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (2002): 629. 20 Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1998). 21 “Ob der Autor hier die Behandlung der Herero im Sinn hatte?”; Conrad, “Schlägt das Empire zurück?” 76. 22 Lennox, “Feminisms in Transit,” 91. 23 Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997): 17.

liv

S A R A L E N N O X 

multicultural present.24 After completing a dissertation on “White Women and the Dark Continent: Gender and Sexuality in German Colonial Discourse from the Sentimental Novel to the Fascist Film” as early as 1994, in 1999 Marcia Klotz edited a special issue of the European Studies Journal on “German Colonialism: Another Sonderweg?” and in 2005 co-edited Germany’s Colonial Pasts together with the Germanist Eric Ames and the historian Lora Wildenthal, an interdisciplinary volume based on a Dartmouth conference dedicated to the memory of Susanne Zantop that included contributions by anthropologists, historians, and African as well as U S and German Germanists. Although no enormous breakthroughs in German colonial and postcolonial studies have taken place in German literary and cultural studies since the turn of the millennium, this focus has now become an accepted area of concentration, and two to three dissertations on some aspect of the topic now regularly appear every year. Since the publication of Conrad’s 2002 observations, historical research on the German colonies and related topics has, by contrast, expanded dramatically and shows no sign of subsiding. The single original contribution to Jenseits des Eurozentrismus, written by two German historians of Africa, Andreas Eckert and Albert Wirz, advanced the thesis “that Germany with and without colonies was bound to the common Euro-American project and that the effects of the colonial experience influenced culture and society long after 1918.”25 Although in 2002 they could maintain that, apart from Marxist and dependency-theory-oriented research, “the history of imperialism and colonialism in German-language historiography leads a wallflower existence,”26 those circumstances have changed strikingly. Among the Marxists is the G D R historian Horst Drechsler, whose 1966 volume Südwestafrika

Berman, Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 2004); Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2004). 25 “Dass Deutschland mit und ohne Kolonien eng mit [dem gemeinsamen euroamerikanischen] Projekt verbunden war und dass die Auswirkungen der kolonialen Erfahrung weit über 1918 hinaus Kultur und Gesellschaft beeinflussten”; Eckert & Wirz, “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch,” 374. 24

“Die Geschichte von Imperialismus und Kolonialismus fristete in der deutschsprachigen Historiographie [. . . ] ein Mauerblümchendasein”; Eckert & Wirz, “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch,” 374. 26



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lv

unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft27 is still highly regarded by historians of German colonialism, his accomplishments all the greater because he was unable to access many colonial archives. Two still-reliable surveys apparently count among the “wallflowers,” Woodruff Smith’s The German Colonial Empire28 and Horst Gründer’s Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien,29 frequently revised and reissued, along with Helmut Bley’s Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1894–1914.30 Drechsler, who continued to teach at Rostock after German unification, published a second volume of his study, focusing on German mining companies in Namibia, in 1996, thirty years after the first volume appeared. Gründer has continued to publish popular texts on colonialism, including an invaluable volume of selections from colonial documents available in an inexpensive edition,31 the “richly illustrated” Geschichte der europäischen Expansion that is part of the Theiss series “Illustrierte Weltgeschichte,”32 and (together with Gisela Graichen, a television author who, as the book jacket has it, is “often a trendsetter for grand themes from the past and present”33) the volume Deutsche Kolonien: Traum und Trauma accompanying a prime-time television series – which has been accused of German colonialist revisionism in its effort to “reintegrate colonialism as a positively valued epoch of German national history.”34 At the very least,

Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (1884–1915) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966). Tr. Bernd Zöllner as Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (London: Zed, 1980). 28 The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1978) . 29 Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1985). 30 Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1894–1914 (Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968). Tr. Hugh Ridley as South-West Africa under German Rule (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1971); repr. as Namibia under German Rule (Hamburg: L I T , 1996). 31 “. . . da und dort ein junges Deutschland gründen” (Munich: dtv, 1999). 32 “Reich bebildert”: Horst Gründer, Eine Geschichte der europäischen Expansion: Von Entdeckern und Eroberern zum Kolonialismus (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 2003), back cover. 33 “Schon mehrfach Trendsetterin für grosse Themen aus Geschichte und Gegenwart”; Graichen & Gründer, Deutsche Kolonien: Traum und Trauma (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005), dust jacket. 34 “Diesen [den Kolonialismus] als positive Epoche in die deutsche Nationalgeschichte zurückzuholen”; Jürgen Zimmerer, “Menschenfresser und barbusige Mädchen: Eine Z D F -Serie und ein Buch verkitschen und verharmlosen den deutschen Kolonialismus,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 November 2005. 27

lvi

S A R A L E N N O X 

these publications provide solid evidence that German colonialism is now so reliably popular a theme among the German public that German publishers can make money selling books about it. Already in 2002, Conrad also counted among the significant more recent colonial historians Jürgen Osterhammel, author of a terse but sweeping theoretical overview of European colonialism, and Pascal Grosse, author of an altogether splendid study that masterfully documents the relationship of colonial and domestic policy, eugenics and racial science, anthropology and the ‘native question’, revealing the importance of these issues from before the colonial period until into the Nazi period.35 In accordance with my hypothesis that the decolonial turn is motivated by factors external to mainstream Germany, it is relevant that Pascal Grosse is an Afro-German with doctorates in both medicine and history, while Jürgen Osterhammel began his scholarly career as a historian of Asia – as did Sebastian Conrad. What has more recently motivated scholarly and popular attention to German colonialism was the 2004 centenary of the Germans’ genocidal campaign against the Herero people in Namibia. As the sociologist Reinhart Kössler has detailed, the many activities organized around the remembrance of that event may spell the beginning of an awakening from colonial amnesia. To commemorate that German–Herero War, the U S -educated German-Namibian Wolfram Hartmann organized a conference in Windhoek that provided a good marker for the state of German and German-Namibian scholarship in 2004 vis-à-vis the decolonial turn. Given the difficult-todecipher title “1904–2004 – Decontaminating the Namibian Past,” the conference, attended by many luminaries of colonial scholarship, took place in August 2004, a week after the German Minister for Cooperation and Development Heide Wieczorek–Zeul, speaking during a ceremony held on the site of the critical 1904 battle, issued an apology for German colonial crimes in Namibia. Whereas, in a 1995 debate on H-German, very respected German historians were not prepared to acknowledge that German crimes against Namibians could be termed genocidal,36 by 2004 both Wieczorek–Zeul, who declared: “The atrocities committed at the time would today be termed Osterhammel, Kolonialismus: Geschichte – Formen – Folgen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995); Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 1850–1918 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000). 36 Dan Rogers, “Genocide in Germany’s African Colonies,” on-line posting, [email protected] (18 September 1995). 35



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lvii

genocide,”37 and all scholars present at the Windhoek conference unanimously agreed that, according to internationally accepted definitions, the exterminatory policies of the German army towards the Herero people must be classified as genocide. (What, of course, remains entirely unresolved, and very contested, is the obligations on the part of the present German government that this admission entails.) On the other hand, black Namibians attending the conference complained that scholars had been assembled from Europe and the U S A to examine the circumstances of the colonizers, but colonized Africans then or now received much less attention, and apparently little effort had been invested to bring the young generation of Namibian scholars to the conference. In November 2004, scholars from Bremen, Windhoek’s sister city in Germany, brought German politicians, Herero leaders, and scholars of colonialism together to discuss current German– Herero relations. The Herero refused to be placated with anything less than reparations for German colonial crimes, and the conference ended without resolution. However, in connection with the 2004 centenary other scholars of colonialism, particularly from the middle and younger generation, continued to push German thinking about colonialism in a decolonial direction by drawing attention to Germany’s complicity in colonial crimes. In 1999, Gesine Krüger had already published a dissertation that explored African as well as German responses to the colonial wars in Namibia.38 In 2003, Jürgen Zimmerer, a German historian who, after a post-doc in Portugal, now teaches at the University of Sheffield, and Joachim Zeller (a German-Namibian and contributor to the present volume) published an edited collection called Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,39 a third of the book representing the African perspective and a third devoted to current German–Namibian relations; in 2004 the sociology student Janntje Böhlke–Itzen published her M.A.-level thesis on the Herero massacre;40 in 2005, the political scientist Andrew Meldrum, “German Minister Says Sorry for Genocide in Namibia,” Guardian (16 August 2004), www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/aug/16/germany.andrewmeldrum 38 Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (doctoral dissertation, Hanover University, 1995; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). 39 Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2003). 40 Janntje Böhlke–Itzen, Kolonialschuld und Entschädigung: Der deutsche Völkermord an den Hereros (1904–1907) (Diplomarbeit, Hamburger Universität für Wirtschaft und Politik; 37

lviii

S A R A L E N N O X 

Henning Melber, whose parents emigrated to Namibia in 1967, who himself joined the S W A P O resistance movement in 1974, and who now directs a research centre on Africa in Sweden, edited a volume on German–Namibian relations and the shadow of genocide, after his edited collection (2003) addressing the need for greater attention to Namibia itself.41 No doubt the new publication Journal of Namibian Studies, edited by Hartmann and Andreas Eckl, will further contribute to knowledge of the Namibian present and past on the part of Germans and others alike. In their 2002 appeals, Conrad, Eckert, and Wirz had also called upon scholars to acknowledge that colonialism had not been a one-way street, that the colonies had transformed the homeland as much as colonizers transformed the lands they subjugated. As these German authors readily acknowledge, in calling for such transformed scholarly perspectives they were building on the path-breaking collection Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, whose editors Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler argued in the volume’s introduction: “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself.”42 Another important strand of research on German colonialism has pursued this project, investigating the mark German colonialism left on Germany then and up to the present day. In two important volumes, an edited collection and a postdoctoral thesis,43 Birthe Kundrus investigated the political and cultural needs that the colonies satisfied for imperial Germans at home and abroad. Joachim Zeller and the German historian and political scientist of Africa Ulrich van der Heyden have produced two fascinating collections exploring colonialism’s traces in the city of Berlin.44 At two conferences whose papers were subsequently published, “AfrikanerInnen in Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2004). 41 Genozid und Gedenken: Namibisch–deutsche Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2005); Namibia: Grenzen nachkolonialer Emanzipation (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2003). 42 Cooper & Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper & Stoler (Berkeley C A : U of California P , 1997): 1. 43 Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003); Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Habilitationsschrift; Cologne: Böhlau, 2003). 44 Kolonialmetropole Berlin (Berlin: Quintessenz, 2002); “. . . Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft”: Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus (Münster: Unrast, 2005).



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lix

Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche” and “Die (koloniale) Begegnung,” Marianne Bechhaus–Gerst and Reinhard Klein–Arendt have also investigated encounters between the colonizers and the colonized in the colonies and in Germany.45 The change in attitude among Germans towards the relationship between colonial crimes and the Holocaust, arguably the most important event in recent German history, is also striking: while the 1995 HGerman debate dismissed the possibility of connections between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust, Pascal Grosse made a convincing case for that relationship in his contribution to Germany’s Colonial Pasts,46 and Zimmerer’s book Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz dealt with the connection in searching detail.47 Finally, there is strong evidence that new attention to colonial crimes is not limited merely to scholarly arenas but also impacts upon a much broader popular audience. The 2004 Cologne exhibition “Namibia: Eine geteilte Geschichte,” later displayed in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, accessibly displayed the German and the Namibian people’s common histories. When the Augsburg Zoo planned to feature an exotic African village in June 2005, national and international outrage at the event’s close resemblance to a colonial Völkerschau (exhibition of ‘exotic peoples’) was immediate, and the controversy was widely covered in the national and international media. As well, grassroots groups around Germany have taken on the task of sensitizing the German populace to local memorials to colonial history, posting their observations on such websites as deutschland-postkolonial .com, freiburg-postkolonial.de, hamburg-postkolonial.de and africavenir .com. As Kössler proposes, though, Germany has no ‘postcolonial’ populations, in the strict sense of that term, that could continually remind mainstream Germans of their colonial past; “these groups act as a modest substitute for such presence, while also addressing the form of alterity that is

AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Bechhaus–Gerst & Klein–Arendt (Münster: L I T , 2004); Die (koloniale) Begegnung: AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland (1880–1945) – Deutsche in Afrika (1880–1945), ed. Bechhaus–Gerst & Klein– Arendt (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003). 46 “What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Ames, 115–34. 47 Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: L I T , 2007). 45

lx

S A R A L E N N O X 

very much present in Germany, mainly as a consequence of large-scale migration during the last third of the twentieth century.”48 The field of German history within Germany is apparently more transnational, or at least more harmoniously in accord with its sister field in the U S A , than is the case with German studies in the U S A and Germanistik in Germany, and scholars located in the U S A have also made important contributions to the burgeoning studies of German colonialism. Lora Wildenthal’s fascinating German Women for Empire49 illuminates the role played by German women in the colonial process, showing that racial borders in the colonies hardened when German women arrived to police them and to insist that racial purity trumped German men’s earlier patriarchal prerogative to enter into sexual liaisons with indigenous women. Both Andrew Zimmerman and H. Glenn Penny have shown how the discipline of anthropology in imperial Germany developed ostensibly scientific justifications for the legitimacy and importance of the German colonial cause.50 Possibly most importantly, Isabel V. Hull’s Absolute Destruction has made a major intervention in the history of the German nation by arguing that the German army fared so poorly in World War I because they were accustomed to the easy victories the colonial wars had allowed them to achieve and because they had determined that only the absolute destruction of the enemy could preserve the nation’s security.51 Many of the German colonial historians mentioned above presented papers at the 2006 conference of the German Studies Association in Pittsburgh. It is possible that at this moment German historians of colonialism may also be more welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship. In September 2006, Jürgen Zimmerer hosted an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Sheffield titled “War, Genocide and Memory: German Colonialism and National Identity,” sponsored by both the History and the Germanic Studies Departments at that university. Again, few participants Reinhart Kössler, “Awakened from Colonial Amnesia? Germany after 2004,” www .freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/koessler-colonial-amnesia.htm 49 German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2002). 50 Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001); H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2002); Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. H. Glenn Penny & Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2003). 51 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2006). 48



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxi

from the former colonial areas were present, because they lack funding for international travel, and a Herero activist asked that a statement be read asserting that “a specifically academic conference with no representation from the affected groups […] entailed just another instance of colonization and exclusion.”52 Despite the presence of a number of historians and scholars from literary and cultural studies as well as papers on colonial literature and colonial history, Volker Langbehn “expressed some discontent between the literary scholars and the historians, pointing above all to the lesser degree of theoretical engagement among the latter.”53 To remedy this omission, Langbehn himself hosted a conference in September 2007 in San Francisco whose call for papers cast a very broad net, explicitly seeking “a broader spectrum in order to grasp Germany’s imperial project, including, but not limited to the disciplinary fields of medicine, law, and anthropology” as well as “scholars who focus on the intersection between modernity and colonialism” and seeking papers “dealing with aspects of Germany’s colonial empire to the present day.”54 The conference’s programme included historians, Germanists, Africanists, comparatists, medical historians, architectural historians, and media scholars from eight different countries. Although they have as yet not managed very well to integrate the voices of and knowledge about the colonized into scholarship, colonial and postcolonial studies are nonetheless clearly alive and well in the field of German studies. However, postcolonial studies are not yet transnational studies. It is evident that the above studies only question the boundaries of the German nation-state insofar as they concern Germany’s colonies. It is a curious fact that German colonial historians have undertaken virtually no comparisons of the German colonial experience with that of other nations, while, conversely, other colonial historians have rarely integrated Germany into their investigations. Although participants at the Sheffield conference seemed to concur “that the field of colonial history could be very useful in helping to deconstruct the master-narrative of the nation-state,”55 such work has only begun 52

Brian Vick, “ConRpt: German Colonialism and National Identity,” on-line posting

27 September 2006, [email protected]

Vick, “ConRpt.” Volker Langbehn & Mohammad Salama, “Call for Papers: ‘Germany’s Colonialism in International Perspective’, International Interdisciplinary Conference on German Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 6–9 September 2007, San Francisco, U S A ,” unpubl. 55 Vick, “ConRpt.” 53 54

lxii

S A R A L E N N O X 

to be undertaken in German colonial studies. In retrospect, however, it is clear that, in his appeals, Conrad had two objectives in mind: first, an endeavour to displace eurocentrism, as the title of his book has it, by “overcoming [the] reification of the dichotomy between the West and the rest, which understands world history solely as a European diffusion process,”56 and, second, “to juxtapose the privileging of national history with a transnational perspective that locates German (and European) history in a global context and, moreover, takes connections to the non-European world more seriously than has hitherto been the case.”57 Indeed, his article in Geschichte und Gesellschaft bears the subtitle: “Plea for a Transnational Perspective on German History.”58 That the transnational perspective in the discipline of history is itself a transnational initiative is indicated by a ‘conversation’ on transnational history in the December 2006 issue of the American Historical Review. To be sure, the editors note: “Transnational history is hardly new, neither to the profession nor to the A H R ,” and may in fact have already been degraded to a “buzzword,” which occasions the editors to probe its possibilities and specificities more precisely59 – suggesting that once more the field of German studies has come late to an investigation of Germany that does not end at the national borders. In encouraging scholars and students to transform the writing of history by moving beyond the nation-state as the foremost analytical category, participants in the ‘conversation’ observe that the new approach does not regard “the ‘nations’ embedded in the term transnational” as “originary elements to be ‘transcended’ by the [global] forces we are discussing. Rather, they were the products – and often rather late products – of those very processes.”60 They stress that transnational “Reifizierung der Dichotomie vom Westen und dem Rest, die die Weltgeschichte ausschliesslich als Diffusionsprozess begreift, zu überwinden,” Conrad, “Schlägt das Empire zurück?” 82. 57 “Dieser Privilegierung der Nationalgeschichte soll hier eine transnationale Perspektive gegenüber gestellt werden, welche die deutsche (und europäische) Geschichte in einen globalen Zusammenhang einordnet und nicht zuletzt die Beziehungen zur aussereuropäischen Welt ernster nimmt als dies herkömmlicher Weise der Fall ist.” Conrad, “Doppelte Marginalisierung,” 145. 58 “Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte”; Conrad, “Doppelte Marginalisierung,” 145. 59 “A H R Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111.5 (2006): 1441. 60 “A H R Conversation,” 1449. 56



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxiii

history is not bound to one methodological approach within the field of history, but is instead a “way of seeing.” Indeed, as they emphasize: “Much of the writing of history has been limited by its explicit or implicit nationalist vision. Transnational history focuses on uncovering connections across particular political units.”61 Suggesting transnational history’s decolonial potential, participants propose that this new perspective can help to overcome crude binaries of domination and resistance, victimizers and victims, will also abjure grand narratives, and will advance new chronologies less centred on Europe. Instead, transnational histories can deepen “understandings of modernity by radically extending our sense of the range of people and the array of sites involved,”62 revealing “modernity to be a multifaceted process whereby political, economic, and cultural exchanges occur in varied and often unpredictable ways.”63 On the other hand, the participants somewhat wryly note that “more printed pages have been dedicated to discussions of the need for and methodology of transnational history than to empirical research.”64 And this conversation, at least, does not succeed in bringing non-Western voices into the discussion: the inclusion of three male and three female participants from three countries might be a pleasant display of gender equity, but all are white and apparently native speakers of English. In 2004, Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel co-edited the pathbreaking collection Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871– 1914, including contributions by many of the distinguished historians of Germany mentioned so far in this chapter, to move German historiography past the point of vehement proclamations in favour of transnational history to an exploration of what insights a transnational approach can actually deliver. In their introduction, the editors acknowledge that the two impulses informing their new approach are postcolonial studies and the history of a globalization that also made a strong impact on imperial Germany. Pointing to several decades of studied avoidance by German historians of debate on the “Primat der Innenpolitik” (primacy of domestic politics), to use Hans– Ulrich Wehler’s term, but simply taking it for granted, the editors of this volume proceed on the assumption that Germany’s borders, wherever they 61 62 63 64

“A H R “A H R “A H R “A H R

Conversation,” 1454. Conversation,” 1456. Conversation,” 1459. Conversation,” 1446.

lxiv

S A R A L E N N O X 

lay in the course of its history, were never impenetrable barriers; instead, Germany itself was a border land where hybridity was an aspect of everyday life in the form of multilinguality, poly-religiosity, and multiple loyalties and identities,65 and transnational entanglement touched every aspect of German lives, though perhaps not always to the same extent.66 “The interest of all the authors in this volume,” the editors explain, “is directed at specific global entanglements, whose bearers and actors must be identified as precisely as possible, even if they may not always have seen themselves as global agents.”67 Perhaps as a useful counterweight to earlier postcolonial enthusiasms in German studies, the editors also underscore their conviction that “Germany’s transnationality was thus primarily a West European one, secondarily an Atlantic one, in the third place an Eastern-European–Balkan– Turkish one, and only then a tropical one.”68 As a reviewer for the website geschichte.transnational put it, “This collection makes it clear that transnational history has grown far past the stage of theoretical self-positioning and now presents central problems of German history from a new perspective.”69 By the year 2006, many historians of Germany were prepared to embark in these new transnational directions. The editors of the very influential online discussion group H-German had determined the following: The terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transnationalism’ may have replaced ‘identity’ as key concepts in scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. The

65

Conrad & Osterhammel, ed. Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–

1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004): 1–2.

Conrad & Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 26. “Das Interesse aller Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes gilt vielmehr spezifischen globalen Verflechtungen, deren Träger und Akteure möglichst genau angebbar sein müssen, auch wenn sie sich durchaus nicht immer als Agenten gefühlt haben mögen.” Conrad & Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 15. 68 “Deutschlands Transnationalität war daher primär eine westeuropäische, sekundär eine atlantische, an dritter Stelle eine osteuropäisch–balkanisch–türkische und erst danach eine tropische.” Conrad & Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 26–27. 69 “Dieser Sammelband macht deutlich, dass die ‘transnationale Geschichte’ längst aus dem Stadium der theoretischen Selbstverortung herausgewachsen ist und zentrale Probleme der deutschen Geschichte in eine neue Perspektive rückt.” Alexander Nützenadel, “Rez. A E G : Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871– 1914,” http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/rezensionen/id=5492. 66 67



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxv

popularity of the term was reflected at the [2005] G S A conference in Milwaukee, where transnationalism (along with interdisciplinarity) served as a thematic umbrella for a variety of panels that focused on such issues as national identity, tourism and exoticism, third world protest, counter-narratives and the Black experience, border crossing, and imperial dynamics.70

In a luncheon talk at the 2006 G S A conference, Michael Geyer was able to declare: “The current excitement about transnational history […] has effectively led to a reorientation of scholarly perspective.”71 H-German sponsored an on-line forum and subsequent discussion “to explore the question of how transnationalism can help scholars of Germany in their understanding of the past.”72 Although not all contributions are of equal utility, the brief essays by Young Sun Hong and Konrad Jarausch plus Geyer’s luncheon talk (all three historians bi- if not transnational subjects) help to delineate the ways in which German historians agree and disagree about the definition of the new perspective. All three agree that transnational history is a perspective, not a method, and that many aspects of Germany’s past can be illuminated using a transnational approach. Able to speak at greatest length, Geyer is also the most effusive: eloquently, he declares: What emerges is a history that explores the deep and irremediable entanglement of nations in the world, the efforts to seek out the world and pull it in – people, territories, goods, knowledge – and the equally insistent attempt to put the world off and negotiate a separation that sets the nation, its territory, and its culture over and against the world. […] The wager of transnational history in all this is that even the most parochial and inward-turned worlds are imbricated in other worlds of action and imagination that range beyond parish and nation.73

Geyer spells out three varieties of transnational approaches: those that stress the nation’s entanglement in the world, proceeding from the inside out; what he calls “local transnationalism”; those that examine the form of the nation in its function as a global regime of organizing territoriality, moving from the outside in, what he terms “global transnationalism”; and a strategy in be70 H-German Forum: Transnationalism. www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/Trans /forum_trans_index.htm. 71 Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell,” 29. 72 H-German Forum: Transnationalism. 73 Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell,” 30.

lxvi

S A R A L E N N O X 

tween the first two that examines “forces, movements, people, things and knowledges that circulate across boundaries.”74 Transnational history is a better kind of history for Germany, he concludes, because “it widens the spatial and temporal scope of the German past” and “makes so much more sense of the nation.”75 But, though perhaps new and exciting, the approaches he delineates can as easily focus on Europe and the West as elsewhere, hence are as likely to reconfirm transnational hegemonies as to put them in question. Jarausch is the most dismissive of the transnational perspective: he claims that many historical subfields – economic, social, or political history – have been implicitly transnational all along, that transnational approaches hold most promise for investigations of culture, the ‘softest’ kind of history, that transnational history “cannot presume to be a universal wrench that manages [to] fix all historical problems,” and that there is in any case no particular moral virtue involved in choosing a transnational perspective: “crossing borders is not in itself morally superior,” though, he notes somewhat patronizingly, “Heady proclamations of an impending paradigm shift might make younger scholars feel good who are in search of a generational cause beyond postmodernism.”76 But Hong takes vigorous issue with Jarausch (as she has often done in public forums), and her definition of transnational history reveals its decolonial potential. She argues: Transnational history involves deconstructing – from a potentially infinite number of perspectives – the nation state as one of the fundamental categories through which Western modernity is narrated and doing so by showing how the national intersects with or is imbricated in sub- and supra-national phenomena whose repression or forgetting first makes possible the political and cultural construction of the nation.77

For Hong, transnationalism enables the scholarly moves necessary for the decolonial turn:

“Where Germans Dwell,” 33. Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell,” 36. 76 Konrad Jarausch, “Reflections on Transnational History,” on-line posting 20 January 2006, [email protected] 77 Young Sun Hong, “The Challenge of Transnational History,” on-line posting 19 January 2006, [email protected] 74 75



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxvii

transnationalism forces us to rethink those narratives of Western modernity that viewed the territorial nation state as the primary site of progress, development, and even human freedom while at the same time de-naturalizing the Eurocentric opposition between ‘traditional’ community and ‘modern’ nation–state, place-based subaltern experiences and state-guided productivist modernization and development, and between the West and all of those people who were believed to lack those constitutive features of Western modernity (or at least who were constructed as lacking them).78

In a later, still unpublished paper, Hong argues further that the discipline of history is deeply implicated in the formation and naturalization of the territorially bounded nation-state and postulates that, by historicizing their own discipline, historians can help “to uncover, narrate and analyze that which was excluded or obscured by this state centered historiography.”79 Historians who advocate “European transnationalism” in order to “legitimate a new integrated Europe” fail to advance this project; indeed, they recapitulate the shortcomings of state-centered historiography – though at the continental, rather than the national level – through their efforts to recenter Europe in a new world and thereby recuperate that decentering of national sovereignty that is one of the essential effects of the transnational analysis.80

Very usefully, Hong also underlines some of the differences between postcolonial and transnational scholarship. Although postcolonialism (along with feminism) helped to lay the foundations of transnational scholarship by giving expression to subaltern identities silenced in conventional narratives of the nation-state, Hong maintains that both remain too focused on “the democratic project within territorially bound nation-states instead of analyzing the different ways in which these nationally bounded visions of citizenship were themselves constructed in relation to sub- and supra-national forces.”81 Thus, in Hong’s view, adapting a transnational perspective may represent a step forward in advancing the critical projects in which postcolonial and feminist scholars are already engaged. Hong, “The Challenge of Transnational History.” Young Sun Hong, “Military Intelligence, Jumbo Shrimp, and European Transnationalism?” (unpubl. MS). 80 Hong, “Military Intelligence, Jumbo Shrimp, and European Transnationalism?” 81 “Military Intelligence, Jumbo Shrimp, and European Transnationalism?” 78 79

lxviii

S A R A L E N N O X 

It is true that not all historians of Germany have embraced transnational approaches, and Jarausch may indeed be correct in suggesting that something of a generational conflict expresses itself in the enthusiasm or disdain directed towards transnational perspectives. The Festschrift that Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz published in 2006 in honour of Jürgen Kocka is entitled ‘Transnational History: Themes, Tendencies, and Theories’82 and assembles internationally renowned historians of Europe to write on the topic. On the other hand, Hans–Ulrich Wehler, once one of the deans of German historiography, devotes his own essay to denouncing many aspects of the volume and other publications on colonial and transnational history.83 In the context of a conference held in Bonn in February 2007 on “Decolonization: Processes and Entanglements,” Jürgen Kocka delivered a talk entitled “Geschichtswissenschaft im Umbruch? Transnationalisierung als Trend und Fiktion” (Historical Studies in Transition? Transnationalization as Trend and Fiction), which, after considering various new approaches related to transnational history, firmly emphasized the fundamental importance and primacy of national history.84 Conversely, in the several hours in which I was writing the first draft of this section of my chapter, two more notices about transnational conferences arrived in my inbox, one an announcement of “Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires Since 1848,” taking place in Marburg in May 2007, the second one a call for papers for “Transnational Networks: Contributions to the History of Globalization,” held in Vienna in November 2007. Although accompanied by some resistance on the part of older historians, it thus appears that transnationalism has established itself as an important perspective within the field of German historical studies. Which makes it all the more surprising that this exciting approach to the discipline of history is much less at issue in the field of German literary and cultural studies. Indeed, literary studies as a whole may itself come belatedly to transnational approaches: in the afterword to the special September 2006

Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 83 Hans–Ulrich Wehler, “Transnationale Geschichte – der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad & Oliver Janz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006): 161–74. 84 Martin Rempe, “Dekolonisation: Prozess und Verflechtungen 1945–1990,” http: //hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsbericht/id=1516 82



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxix

issue of the journal Modernity/Modernism focused on “Modernism and Transnationalisms,” Sonita Sarker observes: Until as recently as 2002, the issue of nation-state identity in modernist literary studies has been rendered in one of two ways: either largely implicit or absent from discussions of Anglo-American or Western European authors, or the only focus in overdetermined approaches to Latin American, Asian, or African authors.85

A glance through the 2006 M L A convention programme (always a good measure of what is ‘in’) shows not a few sessions with the term ‘transnational’ in their title – but most in association with some aspect of ethnic studies and none on German topics. To be sure, it might be possible that the term ‘transnationalism’ is simply not used in literary studies, so that parallel activities are taking place under a different name. It is true that several decades of German studies scholarship has addressed migrants’ literature, though that scholarship rarely investigates the relationship of the migrants’ diasporic routes to their literary production in Germany. Globalization has been the focus of much attention, among other places in successive forums in the German Quarterly, including Nina Berman’s useful contribution, “On the Relevance of Comparative Cultural Knowledge for German Literary Studies,” which is decidedly transnational.86 (Berman was also the only Germanist to participate in the H-German forum on transnationalism.) British scholars have published the volume German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (though its essays appear to examine how literary texts explore the topic of globalization rather than to situate German literature in a global context),87 and a collection on this very topic, edited by the U S A -based Germanist Elke Frederiksen, will soon appear.88 German-Jewish studies has elaborated transnational methods, and black German studies is beginning to do so. The Turkish-American Germanist Azade Seyhan appropriates Chicana border85 Sonita Sarker, “Afterword: Modernisms in our image … always, partially,” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 54. 86 Nina Berman, “On the Relevance of Comparative Cultural Knowledge for German Literary Studies,” German Quarterly 78.2 (2005): 243–45. 87 German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Stuart Tabener (Birmingham: U of Birmingham P , 2004). 88 Within Global Contexts: Literature and Culture of German Speaking Europe (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming).

lxx

S A R A L E N N O X 

lands theory for a very helpful investigation of parallels between TurkishGerman and Chicano/Chicana writers, and her explanation of her method in her introduction is decidedly decolonial: Transnational writing can potentially redress the ruptures in history and collective memory caused by the unavailability of sources, archives, and recorded narratives. By uncovering obscure poetic traditions, discovering forgotten idioms and grammars, and restoring hitherto neglected individual and collective stories to literary history, it introduces the riches of hitherto neglected cultures in modern literary consciousness.89

In an article in the German Quarterly, Randall Halle has also probed the utility of borderlands theory for thinking about recent films set on the German– Polish border,90 and he has recently published a book on transnational German cinema.91 In April 2007, a conference at Indiana University brought scholars of Germany and Poland together to investigate “Polish–German Post/Memory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics,” a promising initiative that continued at the 2007 German Studies Association conference. So it would be clearly inaccurate to claim that German literary and cultural studies, despite their role in launching postcolonial perspectives, has remained impervious to new transnational approaches. Yet, in my view, German literary studies has given little thought to what it would mean for a national literature department to undertake the almost inconceivable project of changing the optic with which we examine our field to repudiate the primacy of national culture. Our appointments are, after all, in the German departments or programmes, and we teach our students the German language. As Benedict Anderson has explained to us, the modern national literatures that we teach, especially the genre of the novel, played a critical role in helping to make thinkable the notion of homogeneous, empty time on which the imagined community of the nation depends;92 as in the case of the discipline of history, our own disciplinary history and the history

Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2001): 13. Randall Halle, “Views from the Polish–German Border: The Exploration of International Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter,” German Quarterly 80.1 (2007): 77–93. 91 German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2008). 92 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991): 24–34. 89 90



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxxi

of the nation are inextricably entangled. Exploring the relationships of two or more literatures is not our province; we know very little about the cultures of countries other than those of German-speaking ones, so that we are not at all prepared either to undertake transnational scholarship ourselves or to provide undergraduates and graduate students with the information and language skills to observe, and write, from the perspective of the new transnational optic. And as practitioners of German studies we remain much more constrained than our colleagues in English, French, and Spanish departments, where transnational, if monolingual, studies could be undertaken and, at least in American studies, are indeed underway, because Germanlanguage texts are produced almost entirely in three countries of Europe. So what might be the benefits of a transnational approach to German literary and cultural studies? Why would it be worth our while to undertake the rigorous re-training that would enable us to think beyond the boundaries of German-speaking countries? To my knowledge, only Nina Berman, the sole participant from literary studies in the H-German forum on transnationalism, has addressed this question head-on. What Berman proposes is certainly not wrong: she suggests that German studies scholars might look at the transnational contexts of German literary production (e.g., the Crusades or colonialism); its ties to transnational belief systems like Christianity; its references to and appropriations of other cultures; and multicultural production in Germany. We might also look at the representation of Germany in texts from other cultures and at how German literature is received elsewhere. Not incorrect, but neither very exciting nor very new, and certainly not guaranteed to accomplish the decolonial turn that could move German studies in post-national and post-eurocentric directions. Let me suggest some other questions that Germanists – and others – might ask about literary and cultural texts to move our analyses in transnational and decolonial directions, as we also insist that in each of these questions race, class, gender, and every other intersectional category is always at play. We might ask, for example: How are cultural representations affected by impulses external to the nationstate – say, colonialism, the Cold War, September 11, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and how does the cultural product position itself vis-à-vis those impulses? To what degree does the text directly thematize these questions, and how must we read differently to find the answers? How and why do German-language texts respond differently to the same transnational phenomena from texts with other linguistic origins? How are the national and the transnational explicitly or implicitly represented in the text? Where

lxxii

S A R A L E N N O X 

does the text situate itself with respect to the coloniality of power? How does the cultural product help to constitute, sustain, subvert, think beyond, the nation? Is it possible to read the text against the grain to detect suppressed sub- or supranational aspects that put national or transnational hegemonies into question? Does the text lend expression to suppressed voices, and, if so, which ones and how? Must we, as in the earlier case of women’s writing, read different texts in order to find those voices? How does the text draw upon the national and/or the transnational to construct identity, subjectivity, solidarity, notions of individual or collective resistance? (Michelle Ann Stephen’s book Black Empire provides a brilliant model for such inquiries.93) Can the text be read so as to produce epistemic models different from the dominant ones? Does the text formally offer narrative paradigms different from those that support the narrative of the nation? How has the text been read and received so as to support and/or contest which national or transnational models? How are such readings themselves nationally inflected, and how can reflection upon national readings help us to think beyond the nation? In that regard, transnational approaches provide a particular opportunity, and responsibility, for Auslandsgermanistik (scholars of German studies outside of Germany), or, for that matter, Auslandsamerikanistik (scholars of American studies outside of the U S A ), as Shelley Fisher Fishkin outlined so well in her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004.94 To be able to ask such questions, of course, we will have to attend even more carefully to the economic, social, and political conditions that underwrite these constructions, as well as to how cultural producers locate themselves with respect to them, and that means we will have to work even more energetically in an interdisciplinary manner. As one of the participants in the A H R forum put it: “If the material and the ideological are always in dialogue, then perhaps it’s time that practitioners of cultural studies start reading more military, economic, and diplomatic history.”95 It is also possible that transnational scholarship calls for more knowledge than any individual scholar can conceivably amass, which means we must turn increasingly to collaborative 93

Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States,

1914–1962 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). 94 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. 95 “A H R Conversation,” 1453.



From Postcolonial to Transnational

lxxiii

work, enabled by new technologies of communication, as another participant in the A H R forum also proposes: Will history’s interdisciplinary relationships change – will literary and historical scholars perhaps increasingly cooperate transnationally on a single project? […] Will cybernetworks alter the familiar paradigm of a lone historian trudging through the archives into a collaborative (more transnational?) model of research in the future?96

In a recent book on ‘cultural turns’ in the German Kulturwissenschaften – which does not yet include the transnational turn or the decolonial turn – Doris Bachmann–Medick writes: The various ‘turns’ emerging in the seventies in the wake of the linguistic turn first revealed the differentiated, highly dynamic fields of tension within the Kulturwissenschaften. Only because of those turns were perspectives changed and new focuses introduced. […] It is a matter of path-breaking new orientations.97

That is true for my field, too. Should we continue to proceed in transnational directions, a bright and exciting future for interdisciplinary German studies lies ahead.



96

“A H R Conversation,” 1455.

“Erst die verschiedenen ‘Wenden’, die sich etwa seit den 1970er Jahren im Schlepptau des linguistic turn herausgebildet haben, legen ein ausdifferenziertes, höchst dynamisches Spannungsfeld der kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung frei. Erst sie haben Blickrichtungen geändert und neue Fokussierungen eingeführt. [. . . ] Die Rede ist von bahnbrechenden Neuorientierungen.” Bachmann–Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006): 7. 97

S ECTION I: ——————————————————————————————————

(P OST )C OLONIAL I DENTIFICATIONS , C OLONIAL T RADITIONS , AND C ULTURES OF M EMORY

Encounters Over the Border The Shaping of Colonial Identities in Neighbouring British and German Colonies in Southern Africa

U LRIKE L INDNER

W

G E R M A N C O L O N I A L E N T H U S I A S T S or German colonial administrators tried to define a distinctive German colonial style, they often referred to examples of British colonial rule, either to describe similar qualities within German colonialism or to distinguish characteristics typical of German colonialism from the British model.1 As one example taken from the countless books, pamphlets, and articles on the subject, one could refer to an article with the title “Was lehrt uns die englische Kolonialpolitik?” (What does English colonial policy teach us?) published in the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, the press organ of the highly influential German Colonial Society, in 1897.2 On the British side, German colonial problems were often used to highlight the former’s outstanding experience as colonizer, as an editorial of the Times in 1905 reflects: “A people of wide colonial interests and long colonial experience like our own must necessarily regard with sympathetic interest the misfortunes which Germany is going through in her African colonies.”3 This chapter addresses transnational/transcolonial features of colonial identity-formation, examines the self-definitions of German and British adHEN

1 The chapter draws on research in the U K , South Africa and Namibia funded by a Feodor Lynen Grant and a research grant of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 2 “Was lehrt uns die englische Kolonialpolitik?,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (28 August 1897). 3 Editorial, The Times (16 September 1905).

4

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

ministrators in African colonies as well as of colonial officials and colonial enthusiasts in the respective motherlands, and, finally, analyzes how interactions and perceptions across colonial borders and across the metropoles shaped the colonizers’ identities.4 Since such an approach – like comparative research on colonialism in general – has very rarely been a focus of research, I thus try to contribute to a more precise understanding of the various entanglements of the colonial situation.5 I focus on two colonies in southern Africa, German South-West Africa and the British Cape Colony (after 1910 the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa), during the last decade before World War I, and look at colonial encounters between the neighbouring colonies of the two European empires.6 The analysis concentrates on British and German perceptions of each other’s colonial practices and techniques. The aim is to examine German and British colonial identities by investigating discourses and sets of practices that construct and reflect the colonial cultures and colonial concepts of the two colonizers. Collective identities are thus understood as concepts of self-understanding by people who create an identity by shared discourses and practices.7 However, the consensus thus obtained remained always contested and challenged.

4 This chapter will focus mainly on identities of the two neighbouring powers; for a broader view on the colonial concepts of the two nations in Africa, see Ulrike Lindner, “Colonialism as a European Project before 1914? British and German Concepts of Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Comparativ 19 (2009): 88–106. 5 Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003): 4–5; Dirk van Laak, “Kolonien als ‘Laboratorien der Moderne’?,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Jürgen Osterhamme (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupprecht, 2004): 257. 6 I thus try to follow Frederick Cooper’s plea for a more differentiated understanding of colonial identity, see Cooper, Colonialism in Question (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005): 50–51, 71–72. 7 See Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 73–75, who focuses more on the concept of selfunderstanding than on collective identity. For the definition of collective identity, see Jürgen Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität: Zur Analyse eines theoretischen Begriffs,” in Identitäten, ed. Aleida Assmann & Heidrun Friese (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 103–104; see, generally, on the concept of collective identities: Maurice Halbwachs, Das kollektive Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985); Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann & Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 9–19; for a critical approach to the concept of collective identity, see Axel Dossmann & Lutz Niethammer, Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000).



Encounters Over the Border

5

Generally, in the colonial situation (for both the Germans and the British), the colonized, in this case black Africans, were a primary means of defining the colonizer and a way of creating a unity for white Europeans that went beyond differences of class, wealth, and sometimes nationality.8 Negotiations of imperial self-perception and identity were mostly characterized by attempts at demarcation from the ‘Other’, the colonized subject. When the colonizers interacted with the colonized, representations and perceptions changed and new transcultural forms of identity could be formed within the zones of colonization, and this, in turn, had a considerable impact on the shaping of imperial self-definition.9 Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper identify the constant discussing of and dealing with difference and otherness in the colonies as “the most basic tension of empire.”10 Furthermore, colonial identities had to be negotiated with neighbouring European colonial rulers: German and British administrators, settlers, and missionaries observed each other very closely as fellow colonizers. Interactions with and perceptions of the other imperial power had a considerable impact on the colonizers’ own decisions and on their self-definition. In this relationship, Germany was the latecomer as colonizer, an aspect that often influenced mutual perceptions.11 Colonial knowledge and self-understanding as a colonizer were developed not only within the boundaries of national empires but also across the metropoles and the colonies of different empires, through collaboration and 8 Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Conrad & Randeria (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002): 25–27. 9 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 37–38; Ali Rattansi, “ ‘ Western’ Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a ‘Postmodern’ Frame,” in Racism, Modernity and Identity, ed. A. Rattansi & Sallie Westwood (Cambridge: Polity, 1994): 36–37. 10 Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper & Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 7. There were of course other dimensions of colonial identity production, such as gender or religion. 11 Generally for this aspect of German–British relations, see: Hartmut Berghoff & Dieter Ziegler, “Pionier und Nachzügler: Kategorien für den deutsch–britischen Vergleich?,” in Pionier und Nachzügler? Vergleichende Studien zur Geschichte Grossbritanniens und Deutschlands im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, ed. Berghoff & Ziegler (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1995): 15–28.

6

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

through the reception of each other’s colonial rule.12 This is particularly obvious at the turn of the twentieth century with an emerging European debate about the aims of colonialism as a civilizing project, especially with regard to Africa. European colonialists were generally confident that their forms of colonial rule and their modes of suppression were ways of bringing order and moral development into the African colonies.13 Such arguments can be found in both British and German imperial discourse. The turn of the twentieth century was also a phase of growing interconnectedness and globalization, economically, technically, and socially. Steamships and telegraphs were linking Africa with Europe, allowing for faster modes of communication between colonies and motherlands but also between neighbouring colonies of different empires.14 In the southern African colonies that are addressed here, such developments can be observed as well: the administration of German South-West Africa had to use the British telegraph system in the British enclave of Walfish Bay on the coast of the German colony during the first years of German occupation. In 1899, the German coastal town of Swakopmund was connected with the British telegraph system; later on, further links between the German and British telegraph systems were established.15 Also, the German and British steamship lines normally served the German colony as well as the Cape Colony before reaching Cape Town as their final port of call. They were used by British and

12 On the common imperial project, see van Laak, “Kolonien als ‘Laboratorien der Moderne’?,” 257. The Brussels “Institut Colonial International” that counted many German and British colonial politicians as members, is also an important example of imperial cooperation. See also Cooper & Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 13. 13 Fatima El-Tayeb, “Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity,” in Not so Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History 1890–2000, ed. Patricia Mazon & Reinhild Steingröver (Rochester N Y : U of Rochester P , 2005): 39; Cooper & Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 31. 14 Chris Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 451. See also Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006). 15 Cape Town Archives Repository, T 1192 3068, General Post Office Cape Town, Telegraph Communication with G S W A , 13 April 1910; National Archive of South Africa, Pretoria, G G 1391 43/5, Office of the Governor-General of South Africa, Postal Telegraphs. Linking up of Cape Colony and German South West Africa Telegraphs, 1910.



Encounters Over the Border

7

German settlers, administrators, and missionaries alike.16 Thus, a high degree of connectedness can be witnessed, one that also produced growing knowledge about the neighbouring colonizer. This in turn led to an anxiety to define a distinct national style as a colonial power. In the following pages, I will first touch upon some general aspects within the mutual perceptions of the two colonizers before focusing on encounters between the neighbouring colonies and on their influence on colonial identities.

Self-Definitions of British and German Colonizers in Africa For the Germans, the tension between imitating the experienced British colonizers and distinguishing themselves from the British is obvious throughout the whole period of German colonialism, not only in the administration of the colonies but also in the central colonial office in Berlin. The British role model is also found in the discourse of the colonial movement and the various colonial associations, as well as in many publications by German colonial enthusiasts. Often, British colonization and the British Empire were simultaneously admired and envied.17 For example, Paul Rohrbach, a colonial enthusiast with experience as a colonial administrator (he worked as Siedlungskommisar (settlement commissary) in German South West Africa from 1903 to 1906) and one of the most prominent colonial publicists, wrote in 1909 that the narrow-mindedness of the German people and their outlook on colonial problems could only be changed if they acquired the consciousness of heading a worldwide empire – a consciousness that British people naturally possessed.18 On an administrative level, before implementing new measures, the German colonial office tended to observe the British colonies and to write elaborate reports on their policies.19 Another aspect 16 See, for example, the journey of German colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg to South Africa on the British steamer Kenilworth Castle, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N 1130/50, Dernburg an Reichskanzler Bülow, 10 May 1908. 17 Alexander Lion, Die Kulturfähigkeit des Negers und die Erziehungsaufgaben der Kulturnationen (Berlin: Süsserott, 1908). Max von Brandt, Die englische Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialverwaltung (Halle: Gebauer–Schwetschke, 1906). 18 Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft: Kulturpolitische Grundsätze für die Rassen- und Missionsfragen (Berlin: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1909): 30–31. 19 The German colonial office kept files to study the administration in British colonies, see, for example, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (B A B ) R 1001/5360 on the admini-

8

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

was the production of common colonial knowledge among the European colonizers. The development of a distinct colonial style was strongly dependent on the perception of information from other empires. In a public lecture given in the spring of 1914, Bernhard Dernburg, who held the office of colonial secretary from 1906 to 1910, said in a retrospective view on his colonial work that whenever he was uncertain about how a colonial problem ought to be handled, he had found a solution in the study of British methods. He was an admirer of British colonization, had travelled through several of the British African colonies, and had tried to implement similar policies during his time in office.20 He also stressed German and British cooperation – for example, in his speech of November 1909 at the African Society in London, which was cheered by his English guests: That the conviction of the natives that the white colonizing nation was superior in point of strength and knowledge should be maintained was the common interest of all colonizing nations in Africa, since their power had everywhere the same basis. Every successful colonization started establishing peace and justice and the ‘Pax Britannica’ in a British colony was as essential to its German neighbour as the ‘Pax Germanica’ was to the British territory.21

In my view, Dernburg’s statement can be seen as an essential argument for the common understanding of the colonial enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa by both colonizing powers, at least for the period of time between the end of the South African War and 1914. However, the use of the British colonies as a role model and the stress on cooperation was only one aspect of the German view of British colonial administrators. Many colonial enthusiasts in the metropole as well as settlers and their press organs in the colonies saw the British colonial administration

stration of justice in British colonies; see also B A B R 1001/5379 Die Prügelstrafe – Allgemein – und das Züchtigungsrecht der Pflanzungsleiter, 1906–1908. In this file, corporal punishment in British and other European colonies was elaborately researched before planning regulations for the German colonies. 20 See B A B R 1001/6938: Staatssekretär Dernburg zu Fragen der Eingeborenenpolitik; 18 February 1908; in this case, Dernburg cites British colonies as a role model for a more reasonable economic policy in the colonies and for a better treatment of “natives.” Also see The Times, 23 June 1914, about a speech by Dernburg on similar matters. 21 The Times (6 November 1909).



Encounters Over the Border

9

and the British style of colonization in a more critical light.22 Particularly with regard to British “native policy,” German reception tended to be highly disapproving. In a report to Berlin from 1912, a German consul residing in South Africa referred to the dangerous, overly egalitarian ideas of “negrophile” South African politicians that would spoil the indigenous population in British South Africa.23 Generally, German officials in touch with the British colonial administration as well as many “colonial experts” at home regarded British colonial policy as too lenient towards the African population and saw the organization of the colonies as too superficial.24 In this discourse, the British colonial style was not seen as something to be copied. Instead, a ‘better’, more rigorous German colonial style was advocated. The British example was used to highlight a self-definition as a ‘good German colonizer’. On the British side, neither the British Foreign Office nor the Colonial Office had this kind of obsession with the Germans as fellow colonizers. Their colonial Empire was spread around the world; they had many imperial neighbours and a great enough variety of local colonial problems to cope with. Generally, Britain’s view of German expansion in Africa was ambivalent. On the one hand, at least at the beginning of German colonialism, the Germans were seen as less dangerous rivals in Africa and were more or less welcomed as fellow imperialists, as Prime Minister William Gladstone put it in Parliament in 1885: It is for Germany to say how far it is her interest to become a colonizing power. With that we have nothing whatever to do; but, so far as we are concerned we ought to meet her in no grudging spirit – if Germany becomes a colonizing power all I can say is God speed her.25 22

See, for example, Hans Grimm, Afrikafahrt West (Frankfurt am Main: Hendschel,

1913): 168–69; also see articles in the press organs of the settlers in German East Africa,

the Usambara Post and the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung. 23 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (P A A A ), R 14867, Kaiserlich Deutsches Konsulat Durban an Reichskanzler Bethmann Hollweg, 26 February 1912. 24 See, for example, P A A A , R 14867, Schroetter, Kaiserliches Konsulat Durban, an Reichskanzler von Bethmann Hollweg, 8 February 1914, on native policy in Natal; The National Archives, Public Record Office (T N A , P R O ), F O 367/12, Cartwright, Munich, to Sir Edward Grey, 26 July 1906, on the German press and its criticism of ‘misguided’ native policy in South Africa. 25 Parliamentary Debates 3rd series 295, 978–79, as quoted in Jean Stengers, “British and German Imperial Rivalry: A Conclusion,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial

10

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

On the other hand, British observers frequently criticized German colonial methods as too rigid; German colonies were said to suffer from ‘military misrule’ and over-administration. Criticism was used to style oneself as the better, more experienced colonizer. Particularly when the German military brutally suppressed the indigenous population in the wars in East Africa and South-West Africa during the years 1904–1907, British officials in the Colonial and Foreign Offices as well as the British press were highly critical about Germany’s conduct.26 However, on an imperial level, Germany was still regarded as a ‘worthy’ neighbouring power in Africa, at least in comparison with other European colonizers and especially in contrast to Portuguese colonial rule, which was seen as corrupt, inept, and cruel.27 After 1900, the concept of a shared European ‘burden’ in Africa became a significant feature of Britain’s self-definition as a colonizer in Africa. In a Foreign Office memorandum from 1910, the British stated that, so far, they had not found a case in which they did not support other colonizing nations against native uprisings in Africa, even if it was only to permit the transport of arms through their territory.28 Another obvious aspect was the sharing of colonial knowledge. This is evident in many publications on colonial matters. For example, an article in the Journal of the African Society from 1901–1902 grudgingly admires the modes of German colonization and advocates similar methods for British colonies:

Policy and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford & William Roger Louis (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1967): 340. 26 P A A A , R 14668, von Metternich, Kaiserlich Deutsche Botschaft London an Reichskanzler von Bülow, 1 November 1904; P A A A , R 14667, Article Morning Post, 29 April 1904, displaying criticism of the highly bureaucratic and rigid administration in German colonies. See, generally, Michael Fröhlich, Von Konfrontation zur Koexistenz: Die deutsch–englischen Kolonialbeziehungen in Afrika 1884–1914 (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1990): 233–66, see also the next paragraph on the Herero and Nama war. 27 See William Roger Louis, “Great Britain and German Expansion in Africa 1884– 1919,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Policy and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford & William Roger Louis (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1967): 34–39. 28 T N A , P R O , F O 367/181, Colonial Office to Foreign Office, Movements of natives – Interchange of information with German government, 27 January 1910. This document includes a memorandum on mutual support in the case of uprisings of indigenous populations.



Encounters Over the Border

11

The colonies are themselves not of the first order but with that dogged Teuton perseverance and the scientific method behind it competent judges consider that they have a great promise. For the moment much money has been and is being spent on developing them and the return is small […]. Every year however steady progress is reported.29

In this case, the colonial view also reflects national stereotypes that were common in the perception of Germany in the U K , such as admiration for German scholarship and science.30 The sharing of colonial knowledge sometimes went a step further – for example, when the African Society in London published a report on law and administration in the British colonies of Nigeria and the Gold Coast, written by a German consul and translated for the journal of the Society. The German view on British administration and colonization was obviously seen as an important element of colonial knowledge that should be made accessible to an interested British public.31 Particularly during the last years before the outbreak of World War I, the German–British relationship in the African colonies was relatively stable. On the metropolitan scale, there were attempts to reconcile German–British relations via the African colonies with a treaty between Germany and Britain on the partition of the Portuguese colonies. Even if negotiations failed, colonial agreements seemed to be possible and desirable.32 Particularly in East Africa, German and British colonizers reached a high degree of understanding, as can be seen, for instance, in the articles of various colonial journals and in the consular report of both colonies.33 In southern Africa, too, even if there were mounting concerns about military plans and rearmament on both sides, a reasonably cordial attitude could be observed until C.T. Hagberg Wright, “German Methods of Development in Africa,” Journal of the African Society 1 (1901–1902): 36. 30 Jose Harris, “English Ideas about Community: Another Case of ‘Made in Germany’?,” in Aneignung und Abwehr, ed. Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann & Willibald Steinmetz (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998): 143, 153. 31 W. Asmis, “Law and Policy: Relating to the Natives of the Gold Coast and Nigeria,” Journal of the African Society 12 (1912–13): 17–51; see, for the original German publication, W. Asmis, “Eingeborenenrecht und Eingeborenenpolitik in der Goldküste und in Nigerien,” Koloniale Rundschau (1912): 678–706. 32 Fröhlich, Von Konfrontation zur Koexistenz, 296–305. 33 P A A A , R 14817, African World, Special Edition German East Africa, 15 November 1913; Rhodes House, Oxford, Dundas Papers M S S Afr.s. 948, C.C.F. Dundas, History of German East Africa, 1914, Ms. 29

12

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

shortly before the outbreak of World War I. In June 1914, the General Governor of South Africa thanked the Governor of German South-West Africa for the kind support that the Director of the Geological Survey had received during his visit to German South-West Africa. When the Governor held a levée at Government House in Cape Town on 4 June 1914 to celebrate King George’s birthday, there seemed to be a friendly understanding between him and the imperial German consul attending the event.34 Thus, the moment of European cooperation in Africa became an important aspect of the self-definitions of the two colonizers.

Perceptions Across Colonial Borders: The Cape Colony and German South-West Africa The two neighbouring colonies in southern Africa had diverging histories: the British had been present in South Africa since the beginning of the nineteenth century and had built up a colonial administration at the Cape that developed into an important colony of the British Empire. Like other British settler colonies, the Cape received responsible government in 1853.35 On the German side, colonial development started much later: after expeditions to South-West Africa by German entrepreneurs at the beginning of the 1880s, the area was officially declared a German protectorate in 1884 – thereby becoming the first colony of the German Empire. During the next twenty years, the protectorate developed into the only German settler colony. However, even in 1914, there were only around 14,000 white Europeans to be found in the colony – by far not all German nationals.36 The two colonies had a common border marked by the Orange River. Like most African borders, it was one imposed on African routes, networks, and populations – the Nama people, for instance, lived both north and south of the border. Trade crossed the frontier and African workers came from the Cape to German National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, G G 133 3/1640, Dr. Arthur Roger’s Visit to German South West Africa, Governor-General of South Africa to Governor of German South West Africa, 24 June 1914; G G 133 3/1630, Birthday of King George V , Levee and Review, 4 June 1914. 35 Rodney Davenport & Christopher Saunders, South Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000): 40–42, 101–107. 36 Ute Hagen, Walther Hubatsch & Helge bei der Wieden, “Die Schutzgebiete des Deutschen Reiches,” in Grundriss zur deutschen Verwaltungsgeschichte 1815–1945, Band 22: Bund- und Reichsbehörden, ed. Hubatsch (Marburg: J.G. Herder, 1983): 425. 34



Encounters Over the Border

13

South-West Africa, especially during the years of depression in the Cape, after the end of the South African War in 1902. The transport of goods from the Cape to German South-West Africa was highly important during the Herero and Nama War of 1904–1907, when the German troops had to rely on supplies from the Cape Colony.37 The Cape Colony also owned an enclave in German South-West Africa, Walfish Bay, which was for a long period the only approachable harbour for large steamships on the coast of German South-West Africa.38 Within this framework, there was a relatively high degree of interaction between the two colonies and steady mutual observation of the imperial neighbours. From the beginning, colonial politicians and administrators from the Cape, with their long tradition and experience in South Africa, viewed the Germans as inexperienced and rigid colonizers. A critical view of German South-West Africa was particularly prevalent before and during the British South African War when the Cape Colony feared German support for the Boers,39 and in many respects such notions prevailed after 1902. The British official most frequently in contact with German administrators and settlers was Resident Magistrate Cleverly in the British enclave of Walfish Bay. He worked there in the 1890s and was again posted to the enclave in 1903– 1905.40 Cleverly disapproved of the German colony and constantly cited the German counter-example to style the Cape administration as good and experienced. Cleverly saw the German treatment of the African population as unnecessarily brutal. However, it was not only on humanitarian grounds that he disapproved of German rule: his most pressing fear was that the Germans might stir up African uprisings that could spill over the border into the Cape Colony.41 In 1909 a British consul was finally installed in German South 37 On the difficulties and the conflicts between G S W A and the Cape Colony regarding transport, see: Tilman Dedering, “War and Mobility in the Borderlands of South Western Africa in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 39 (2006): 275–94. 38 P A A A , R 14802, Die Walfischbai, 1893–1905. 39 Tilman Dedering: “The Ferreira Raid of 1906: Boers, Britons and Germans in Southern Africa in the Aftermath of the South African War,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 46–51. 40 British Library, Ripon Papers 43561, John H. Cleverly, Resident Magistrate Walfish Bay to Mr. Innes Cape Town, Report 1892, 37–46. 41 T N A , P R O ; F O 244/579, John Cleverly, Office of the Resident Magistrate, Walfish Bay, State of Affairs in Neighbourhood of Walfish Bay, 24 October 1898; T N A , P R O ,

14

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

Africa. Consul Müller (a British citizen of German descent from the Cape Colony) took up his office in Lüderitzbucht in 1909 after diamonds had been discovered there, thus attracting various industries and, in their turn, entrepreneurs and workers from British colonies. From then on, Müller was the most important ‘contact man’ between the two colonies. His view of German methods was similar to Cleverly’s, and he disapproved of the Germans’ treatment of the indigenous population. One should add that both Müller and Cleverly came from the liberal tradition of the Cape administration and were used to a different form of ‘native policies’.42 Müller’s critical reports on the treatment of ‘natives’ in the German colony did not always meet with approval on the higher levels of the British administration. Commenting on Müller’s despatches being sent to the Foreign Office in London, the office of the Governor-General of South Africa opined that Müller’s view of the German administration was too critical, given the extent of the segregation and racism that were commonplace in several provinces of the new Union of South Africa.43 On the other side of the border, the German administration and German settlers mostly considered the colonial administration of the Cape Colony as too mild. The treatment of the African and mixed-race population was seen as far too lenient; in the view of German observers, this would lead to grave problems for the white population. ‘Native policy’ in the Cape Colony was usually addressed as misguided. The despatches to Berlin of the German consulate in Cape Town contained many instances of disapproval – for example, when the German consuls reported on visiting cultural events organized by ‘coloured’ people, and when they wrote about congregations of black Africans or simply about street life in Cape Town.44

F O 244/640, Villiers, Foreign Office, to Lascelles, Berlin, Herero Rising, Report by John Cleverly, 23 August 1904. 42

On the Cape liberal tradition, see Rodney Davenport, “The Cape Liberal Tradition to

1910,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, ed. Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick & David Welsh (Johannesburg: Wesleyan U P , 1987): 21–34.

National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, G G 276 4/42, Office of GovernorGeneral of South Africa, Status of natives in G S W A , report by H M consul, 1911. 44 P A A A , R 14869, Deutsches Generalkonsulat Kapstadt an Reichskanzler von Bethmann Hollweg, 23 June 1913. B A B , R 1001/8741, Kaiserlich Deutsches Generalkonsulat für Britisch-Südafrika an Reichskanzler von Bülow, 8 May 1905; B A B , R 1001/8741, Konsulat Kapkolonie an Reichskanzler Bülow, 4 October 1904. 43



Encounters Over the Border

15

The German side also complained about a lack of cooperation in its fight against the indigenous population. During the extremely brutal Herero and Nama War, which ended with the extermination of the Herero people, the Cape Colony maintained a policy of neutrality and would not actively fight alongside the Germans. However, the British side supported the German military with arms and supplied numerous transports through its territory. Furthermore, during the war, the British had an officer attached to General Trotha and his headquarters. Colonel Trench sent detailed reports about the military campaign back to the War Office, the Colonial Office, and the Foreign Office, but these only rarely criticized the German treatment of the indigenous population.45 Colonel Trench was generally much more concerned about the potential threat that German troops might pose to the Cape Colony.46 He feared a military invasion during and after the Herero and Nama War, since the Germans had thousands of troops under arms in German South-West Africa and because the infrastructure of the colony was being continuously developed, so that movements of troops became easier.47 However, Trench also acknowledged the mutual consent and support of the two imperial powers in the campaign against the Herero, expressing as much in a report to the Foreign Office in London in 1906: There appears a very marked difference in the way the doings of public and private persons in the neighbouring Colonies are judged. Both officers and officials seem now more ready to acknowledge that we Englishmen have also our native problems to solve – and to believe in our sincere desire to maintain a friendly neutrality. Herr v. Lindequist seems well disposed to Great Britain, and in frequent conversations I’ve had with him has been full of expressions of gratitude for the kindness and help he has received, more especially from the High Commissioner and General during his recent visit. At a dinner last week, in proposing the health of His Majesty King Edward VII., he made a rather long speech full of kindly reminiscences and friendly hopes.48 T N A , P R O , W O 106/268, Trench to War Office, 24 November 1905. In this report, he wrote critically about the horrific conditions in German concentration camps. However, most of his other reports deal entirely with military and technical matters. 46 T N A , P R O , F O 367/8, Memorandum (secret), 7 March 1906, 366–67. 47 National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, GG 276 4/47, Office of the GovernorGeneral of South Africa, Warlike Preparations in German South West Africa, 9 October 1911. 48 T N A , P R O , F O 367/9, Colonel Trench, Extracts from Report, 26 December 1905, 144. 45

16

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

Typically, Trench refers to “problems” all colonizers had to endure when dealing with the “native population,” thus creating a notion of a common interest among all colonizers in Africa. Of course, such cooperation was not stable and could be disrupted at any time: for example, the German military was especially angry with the Cape Colony in the case of Morenga, a Nama captain who was one of the important Nama leaders after the death of the famous captain Hendrik Witbooi in 1905. Morenga led a successful campaign against the Germans in the south of the colony afterwards. The German struggle against Morenga and his troops dragged on over a long period, since he managed successfully to resist the German military with his guerrilla tactics.49 Morenga escaped several times into the Cape Colony and once even gave an interview to Cape newspapers, a fact that infuriated not only the German administration in South West Africa but also the German public at home. The German newspapers judged it to be a betrayal of highly important common European interests in Africa.50 Finally, the Cape administration agreed to support the Germans in their fight against Morenga. He was captured and killed in a cooperative venture between British and German troops near Upington (Cape Colony) in September 1907.51 Besides mutual criticism across the border, used by both sides to define themselves as the ‘better’ colonizer, one could thus find a considerable degree of cooperation and support in the neighbouring colonies. This aspect seemed to be equally important for the self-definition of both colonizing powers, especially when their supremacy was challenged by the African population.

Defining the Other: British and Germans as White Europeans versus Africans and ‘Coloureds’ in Neighbouring Colonies An important field for the complex process of identity-formation was the interaction of the colonizers with the colonized in intimate relationships: i.e. in most cases the relationship of a male European with an African or mixedB A B , R 1001/6490, Denkschrift über die Vernichtung der Bande Morengas und die gegenwärtige Lage in Südwestafrika, 1906, 125–41. 50 B A B , R 8034 I I /6365, “Ein Interview mit Morenga,” Berliner Tageblatt, 10 July 1906. 51 B A B , R 8034 I I /6364, “Morenga gefangen,” Berliner Morgenpost, 16 May 1906; see also J.R. Masson, “A Fragment of Colonial History: The Killing of Jacob Marengo,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (1995): 247–56. 49



Encounters Over the Border

17

race woman. Here the superiority of the colonizer was confirmed and contested in its most intimate form.52 On the German side of the border, the defining of a racial identity against the colonized became very important after the Herero and Nama War of 1904–1907. In the German metropole, the Colonial Society and the PanGerman Society had long been ardent advocates of strict racial segregation, of a new definition of German citizenship, and of a general ban of so-called mixed marriages.53 Despite these widespread theories of racial segregation, concubinage with black African and mixed-race women was widespread in German South-West Africa.54 The presence of African concubines in military homes and in settlements far from the main administration centres was quite common and is well-documented, although it was officially despised and seen as a danger for the German nation and the white European race. Even though concubinage was prevalent and the number of actual mixed marriages was very low, German legislation in South-West Africa concentrated on mixed marriages in order to prevent a growing mixed-race German population. In the course of the extreme radicalization of the South-West African colony during and after the Herero and Nama War, and together with a strict segregation policy, vice-governor Tecklenburg issued a ban on mixed marriages in German South-West Africa in 1905. Not only were new mixed marriages forbidden, but existing mixed marriages were also denied legal status from 1907 onwards. Children from these marriages were declared ‘natives’.55 This meant a re-definition of citizens’ rights and represented a serious intrusion into individual personal rights that created many conflicts. Indeed, it could also affect people with British or other European citizen-

52 See a detailed account of this topic in Ulrike Lindner, “Contested Concepts of ‘White’ and ‘Native’. Mixed Marriages in German South-West Africa and the Cape Colony: A Histoire Croisée,” Journal of Namibian Studies 6 (2009): 57–79. 53 Franz–Josef Schulte–Althoff, “Rassenmischung im kolonialen System,” Historisches Jahrbuch 109 (1985): 86. 54 Helmut Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1914 (Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968): 251–52; Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003): 246–47; see also Frank Becker, “Einleitung: Kolonialherrschaft und Rassenpolitik,” in Rassenmischehen – Mischlinge – Rassentrennung, ed. Becker (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004): 13. 55 Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 219; Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in DeutschSüdwestafrika 1894–1914, 249–56.

18

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

ships who were married to African or mixed-race people, since their offspring would be re-defined as well. In contrast to the German protectorate, official policy towards the black and so-called ‘coloured’ mixed-race population in the Cape Colony had been relatively liberal and had relied more on class distinctions than on racial segregation. There was no open racial infringement for the vote: black Africans and coloured people could vote if they had a certain income and paid a certain amount of tax.56 Since only relatively few black people met these conditions, the supremacy of the white Europeans was not challenged. Also, social distinctions between white, coloured, and black had always been relatively rigid despite the more liberal laws. With the mining revolution and with a growing ‘coloured population’, racial policies and laws became more important in the Cape Colony from 1890 onwards. As regards mixed marriages, there was no official ban to be found in most of the British African colonies and no new legal definition of ‘white’ versus ‘native’ was introduced during the period under consideration. Only in the former Transvaal Republic, after 1910 part of the Union of South Africa, with its tradition of Boer ‘native policy’, were mixed marriages illegal since 1898.57 In the Union of South Africa these differences prevailed, and mixed marriages were still possible in the Cape Province, even if such marriages were an exception.58 These 56 In 1853, the qualifications for franchise were either occupation franchise, separately or jointly with any land, of the value of 25 pounds, or a wage of 50 pounds per annum or 25 pounds with board and lodging and a minimum voting age of twenty-one. Several acts then restricted African access to the franchise during the following decades. The African and coloured voters had between 15 and 16 percent of all votes between 1892 and 1910. See D.R. Edgecombe, “The Non-racial Franchise in Cape Politics, 1853–1910,” Kleio 10 (1978): 21–37; Vivian Bickford–Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice 1875–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995): 10. 57 However, relations between white women and black men were regulated in most British colonies around 1900 (being perceived as the ultimate danger to white superiority), but marriages between white men and black women were not (unlike the situation in the German colony). See Gareth Cornwell, “George Webb Hardy’s ‘The Black Peril’ and the Social Meaning of ‘Black Peril’ in Early Twentieth Century Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 443–44; also see Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10 (1984): 170–97. 58 See Martin Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001); see also Pamela Scully, “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review 100.2 (1995): 335–59.



Encounters Over the Border

19

marriages were, of course, socially condemned; nevertheless, British regulations and laws allowed for more leeway and flexibility. As in German African colonies, concubinage and half-legal marriages were widely practised by white traders, railway engineers, unmarried settlers, and colonial administrators who lived far from the administrative centres.59 But in the British case as well, awareness of racial issues increased, and maintaining an imperial ‘British race’ became an important aim,60 since there was a growing fear that English blood could be ‘corrupted’ by mixing it with the blood of Africans.61 A change of policy could be found in 1909: a directive was issued by the Colonial Office which for the first time provided a general rule to discourage concubinage for members of the colonial service,62 as this would endanger the authority of the colonial administration. How did the two colonial administrations perceive each other concerning these issues? The British side observed with some concern the state racism of German South-West Africa with its over-regulation. The administrators of the Cape Colony, and later the Governor-General of South Africa and the officials in the British Foreign Office, were quite astonished by the new German regulations re-defining ‘white’ and ‘native’. And they were not willing to tolerate the thought that the new German definitions of ‘native’ might affect British citizens: in an official despatch to the German Foreign Ministry in 1912, the British ambassador in Berlin stated that “His Majesty’s Government consider it is desirable that no British subject who had the status of a white man when the Protectorate was taken over by the German Government should be reduced to the status of a native.”63 Also, children from valid marriages with British subjects should be treated as British and should not fall under German ‘native law’. Even if mixed-race people were viewed with suspicion in the Cape Colony, the official British line would certainly not tolerate any re-definition of British citizens. Mixed marriages thus became a bone of contention between the British and the Germans during the last years of the German South-West African 59

Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester

U P , 1990): 158. 60 61 62 63

259.

Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 159. Schulte–Althoff, “Rassenmischung im kolonialen System,” 56–57. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 157. B A B , R 1001/5417, Botschafter Granville an Kiderlen–Waechter, 11 October 1912,

20

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

protectorate.64 There were some twenty to thirty mixed marriages between German citizens and Africans/mixed-race persons and twenty concerning British citizens.65 An example of the interactions between German and British colonial administrators is the case of the Windelberg family: here, a German citizen wished to marry a (in German terms) mixed-race woman called Klukowski, who had the status of a white woman in the Cape Colony. The German magistrate forbade the marriage, with the result that the couple went to Rietfontein in the Cape Colony and got married in 1907. Afterwards, the German magistrate in German South-West Africa refused to include their children in the German birth register. After protests from the British consulate and from the British Foreign Office, colonial secretary Solf intervened. He stated that the children had the status of Germans according to international law, since the marriage was valid under British law. Finally, the German administration in South-West Africa refused to obey and delayed the case.66 A conflict between different colonial laws/regulations on how to define a white identity could be witnessed. German regulations in German South-West Africa did not accord with British law on the definition of ‘white’/ ‘coloured’: In certain cases, the German side were forced to accept the British definition, since international law had to be observed. The interventions of the British consulate on behalf of mixed-race people are quite remarkable, given the extent of racial prejudice in the British administration of the neighbouring Cape Colony, as Vivian Bickford–Smith has shown.67 The colonial administration was highly critical of the means by which the Germans tried to implement their racial policy and could not accept any infringement of the rights of British citizens. This also represented a violation of British sovereignty and could thus not be tolerated. In this field, a British colonial identity was demarcated against the new rigid self-definition of ‘white’ versus ‘native’ in the German colony.

Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 269. Cornelia Essner, “ ‘ Wo Rauch ist, da ist auch Feuer’: Zu den Ansätzen eines Rassenrechts für die deutschen Kolonien,” in Rassendiskriminierung, Kolonialpolitik und ethnischnationale Identität, ed. Wilfried Wagner (Münster: L I T , 1992): 146–47. 66 B A B , R 1001/5424, Staatssekretär des Reichskolonialamtes Solf an Staatssekretär des Auswärtigen Amtes, 30 June 1913. 67 Bickford–Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town. 64 65



Encounters Over the Border

21

Conclusion In metropolitan discourse and in everyday administration and interaction with Africans, German and British colonial identities proved multi-layered: the British colonial administration opposed the highly bureaucratic and rigid terms of colonial policy implemented by the Germans, and the criticism fed into their own self-definition as ‘experienced’ and ‘better’ colonizers. The German colonial administration mostly regarded British colonial policy as far too laissez-faire and lenient. This disapproval was again used to define a distinct and ‘better’ German colonial style. In this discourse, the cultural backgrounds of both countries and British and German stereotypes were integrated into the process of styling oneself and the other colonizer. The fact that Britain had a long-established colonial empire and Germany was a newcomer in the colonial sphere also had a strong impact on self-definitions. German discourse in colonial publications and within the administration oscillated between admiration for the British as a role model and attempts to shape the German colonies in a more rigorous, specifically German way. However, alongside these processes of demarcation, the sharing and exchange of colonial knowledge and mutual support also became important aspects of a colonial identity as imperial European powers in Africa, particularly during the last decade before World War I. As has become clear from the discussion of mixed marriages, the two European powers had to negotiate their colonial self-definition between their own colonial administrations and their fellow imperialists. The insecure and changing demarcation line between white European, ‘coloured’, and black African remained a constant challenge in the colonial situation. In this case, international law and transnational movements, and personal as well as political aspects, were connected in the process of demarcating a white European identity. Identity-formation was often ambivalent, was subject to change over time, and was, of course, also influenced by the respective political situations of the ‘mother countries’. Despite growing tensions in Europe, both imperial powers attained a high degree of cooperation in the colonies during the years immediately before World War I. Such a colonial understanding is also obvious on the imperial level whenever colonial knowledge and self-definitions were debated and exchanged in the metropoles. The overruling interest in the African colonies before 1914 was certainly to define a white European identity against the challenge of the indigenous population and to uphold European supremacy

22

U L R I K E L I N D N E R 

in Africa. However, this white European supremacy was not constant and unchangeable throughout the different European colonies. On the question of how to be a white European in Africa, one could find transnational agreements but also specific national definitions and particular cultural forms of identity that had been developed in a national colonial context.



The Colonial Order Upside Down? British and Germans in East African Prisoner-of-War Camps During World War I

M ICHAEL P ESEK

W

HEREAS, IN

G E R M A N Y , young men marched onto the battlefields with patriotic songs on their lips, the mood for war among Germans in the East African colony was much less enthusiastic. Governor Heinrich Schnee, one of the few governors in the history of the colony without a military background, saw only little chance of victory against the Allied forces. The colony, he argued, was encircled by Germany’s enemies: the Belgian Congo in the west, British-Nyasaland in the south, and British East Africa in the north. Although Portugal, bordering the colony in the south, remained neutral during the first months, it later played a distinctive role in supporting the Allies when, in 1917 and 1918, the colony was invaded by German troops retreating from the Allied offensive. Moreover, Schnee feared rebellions by Africans if the colonial order was shattered by the war. And so did other Germans. Georg Zürich, a German planter, recalled that, in the first weeks of the war, Germans feared the outbreak of rebellions much more than a British invasion.1 The governor of British East Africa was likewise sceptical about the war, and his arguments resembled those of his German counterpart Schnee: the war could have unforeseeable consequences for the relations between Europeans and Africans. However, there seemed to be only little chance for those who opposed the struggle. Georg Julius Ernst Gürich, Während des Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika und Südafrika: Meine Erlebnisse bei Ausbruch des Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika, im englischen Gefangenenlager in Südafrika und auf der Rückreise nach Europa (Berlin: D. Riemer (E. Vohsen), 1916): 22. 1

24

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

The military in the colony were eager to wage war, even if the prospect of victory was slight. For the German commander of the Schutztruppe (German colonial troops), Paul von Lettow–Vorbeck, war was not even a question; his only concern was how long the Germans could stand up against the Allied troops. He had a clear goal: namely, to hold out as long as possible in order to tie up as many British imperial troops as possible. Lettow–Vorbeck’s and Schnee’s different views on the colony’s role in the war clashed within a few weeks after the outbreak of the conflict. Officially, Schnee was the commander of all armed forces in the colony, but Lettow–Vorbeck disputed the governor’s command and ignored most of Schnee’s orders. Schnee wired to Berlin for clarification of the chain of command. Before he could get an answer, the conflict was resolved by Lettow–Vorbeck’s victory in the battle of Tanga.2 There were similar conflicts between the civil administration and the military on the British side. But, as in the German colony, the military were deaf to such warnings. For the War Office, the potential danger posed by German East Africa arose from its strategic location on the edge of the Indian Ocean, since supply routes from India might become vulnerable. It was feared that German warships could use the ports of the colony as a base for operations. Despite early warnings by military intelligence officers such as Richard Meinertzhagen, British generals assumed that the campaign would be a cakewalk.3 They underestimated both the determination of the Germans to wage this war and the military skills of the latter’s African soldiers. Moreover, they expected the Africans to rise up against German colonial rule as soon as they saw the regime shaken by the war. They hoped that the British troops would be welcomed by the local population as liberators, since British officers and officials perceived the German colonial regime as cruel.

2 Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg (BA Militärarchiv), N 103/81, Intelligence Report Africa, October 1914 – December 1915, Aufzeichnungen des britischen Captain Meinertzhagen, auszugsweise Abschrift; BA Militärarchiv, N 14/14, Boell, Ludwig, Anlagen zum Manuskript “Der Feldzug in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1914–1918”; BA Militärarchiv, N 103/45, Nachlass v. Lettow–Vorbeck: Einsatz während des Feldzuges in DeutschOstafrika. Persönliches Tagebuch; Heinrich Schnee, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Weltkriege: Wie wir lebten und kämpften (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919): 43; Paul Emil von Lettow–Vorbeck, Meine Erinnerungen an Ostafrika (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920): 24. 3 See Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary, 1899–1926 (London & Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960).



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

25

The campaign in eastern Africa, although fought for reasons that had little to do with the European colonies there, was not only about Europe. It was, from its very inception, about Europe’s colonial order in Africa. As soon as the first shots were fired in Europe, colonial politicians and the colonial military attempted to include their particular agenda in the new needs of their nations at war. In Britain, the Colonial Office and the Indian Office strongly promoted the war in the colonies against the more reluctant War Office. German officers stationed overseas, such as Lettow–Vorbeck, developed their own schemes about what should be done in the ‘faraway places’ of the German Empire. They acted against the established views of policy-makers in the metropole, who generally opted for peace in the colonies. Most German officials had a rather limited vision of postwar Europe’s colonial order overseas. Even though a group of German colonial politicians and diplomats were dreaming of founding a German Mittelafrika (central Africa) that would range from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, these schemes did not go so far as to influence the strategic plans of the Emperor and the General Staff. The British were far more eager to use the war as an opportunity to revive the project of a Cape-to-Cairo railway that would become possible if parts of the German colonial empire were annexed after victory was secured on European battlefields. The outcome of the war is known, and so is the re-ordering of the political landscape in Africa as detailed in the Versailles Treaty. When dealing with the impact of the war on Europe’s colonial order in Africa, I am not referring to the well-known power-politics of Versailles but to practices and discourse that emerged locally or, so to speak, on the battlegrounds. Colonial order as seen there is as much a configuration of social practices and relationships as it is, in a Bourdieusian sense, a grammar orchestrating the production of social world representations. The battlegrounds of colonial order lay as much on African soil as in the publications written by the participants in the war once they had returned home. As a configuration of social practices, colonial order is not easy to grapple with, mainly because – as I have noted elsewhere – it emerged in a complex environment in which it was alien.4 African societies did not enthusiastically welcome the arrival of the colonial order, which in many cases was enforced with the utmost brutality. The colonial state that imposed this order might have had the military 4 Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2005).

26

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

strength to weaken or destroy the social order of African societies, but it did not have the power and resources to transform them according to its will. If colonial order was imposed on African societies, it remained a fragmented and ambivalent configuration. Therefore, when reading the sources of colonial rulers, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between description and fantasy. Imposing a colonial order was a very radical social and political engineering project; it aimed at predictable, regulated future development. As a configuration of social worlds and a discourse representing social worlds, colonial order was all about differentiation. The difference between Africans and Europeans – assumed by colonial discourses – was performed in everyday spectacles staged by colonial rulers. It guided every aspect of colonial politics, from the enforcement of European superiority in colonial law to the urban planning of colonial towns. With the same vigour that colonial discourses ordered social worlds according to racial categories, colonial politics tried to build a social world in which these categories divided the powerful from the powerless, the rulers from the oppressed. Whereas the German colonial order may have had much less impact on Africans than colonial rulers liked to believe or reported home to their superiors as well as to an eager German public, the colonial order did gain momentum, especially in the construction of the colonial ruler itself. Creating an order that provided Germans with privileged access to power resources and global consumer worlds, it enabled them to perform their status as master or, as it was called in German East Africa, wana mkubwa (great master). This chapter deals with the experiences and narratives of prisoners of war (P O W s) in either British or German camps. When I started my research about World War I, the question of colonial order quickly attracted my attention. Having completed my first book about the emergence of colonial order in German East Africa, I found it rewarding to investigate its very end.5 I should confess that my interest arose mainly out of a certain preference for the dramaturgies typical of historical processes. However, both epochs are clearly connected by the question of colonial order in crisis. As I will argue, the camps can be seen as a new space that emerged during the war. In this space, the colonial order was violated and to a certain extent reversed. For most P O W s, their experiences within this new space were accompanied by a strong feeling of crisis regarding their colonial identities. As soon as British troops conquered the colony and freed British inmates, the 5

Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika.



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

27

British government initiated investigations into cases of mistreatment of their nationals in German camps. First-person accounts of British prisoners were published as early as 1917. Both investigation reports and published books are used as main sources for this chapter, but they are highly problematic sources. Indeed, they have to be read in the context of the aforementioned postwar debates, to which they clearly contribute. Nonetheless, they are very useful precisely because of this involvement. By trying to build a case for German war crimes, they revealed a colonial order in crisis. What we can learn from the discourse of a colonial society in crisis is not only how the war influenced the individual lives of Europeans – it also provides compelling insights into what Europeans regarded as the normality of colonial life and order.

British POW s in German Camps: The Colonial Order Upside Down The imprisonment of British and other enemy nations’ subjects living in the colony began in the early days of the war. Although the civil administration under governor Heinrich Schnee had granted these people the right to leave the colony, the colonial military, which had quickly gained control over the territory, prohibited all migration towards neighbouring colonies. Instead, the military began to force Europeans from enemy nations to leave their farms and houses and to move into quickly erected camps. In the first weeks of the war, only a few individuals were affected. The first wave of Europeans who ended up in these camps consisted of missionaries and planters who lived in the northeast of the colony, where German and British forces initially began to fight. From letters penned by Church Mission Society (C M S ) missionaries to their families back home, it appears that in most locations British missionaries were able to pursue their work without major disturbances during the first months.6 It was only after the battles of Tanga and Longido that the German military started to imprison British subjects more systematically. However, many missionaries were still left in place. But at the end of 1915, with the Allied offensive looming, the second and last wave of imprisonments temporarily interrupted the activities of British missionaries.

6 C M S Archive, British Library, London: Copy of a Letter from Simeonu Mtipula, Mwami Teacher, to Miss Jackson, 29 June 1916.

28

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

We do not have many sources about these early imprisonments, but one Belgian witness describes the deportation of several Italian families from the Kilimanjaro region to the camp at Kilimatinde. After an arduous journey of more than five hundred kilometres, the men, women, and children reached the camp in a “pitiable state.” The author was particularly incensed by the fact that the families were guarded by African soldiers and thus exposed to what was perceived as latent humiliation.7 This experience was echoed by C M S missionary D.E. Rees, who described his journey through several camps in early 1915. As the war progressed and the German military became more and more paranoid, even missionaries were deported to the camps. In his autobiography, Martin Kayamba Mdumi, an early convert of the University Mission for Central Africa (U M C A ), recollected that Germans accused several missionaries from Magila of being spies for the British. The missionaries were arrested and brought to a camp near Morogoro. Only their wives and children were allowed to stay temporarily in Magila. Later on, they, too, had to travel to the camp at Tabora.8 We have no figures detailing how many British subjects or individuals of other nationalities were interned by the Germans during the war; the majority of files pertaining to the administration of the colony during wartime were lost or destroyed by the Germans when they withdrew before the Allied forces in 1916 and 1917. But given the small number of Europeans living in the colony at the time, the overall figure probably did not exceed several hundred. Even after the first battles of the war, during which the Germans were able to capture many Allied troops, numbers did not drastically increase. We can only guess the number of British P O W s, but they probably did not go beyond a few hundred, since Germans used to release most of their European prisoners in exchange for their word of honour not to fight against them. The Germans, so it appears from various sources, made a certain distinction between the treatment of soldiers and civilians. Captured military were usually separated from missionaries and planters.9 Van Leeuw, “Souvenirs de deux années de captivité en Afrique orientale allemande: Août 1914–Septembre 1916,” Congo 3.3 (1923): 314. 8 Martin Kayamba Mdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi, M.B.E., of the Bondei Tribe,” in Ten Africans, ed. Margery Freda Perham (London: Faber & Faber, 1963): 173–272. 9 C.P. Fendall, The East African Force, 1915–1919; an unofficial record of its creation and fighting career, together with some account of the civil and military administrative conditions in East Africa before and during that period (London: Witherby, 1921): 79. 7



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

29

Therefore, most cases discussed here concern missionaries and other civilians, since they filed the majority of reports condemning Germans for abuses in the P O W camps. There were also some complaints from military prisoners, the account of medical officer Holtom being such a case.10 Nevertheless, it seems that the abuses discussed in the following pages were mainly visited upon missionaries. This may not just be due to better treatment of captured soldiers, but also to missionaries’ greater awareness of issues of colonial order. Indeed, in contrast to the majority of British officers who came to eastern Africa only for the war, the missionaries had been part of the prewar colonial order. Moreover, British officers seemed to have benefited from a more lenient attitude of the German military, based as it was on a codex of military honour. There were three main camps, located at Tabora, Kilimatinde, and Kiborani, as well as some smaller camps that were mostly stopovers for the three main camps. From the accounts of British inmates, the living conditions for Europeans in the camps were fairly humane but certainly not luxurious. In the first two years of the war, the P O W s experienced only minor problems with food, although that provided in the camps was hardly comparable to what Europeans usually consumed in prewar times. But this was also the case for the German population of the colony. Owing to the war and the subsequent blockade installed by the British navy, Germans were cut off from all supplies and experienced serious food shortages. This situation was compounded by the fact that, until then, Europeans had mainly lived on imported canned food because colonial agriculture focused on cash crops and proved inadequate to feed the colony.11 Holtom describes the food he got in the first days of his imprisonment as good and mentions “a plentiful supply.” It was only later that he experienced shortages, but he attributed these to the worsening situation of the German food supply caused by the war.12 According to one Belgian source, the P O W s at the Tabora camp received 100 g of bread made from manioc and some cooked meat for

E.C. Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity in German East Africa, being the personal experiences of Surgeon E.C.H., Royal Navy (London: Hutchinson, 1919): 150. 11 Otto Friedrich Raum, “German East Africa: Changes in African Life under German Administration, 1892–1914,” in History of East Africa, ed. E.M. Chilver & Vincent Todd Harlow (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1965): 177; Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Hamburg: L I T , 1995): 367, 609. 12 Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 68. 10

30

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

breakfast and a nearly meatless soup or rice and potatoes for lunch. As to drinks, the inmates were only served dirty water and some coffee. The situation in the camp at Kilimatinde was comparable to that of Tabora, but the author emphasized that Europeans had to accept food from the native population. Moreover, they had to pay for it from the meagre financial resources they still had. What made the situation a lot easier for the P O W s was the fact that they were supported by families from the local missions.13 The reference to African food hints at P O W s’ fear of losing the distinction they had enjoyed in prewar times. As the historian of colonial cuisine Albert Wirz mentioned, colonial identities were based very much on what one ate and how one ate it.14 The European perception of African cooking was overwhelmingly pejorative: it expressed the assumed otherness of Africans in terms of disgust. Thus, for the P O W s their experience with the food in the camps represented not only a change in taste but also a challenge to their identity. For the missionary Frederick Spanton, things were even worse: the food at the Morogoro camp was made of such low-quality millet that even the Africans used it only for beer-brewing or in times of famine.15 The regime enforced in the smaller camps seemed to guarantee some basic comforts for the European inmates, in accordance with what they were accustomed to. Only Tabora was an exemption – to a certain degree. Still, in the first two years of the war, most European P O W s had their personal servants and cooks. Holtom mentions that it was only after two British officers had attempted to escape that prisoners were deprived of their personal servants as a form of retaliation. This, as he comments, clearly served as an act of humiliation: In a European country this would not have mattered very much, but in Africa, where even the poorest white has one or two native servants, the effect was to seriously lower British prestige and to give the natives the impression that we were a conquered and inferior race, and this, doubtless, is exactly what the Germans intended.16

Van Leeuw, “Souvenirs de deux années de captivité,” 317. Albert Wirz, “Essen und Herrschen: Zur Ethnographie der kolonialen Küche in Kamerun vor 1914,” Genève–Afrique 22.2 (1984): 38–62. 15 Great Britain. Foreign Office, Reports on the Treatment by the Germans of British Prisoners and Natives in German East Africa (London: H M S O , 1917): 3. 16 Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 106. 13 14



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

31

Arriving at Tabora, Frederick Spanton complained bitterly that his ‘boys’, or servants, were denied him. But what particularly irked the inmates was the close surveillance they were subjected to. There were roll-calls and inspections every day.17 The inmates were guarded by African soldiers, the socalled Askari. According to some statements, the Askari used their power on several occasions to humiliate the Europeans. There were even accusations according to which the African guards had beaten or robbed European P O W s.18 But for the missionaries, the mere fact of having to obey orders given by Africans was a humiliation. It was not so much the living conditions that aroused the anger of the P O W s and later led them to accuse German officers of war crimes in the camps as what they saw as a reversal of the prewar colonial order. This order had guaranteed a high status connected with certain privileges and luxuries. One of these privileges was that, despite all the talk about the value of work that had become a basic argument in Europe’s propaganda about its ‘civilizing mission’ in Africa, Europeans were seldom obliged to perform physical work in the colony. The question of work was indeed a basic boundary that separated Europeans from Africans. Physical work was a task reserved for Africans, while brainwork was the preserve of Europeans. A good measure of how unusual physical work seemed to be for Europeans in the colonies in prewar times is provided by the accounts of European P O W s who were ordered to work in the German camps and reacted to that obligation with great indignation and bewilderment. Medical officer Holtom indignantly noted that he had to do “coolie-work” while he was imprisoned during the first months of war because he had to assist German Askari in building the Boma, or the German administrative headquarters, as well as defence projects. Moreover, he got his orders from Africans.19 Other P O W s reported that they had to build native mansions, to carry the water they needed over a distance of several miles, and to collect the firewood for their cooking in nearby forests. Furthermore, Europeans had to clean their latrines them-

Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 105. Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 23; Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 135; Meinertzhagen, Army Diary, 196; The National Archives, Public Record Office (T N A ; P R O ), C O 691/12 Government Committee on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners of War. 19 Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 150. 17 18

32

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

selves, even though their Askari guards also used them.20 This last fact aroused great anger among British P O W s, since it represented a transgression of boundaries between whites and blacks that had been unthinkable until then. In the Kilimatinde and Kiboreni prison camps, inmates were also forced to contribute to the German war effort. The women had to tailor and knit uniforms for the German troops, and the men had to work in the joiner’s workshop, where they produced wooden nails.21 In the discourse of European P O W s about the vanishing colonial order in the camps, Africans served as a mirror for Europeans’ fears. The inmates perceived their lot as abuse and felt they were treated as puppets in the German propaganda effort. All the work they were obliged to perform had to be done in front of Africans. At least for missionaries who had preached the protestant ethic as the golden gate for Africa’s access to civilization, it was not work itself that proved problematic but working in front of Africans. The latter was considered a crime against the colonial order. There again, Africans served as witnesses to German misdeeds. But it was only through their witnessing that these misdeeds became an offence against the colonial order. The missionary Jas Scott–Bronn mentions that while he was working in a field he talked with his Askari guard, who expressed his bewilderment at seeing Europeans doing physical work.22 Others reported that among the African population the terms mateka or watumbwa wa ulaya (meaning ‘white slaves’) were used to designate the P O W s.23 Hence, the Germans were accused of doing their best to degrade the British in the eyes of the Africans by making a show of the P O W s. When his group of prisoners arrived at the Bagamoyo camp, a missionary reported that they were formed into a close procession. The porters were then directed to sing as they went along in order to attract people, and the streets were lined as we passed

Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 5. Van Leeuw, “Souvenirs de deux années de captivité,” 316; Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 13. 22 Jas Scott–Bronn in Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 13. 23 Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 5; van Leeuw, “Souvenirs de deux années de captivité,” 316. The term mateka has various translations. It either means ‘prisoners of war’ or ‘slaves’, since in precolonial times most captured people became slaves. Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995): 108. Watumbwa are ‘slaves’ in a more general sense. 20 21



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

33

through the town with excited crowds of natives who had been brought to look at us. When we arrived at the boma we were halted outside the building for about half an hour. Surrounded by a crowd of natives and Arabs, who amused themselves by vying with one another insults.24

Holtom describes his journey through different camps as an endless spectacle held by the Germans for the benefit of Africans. At each train station where his group of P O W s arrived, a huge crowd of Africans had gathered and they would watch the procession of prisoners with amusement.25 Both sides – the Germans as well as the Allies – fought the war not only for a postwar colonial order. And while Africans were not considered as a group that should gain any influence in the future construction of colonial rule in eastern Africa, they served as witnesses in such narratives and accusations. Generally, however, the inhabitants of East Africa seemed to have reacted with a lack of interest. It is even doubtful that Africans called the P O W s ‘slaves’ as the missionaries had claimed. However, the Germans did not completely overstep established boundaries. Differences between European and non-European P O W s still existed and, compared to the non-European P O W s, the missionaries and imprisoned officers fared much better as a rule. Captured Indian and African soldiers and many imprisoned African members of British missions had to endure gruelling work, inhumane living conditions, and harsh discipline, often ending in death. When Martin Kayamba Mdumi arrived at the Korogwe prison camp, he and other prisoners were put in a prison gang and despatched to carry sand till the evening. We used to work with criminals from 4 p.m. till 11 p.m. From 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. we carried ammunition boxes from the train to the Police Station.26

Food was provided only irregularly, and many had to sleep outdoors. Things got worse when Mdumi and his comrades were moved to the Tabora camp. On the way to the railway station of Kimamba, “the German African soldiers who were escorting us were treating our gang very badly. They made us 24 Great Britain. Foreign Office, “Reports on the treatment,” 2; T N A , P R O , C O 691/12 Government Committee on the Treatment by the enemy of British Prisoners of

War. 25 Holtom, Two Years’ Captivity, 56. For similar accusations, also see Imperial War Museum 95/32/1: The Reverend J.T. Williams Papers. 26 Mdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 188.

34

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

run and lashed the stragglers.”27 In Tabora he met some of his former colleagues, who were on the verge of death because they were so very harshly treated that they thought not one of them would survive. They were made to hoe from morning to evening without lifting their backs, and whenever they tried to do so they were severely flogged. They were all in chains and slept with chains round their necks. They did everything in chains.28

Moreover, they had to endure inhumane living conditions: they were forced to sleep on open ground and to drink water from buckets formerly used by them as toilets.29 Similar to this was the fate of non-European officers and soldiers, like that of Corporal Mzololo, a Matabele who had served in the Nyasaland Battalion of the King’s African Rifles. After the war, he reported to the commission on war crimes that his uniform was taken from him when he was captured and instead he was given a long white kanzu, the garment typical of the male population on the coast and in urban centres of the interior. The kanzu was also a garment commonly worn by porters, and serving as a porter was Mzololo’s fate until he was freed. From German sources, it appears that their troops were constantly short of supplies and porters during this period of the war. When they began to lose more and more territory as well as the colonial infrastructure they had previously been able to rely on, they increasingly needed to appropriate both from the enemy. The group of porters to which Mzololo was assigned only had a small chance of surviving. They suffered from shortages of food and medicine as well a harsh and brutal regime of exploitation. During the marches, Mzololo witnessed how a German officer killed one of his exhausted comrades when he refused to carry on.30 Decher, a German volunteer, confirmed such deeds: he witnessed several cases in which German officers or Askari soldiers murdered exhausMdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 218; see also the statements of Godfrey Herbert Patison, John Henry Briggs, Zacharias Marengo, Mika Munyambwa and Ernest William Doulton in Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the treatment,” 19– 23. 28 Mdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 218; this is confirmed in a statement by Spanton to the Government committee on German war crimes. See Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Reports on the Treatment,” 6. 29 Mdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 190. 30 T N A , P R O , F O 608/215: Copy of Statement of Corporal Mzololo, Enclosure to a Despatch by Majro G. Parson, Department of Defence. Northern Rhodesia to Department of Administration, Salisbury, 11 February 1919. 27



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

35

ted porters.31 If the Germans still maintained racial differences in their treatment of P O W s, the British did so as well and remained relatively silent about the fate of their Indian and African soldiers. It was not brutal and inhumane treatment that filled the lines of the reports on German P O W camps; instead it was the fate of Europeans that attracted the most attention. Shortly after the internments, Martin Kayamba Mdumi – just like his British colleagues – was accused of spying for the British and was taken into custody. He complained bitterly: “It was the beginning of the persecution of the African Christians belonging to the U M C A . I found my safety was jeopardized.”32 It seems that, from that point on, his world caved in. Most of his life had been spent with missionaries. He attended Zanzibar’s U M C A Boys’ School. He then became a sort of crossover between a servant and a priest for a C M S missionary and moved with the latter to Magila. Mdumi held a British passport and could have considered himself British: “Yes, I am a British,” he answered when he was questioned about his nationality by the German officer who had ordered his arrest.33 Mdumi’s fate convincingly illustrates the very individual consequences of the war for African Christians. Educated by and socialized with missionaries, he shared their vision of the future of African societies. This future was envisioned as a turning-away from a precolonial period that was imagined in terms of warfare and ‘barbarism’. But this vision was already shattered during the first months of war. Not only did Germans direct their anger against individual Christians affiliated with the enemy, they also stigmatized the Christian faith as such. In his autobiographical account of his years spent in the German colony, the C M S missionary John Henry Briggs reported that a German D C O enjoined the local Christians of Ugogo to sever their connexions with the English Mission by either going over to Mohammedanism or returning to heathenism, and to destroy at once their Bibles, hymn books, Prayer Books, and all other books printed in England, which, he said, would get them into trouble if found in their possession.34

For Briggs the missionary as well as for Mdumi the convert, the Germans were sacrificing the basic values of Europe’s colonial project in Africa in the 31 32 33 34

Mdumi, “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 242. “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 186. “The Story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi,” 154. John Henry Briggs, In the East African War Zone (London: C M S , 1918): 58.

36

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

name of a propagandistic show to ensure the goodwill and loyalty of their African subjects. Indeed, from a missionary perspective, the colonial project was seen as closely interwoven with the propagation of Christianity. But as I have shown elsewhere, this view was not shared by the majority of German colonizers, who saw the Christian dimension of Europe’s civilizing mission as, at best, a minor concern and sometimes even as an annoying obligation.35 The fact that colonial powers counted on the support of Muslim elites was not unique to German East Africa. The British also cultivated close relations with the Muslim elites in Sudan, even if some of the latter had previously joined the ranks of the Madhists. However, hardly any other colonial administration in Africa was as reluctant to support Christian missionaries as the Germans in East Africa. Frederick Spanton, citing some of the German officers’ ‘boys’, even doubted that Germans were Christians at all.36 Nevertheless, German Holy War propaganda should be assessed from a broader perspective. In the very first month of World War I, German diplomats at the Ottoman court had put pressure on the Sultan of Istanbul to declare a Holy War. They hoped that such a declaration would provoke Muslim uprisings all over the British and French colonial empires. Although the scheme clearly failed to fulfil the hopes of the Germans, the British authorities became very suspicious of the activities of German and Ottoman agents who might be playing the role of ‘jihadists’ and reacted with harsh sanctions against dubious Muslim scholars. The missionary presses with their global network of journals and newspapers quickly publicized these German transgressions against Europe’s colonial order. Thereby, they revived a criticism of German colonial administration in eastern Africa in its dealings with Muslim subjects that had been en vogue among German, predominantly Protestant, missionaries during the prewar years. At the time, the missionaries had accused the government of favouring Muslim elites over African Christians. Whereas German missionaries remained largely silent on that topic 35 See: Michael Pesek, “Islam und Politik in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905–1919,” in Alles unter Kontrolle: Disziplinierungsverfahren im kolonialen Tanzania (1850–1960), ed. Katrin Bromber, Andreas Eckert & Albert Wirz (Hamburg: L I T , 2003): 99–140, and “Für Kaiser und Allah: Ostafrikas Muslime im Grossen Krieg für die Zivilisation, 1914–1919,” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaften Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen 19 (2004): 9–18. 36 Ernest Frederick Spanton, In German Gaols: A Narrative of Two Years Captivity in German East Africa (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917): 2. For the attitude of German colonizers towards Christianity, see my previously cited articles on policies towards the Muslim population.



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

37

during the war, some even became staunch supporters of Islam, and the anglophone missionaries readily exploited these tensions to their own advantage.37 The main source of these accusations was probably the group of missionaries imprisoned in the German P O W camps. Moslem World, a thoroughly international enterprise founded by the British orientalist Samuel Zwemer, with contributors from all over the world including some German orientalists, reported events linked to German jihad propaganda in eastern Africa with both concern and astonishment: The attitude of the Imperial German Government towards religion in their East African possession has been somewhat perplexing, in a nation professing Christianity. While Lutheran missions have received support from the Fatherland, proofs have been obtained of the desire of the German Government to foster Mohammedanism by every means in its power. Their reason for this seeming inconsistency was doubtless to imbue their Askaris or coloured black troops with the fanatical spirit of Islam, and to preach a Holy War when the occasion arose.38

These articles, published during the last year of the war, set the tone for a postwar dispute mainly fostered by British writers who tried to discredit the German colonial endeavour as a deviance from the basic principles of European civilization. Hence, the bewilderment of the authors served as a marker of difference between the British and the Germans. Indeed, accusing Germans of committing crimes against Europe’s colonial order with jihad propaganda neatly paralleled the debates about German war crimes in Europe. However, it must be stressed that the British postwar reception of German colonial Africa assigned responsibility for any ill-treatment of P O W s to the civilian administration, whereas Lettow–Vorbeck, who had already attained the status of a wartime hero among the British public, was acquitted of any charge.39

On the jihad propaganda of Germans in eastern Africa, see Pesek, “Für Kaiser und Allah,” and my forthcoming book about World War I in East Africa, which will be published in 2010. 38 “Germany and Islam in Eastern Africa,” Moslem World 3.4 (1918): 434. 39 Fendall, The East African Force, 79. On the construction of Lettow–Vorbeck as a hero, see Michael Pesek, “Colonial Heroes: German Colonial Identities in Wartime, 1914– 1918,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael F. Perraudin & Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 37

38

M I C H A E L P E S E K 

German POW s in British Camps: The Last Heroic Show of German Colonial Rule The Germans did not hesitate to launch similar accusations about the British treatment of German nationals in prison camps in British East Africa. However, as opposed to the British case, it never became a very public affair. According to letters written by German traders living in Mombasa, most Germans and Austrians were interned during the first days of the war. They were brought to prisons formerly reserved for Africans and had to sleep on plank beds. In the German discourse, there was the same growing fear of a loss of distinctions between Africans and Europeans. Similarly, it was argued that allowing such treatment represented a betrayal of Europe’s colonial order.40 This meant that the prewar perception of colonial rule as a European project still existed, at least as a reference point. Nevertheless, the Allies, too, were ready to engage in the game played with P O W s, if only for the sake of humiliating the enemy. When, in September 1916, Belgian and British troops conquered Tabora and freed the majority of European P O W s that the Germans had taken, they felt no qualms about recycling the notorious P O W camp there for the imprisonment of the numerous Germans who had remained in the town. According to a Belgian source, the new commanding officer of the camp – himself a former prisoner – introduced the same regime for the Germans that the latter had established for previous prisoners. When he was questioned by the Belgian officer about the reasons underlying his orders, the commander of the camp tersely replied that he was playing the tit-for-tat game: it was now time for the Germans to clean the latrines in front of the Africans.41 A German missionary who was interned after Belgian occupation confirmed these occurrences. Like their British predecessors, German P O W s were ordered to carry their own water and firewood as well as to clean the latrines. Moreover, the Belgians regularly forced them to parade through the native quarters of the town.42

40

Bundesarchiv Berlin (B A B ), R 1001/864: Hansing to Solfs, Hamburg, 24 September

1914. 41 Pierre Daye & Jules Renkin, Avec les Vainqueurs de Tabora: Notes d'un colonial belge en Afrique orientale allemande (Paris: Perrin, 1918): 215. 42 Karl Roehl, Ostafrikas Heldenkampf: Nach eigenen Erlebnissen dargestellt (Berlin: M. Warneck, 1918): 150.



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

39

Two years later, the last German troops surrendered after news of the armistice in Europe had reached eastern Africa. More than 150 German officers and about 1,200 Askari began their journey through the various Allied P O W camps. The Askari did not remain in the camps for a long time: usually they were released after six months. In contrast, German officers were first sent to Tabora and later usually conveyed to a transitional camp in Egypt or India. The biggest camp was located in Ahmednagar, India, and could accommodate more than 2,000 German prisoners. According to reports from the Red Cross, there were few reasons for complaint. The food was plentiful and housing was acceptable. There were even tennis courts, soccer fields, and billiard tables for the amusement of officers.43 In spring 1919, most of the prisoners were sent back home to Germany. For some reason, in contrast to the accounts of British P O W s in German camps, German P O W s put more emphasis on the construction of heroic images, born out of the experience in the camps. Although there had been a certain undertone of heroism in British accounts of German camps, heroism never became a major issue. In contrast to its British counterpart, the German narrative emerged a few years later when the debate about German ‘colonial guilt’ had reached its apex, and it used the experience of the camps as proof of the German Empire’s colonial success. Thus, German officers’ internment narratives did not focus primarily on their personal experiences but on the fate of their Askari fellows, who were portrayed as monuments of German colonialism. Indeed, German accounts were obsessed by the question of Askari loyalty. In a diary relating his war experiences, the officer Rudolf Wieland described the arrival of some hundred Askari at the P O W camp of Dar-es-Salaam. He was particularly fascinated by the behaviour of these men who had been captured by the British in 1916. The author stressed that, despite a lengthy imprisonment, the Askari still showed signs of a pro-German attitude. He drew similar conclusions from the scene of his arrival at the Tabora P O W camp: It is interesting to observe the crowds of natives who encounter us as we pass through the town. Three attitudes can be clearly distinguished. The first group proves its long-standing loyalty to us by greeting us openly. Others are wary of the new situation and thus remain cautious but friendly. Finally, there are those who demonstrate a passive indifference to us by letting us pass by without any 43

1917.

T N A , P R O , C O 691/8: Report of the Consulate of Switzerland, Bombay, 23 March

40

M I C H A E L P E S E K  reaction. These people are more or less loyal to the new rulers of the country. Nevertheless, a pro-German attitude can be detected in the majority of individuals.44

As in British narratives, Africans served as prime witnesses of the state of colonial order. For the Germans, this order inevitably vanished with the outcome of war and therefore they searched for traces of it in the attitudes of their former Askari soldiers or colonial subjects. Despite all the humiliations that the Askari had experienced at the hands of British officers during endless roll-calls where they were robbed of their personal belongings and sometimes even beaten, German officers reported that, at night, they still accompanied their dances with songs praising their former officers. Moreover, despite the insults inflicted upon German officers by the British, the Askari apparently still showed great respect for their former superiors by saluting them across the barbed wire that separated Europeans from Africans. And when British guards tried to impress them with their military rituals, they allegedly mocked them by imitating the badly executed drills.45 These early accounts by German participants in the war set the tone for future postwar literature depicting the German Askari as perhaps the last heroes of German colonial rule.46

Epilogue As the critics of the war in the colonies had foreseen, the war had a devastating impact on the colonial order in German East Africa. The simple fact that Europeans were killed by Africans was regarded by many contemporaries as the sign of an impending crisis in Europe’s colonial order in Africa. The devastation of the colony due to the fighting, the destruction of infrastructure and livelihoods, the evacuation of missions and plantations – all these aspects contributed to the picture of crisis that many Europeans described in their narratives about the war. Therefore, as far as the European BA Militärarchiv: N 103/91. Wieland, Rudolf. Nachlass v. Lettow–Vorbeck: Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Erlebnisse und Eindrücke vom Bekanntwerden des Waffenstillstandes bis zur Heimkehr der letzten 25 Lettow-Krieger. 45 BA Militärarchiv: N 103/91. Wieland, Rudolf. Nachlass v. Lettow–Vorbeck: Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Erlebnisse und Eindrücke vom Bekanntwerden des Waffenstillstandes bis zur Heimkehr der letzten 25 Lettow-Krieger. 46 Pesek, “Colonial Heroes.” 44



The Colonial Order Upside Down?

41

perception of events was concerned, the war also became a struggle to defend Europe’s colonial order from the consequences of a campaign which, even in the eyes of its strongest proponents, was seen as highly problematic if not dangerous for European supremacy in Africa. Nevertheless, just as Europeans battled for superiority in East Africa and for the right to establish their own colonial order, they also fought to define the right way to administer the colonies. Thus, for the first time, World War I created not only a space of violent encounter between European colonial powers but also a space for mutual observation, virtual dialogue, and unusually harsh criticism of colonial methods used by other European nations in Africa. It was not only a question of condemning the wartime enemy in some sort of propagandistic bashing. As much as the British noticed and often condemned the Germans, they also did so with the Belgians. As Ulrike Lindner shows in her chapter in this volume, such mutual observation between colonial powers was not something new or unique to World War I period. But what changed with this war was the end of the virtual truce between Europe’s colonial powers, a truce that had sacrificed criticism in favour of the vision of a common European civilizing mission overseas. Moreover, it openly set one European nation against the other. Even in such (from a European perspective) faraway places as eastern Africa, the new situation had a noticeable impact on the life of each individual European. This was perhaps most obvious in the P O W camps which the belligerent parties had erected during the war. As I have argued, in the P O W camps the colonial order that had guaranteed all Europeans – regardless of their nationalities – a certain number of privileges collapsed and was, in a sense, reversed. The experiences of the P O W s in these camps became a highly debated issue in postwar discussions, especially when the question arose of whether Germany would still have the right to possess colonies or not. The British side clearly rejected this option, and one of the arguments used to support this stance was the treatment of British subjects in German P O W camps in eastern Africa. 

Jack, Peter, and the Beast Postcolonial Perspectives on Sexual Murder and the Construction of White Masculinity in Britain and Germany at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

E VA B ISCHOFF

“O

will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century.” These words, spoken by Sir William Gull alias Jack the Ripper in the film From Hell, indicate the central place the Ripper occupies in public memory. Until today, the anonymous killer who was allegedly responsible for the death of five sex workers in the London district of Whitechapel in 1888 serves as the paradigmatic example of a so-called sex killer. He inspired artistic productions such as the movie Jack the Ripper (1976), graphic novels like Sin City (1991– 2000), and television dramas like the B B C production Jekyll (2007).1 However, sex crime was not restricted to the British Isles: murders such as the Ripper’s occurred in all Western societies and their colonies at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. Charles van Onselen even argues that the Ripper himself was, in fact, Joseph Silver, a pimp who was involved in internationally organized sex crime and engaged in ‘white slavery’: i.e. trafficking white women who had been coerced into prostitution across the globe.2 In the 1920s, the German public was shocked NE DAY MEN

From Hell, dir. Albert & Allen Hughes (Twentieth-Century-Fox, 2001); Jack the Ripper, dir. Jesús Franco (Elite Film, 1976); Frank Miller, Sin City (Yarns) (Milwaukie O R : Dark Horse, 1991–2000); Jekyll, dir. Stephen Moffat (B B C One, 2007). 2 Charles van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (New York: Walker, 2007): 418–85. 1

44

E V A B I S C H O F F 

by the deeds of several sexual murderers. The first among them was Karl Grossmann, who was suspected of murdering several women and was apprehended in Berlin in 1922. Other cases were those of Friedrich (Fritz) Haarmann and Karl Denke, whose deeds were discovered right after the verdict in Haarmann’s trial had been pronounced in December 1924. The last criminal whose case was debated during the years of the Weimar Republic was Peter Kürten, who killed nine people in the city of Düsseldorf. Most of his victims were single women from a working-class background.3 Apart from being an inspiration to the arts and literature, sexual murder is also the object of criminological or historical research and is often debated by scholars in the field of gender studies.4 The latter even argue that sexual murder was a key element in the articulation of modern gender identities at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to their findings, men were constructed as sexually aggressive and potential perpetrators in contrast to passive and helpless female victims.5 In other words: the sex killer figured as the ‘Other’ of ‘normal’ masculinity. Yet, none of these studies discusses the fact that almost all of the sex killers named above were connected to cannibalistic practices in one way or the other. In contrast to this scholarly neglect, contemporaries were well aware of this fact, especially in 1920s Germany: both Haarmann and Grossmann were suspected to have killed their sexual partners and to have sold the flesh of their victims on the black market. And according to the evidence

On 22 April 1931, Kürten was found guilty of murder in nine and of attempted murder in seven cases, several of them in coincidence with rape or attempted rape. See Urteil und Urteilsbegründung im Prozess gegen Peter Kürten, 22 April 1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/543, 2. 4 The studies on the Ripper case are too numerous to be fully accounted for here. With regard to the questions debated on the following pages, the most interesting among them are Judith R. Walkowitz, The City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992), L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 2001), and van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies. 5 Michael Schetsche, “Der Wille, der Trieb und das Deutungsmuster vom Lustmord,” in Serienmord: Kriminologische und kulturwissenschaftliche Skizzierungen eines ungeheuerlichen Phänomens, ed. Frank J. Robertz & Alexandra Thomas (Munich: belleville, 2004): 346–64; Hania Siebenpfeiffer, ‘Böse Lust’: Gewaltverbrechen in Diskursen der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005): 191; Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997): 19–21; Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1997): 5, 159. 3



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

45

found in his house, Denke had processed his victims’ bodies systematically into preserved meat and consumed it on a regular basis.6 Kürten confessed that he had drunk the blood of his victims.7 Thus, their contemporaries, such as Grossmann’s solicitor Erich Frey, saw themselves confronted with the resurrection of the “beast of prey, the cannibal, the wolf in human shape.”8 This accusation, or at least rumoured suspicion, however, opens up a (post)colonial dimension that ranges from western metropoles such as London and Berlin to Britain’s and Germany’s colonial spaces. As we know from seminal works in the field of postcolonial studies, the accusation of practising cannibalism had been a keystone of colonial discourse ever since 1492.9 According to these studies, it had a double function: On the one hand, the accusation of cannibalism marked the indigenous populations of colonial spaces as ‘savages’ and legitimized the European ‘civilizing mission’. On the other hand, “the cannibal” simultaneously served as “a mirror to the European subject,” who relied on it for “its self-definition,” but also “threatened to swallow it, both literally and also through representing the danger of ‘going native’, which could cause the civilized man return to an original state of barbarism.”10 In the following pages, I will take this colonial aspect into consideration while concentrating on the cases of Peter Kürten and Jack the Ripper. I will re-trace the lines of this ‘cannibal connection’ in three steps. Each of these steps will explore one among the several lines that constituted this connection and thereby reconstruct a complex and ‘entangled history’, as concep6 As reconstructed in the reports of the local prosecutor dating from 28 December 1924 and 16 January 1925 (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz I. HA Rep. 84a/D/57488, 2–6 and 84a/D/57488, 14–15). 7 Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen Peter Kürten, Dr. M. Raether, 2.1.1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/731, 225–27. If not indicated otherwise, all translations from German sources are mine. 8 Erich Frey, Ich beantrage Freispruch: Aus den Erinnerungen des Strafverteidigers Prof. Dr. Dr. Erich Frey (Hamburg: Blüchert, 1959): 60. 9 See: William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1979); Peter Hulme, “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 1–38; Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005). 10 Maggie Kilgour, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Barker et al., 242–43.

46

E V A B I S C H O F F 

tualized by scholars in postcolonial studies and by historians interested in transnational history and histoire croisée.11 Generally speaking, I will endeavour to demonstrate that both the German and the British construction of hegemonic masculinity relied on racist concepts of sexuality that originated in colonial discourses in anthropological and medical studies. This aspect has been mostly neglected by the research literature on German masculinity so far, with the exception of Sandra Mass’s study Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger. In contrast to her argument, which emphasizes a binary dichotomy of white German masculinity in contrast to African men (Askari),12 I will reconstruct a continuum of (ab)normality in which both masculinities, white and nonwhite, were located.

The Beast Within Before his trial started in April 1931, Kürten was examined by psychiatric and medical experts. These examinations had to determine the state of mind he had been in while committing the murders. They were deemed necessary because § 51 of the German penal code (Reichsstrafgesetzbuch 1871) exempted delinquents from full legal responsibility under the condition that they had been unable to act of their own free will because of some form of unconsciousness or mental disturbance.13 From Kürten’s perspective, this rule might have saved him from the death penalty. However, all the experts involved concluded that Kürten was fully accountable for his actions. They also considered him to be a typical “psychopath,” a Lustmörder (‘murderer out

Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgois World, ed. Cooper & Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 1–56; Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and the Post-Colonial State in India,” in Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, ed. Yehuda Elkana & Ivan Krastev (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 284–311; Michael Werner & Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History & Theory 45.1 (2006): 30–50. 12 Sandra Mass, Weisse Helden – schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006): 22–25, 8–16. 13 Ernst Traugott Rubo, Kommentar über das Strafgesetz für das deutsche Reich und das Einführungsgesetz vom 31. Mai 1870 sowie die Ergänzungsgesetze vom 10. Dezember 1871 und 26. Februar 1876, ed. Werner Schubert (Frankfurt am Main: Keip, 1992): 114, 467–73. 11



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

47

of lust’) who acted upon his perverted sexual drive and had killed to satisfy his sadistic desires.14 In this assessment, they referred to the notion of “sadism” that had been introduced by Richard von Krafft–Ebing in his study Psychopathia Sexualis.15 With reference to the writings of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, Krafft–Ebing defined “sadism” as the experience of sexual pleasurable sensations (including orgasm) produced by acts of cruelty, bodily punishment afflicted on one’s own person or when witnessed in others, be they animals or human beings. It may also consist of an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound or even destroy others in order thereby to create sexual pleasure in one’s self.16

In extreme pathological cases, the psychiatrist emphasized, this could result in the mutilation of the victim’s body, even in acts of cannibalism.17 To exemplify his findings, Krafft–Ebing referred to the case of Jack the Ripper, whom he considered to be a Lustmörder (sex-killer) because of his “murderous lust extending to anthropophagy.”18 Krafft–Ebing’s notions of sadism and of its role in motivating sexual murder were introduced to the English-speaking scientific community with the translation of his study Psychopathia Sexualis in 1893 and were soon widely accepted, albeit not unconditionally. The sexologist Havelock Ellis, for instance, gave a detailed account of Krafft–Ebing’s concept in his study on Love and Pain.19 Yet he simultaneously presented an alternative explanatory model by maintaining that sadism was driven by the desire to inflict and in turn experience pain, but not the exertion of power, as Krafft–Ebing had claimed. On the other hand, Ellis argued that the pleasure of experiencing or inflicting pain was part of humanity’s gendered evolutionary heritage. Ellis 14 Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen Peter Kürten, Dr. M. Raether, 2.1.1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/731, 268. 15 Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886). Tr. as Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Forensic Study (London: F.J. Rebman, 1893; later tr. from the 12th German ed. [1912], intro. Franklin S. Klaf, New York: Arkade, 1965). All quotations refer to the 1965 edition. 16 Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 53. 17 Psychopathia Sexualis, 62. 18 Psychopathia Sexualis, 58–59. 19 Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (1903; Honolulu: U P of Hawai‘i, 2001).

48

E V A B I S C H O F F 

reasoned that because hunting was as ‘natural’ to the male animal as being prey was to the female animal, the “infliction of pain must inevitably be a frequent indirect result of the exertion of power.” Moreover, “the infliction of pain by the male on the female,” he continued, “may itself be a gratification of the impulse to exert force.”20 He assumed that part of this evolutionary heritage was still present in modern European bourgeois society: This association between love and pain still persists even among the most normal civilized men and women possessing well-developed sexual impulses. The masculine tendency to delight in domination, the feminine tendency to delight in submission still maintain the ancient traditions when the male animal pursued the female.21

Although Ellis disagreed with Krafft–Ebing’s explanation of sadism as an extreme desire to exert power and instead stressed the importance of the circulation of desire and pain in sexual relationships, he nevertheless shared Krafft–Ebing’s underlying assumption of an evolutionary process during which human sexuality was increasingly refined and ‘civilized’.22 Both authors were convinced that the human sexual drive was structured along the same beast-like instincts as in prehistoric times and that earlier stages of this development could be discovered by studying ‘primitive’ societies in the colonies.23 This theory supported widely held racist beliefs about the similarities between ‘savages’, especially African men, and animals in general. Moreover, Ellis and Krafft–Ebing agreed that, within human sexual relationships, to quote the latter, “the active or aggressive rôle belongs to man; woman remains passive, defensive.”24 Accordingly, they both perceived sadistic impulses to be an inherent part of all ‘healthy’ (i.e. heterosexual and reproductive) male sexuality. This assumption was widely accepted in both medico-psychiatric and criminological Ellis, Love and Pain, 57. Love and Pain, 69. 22 Ellis, however, did not regard ‘civilizing’ developments as exclusively positive. He claimed that in modern societies the sexual drive often became distorted because men had no other outlet for their aggressive impulses but sexuality, and women were encouraged to give in to these impulses far too often by social conventions. Ellis, Love and Pain, 69–70. 23 His examples ranged from Africa, New Zealand, and Russia to medieval and early modern England. He also discussed the so-called ‘marriage by capture’ as proof of ‘natural’ male aggressiveness (Ellis, Love and Pain, 57–69). 24 Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 56. 20 21



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

49

literature. For example, Erich Wulffen, the author of a seminal guidebook for civil servants, judges, physicians, and pedagogues entitled Der Sexualverbrecher (1928), defined Lustmord accordingly and warned his readers: “The mere act of cohabitation with its physiologically inherent violence and lust, can induce the sadistic feelings and make him [sic!] kill his victim.”25 Thus, according to the medical, sexological, and criminological experts, every man was walking a fine line between ‘natural’ aggressive behaviour and ‘abnormal’ sadism. But who exactly had to be considered to be the ‘normal’ Dr Jekyll and who to be the criminal Mr Hyde? How to locate the beast that was allegedly lurking within every man? The answer to these questions, according to Krafft–Ebing, could be found in the criminal’s body itself. He argued that sex criminals were ‘tainted’ by a ‘degenerative’ neurological weakness which simultaneously caused an “excessively developed” aggressive sex drive and inhibited male self-control.26 Moreover, this weakness had to be regarded as a form of neurasthenia which, according to him, could be both an inherited physiological condition and an illness acquired by alcohol abuse or frequent masturbation.27 In this assessment, the Austrian psychiatrist was referring to two different yet connected concepts: neurasthenia and Entartung (degeneration). The latter was favoured by the majority of the German medical profession. Its supporters considered a so-called ‘degenerate’ to be a person who had been born with a hereditary predisposition to sexual deviancy and criminality, and were influenced by the notion of the “born criminal” or “atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”28 The idea of the ‘born crimi.

25 Erich Wulffen, Der Sexualverbrecher: Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Polizei- und Verwaltungsbeamte, Mediziner und Pädagogen; Mit zahlreichen kriminalistischen Originalaufnahmen (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1928): 458–59, 458. With this assessment it becomes most obvious that criminologists such as Wulffen and his contemporaries did think about Lustmord not as an exclusively homosexual phenomenon (as might be suggested by the prominence of Haarmann’s case in today’s media coverage of the sexual murderers of the 1920s) but that it was in fact linked to concerns about male sexuality in general. 26 See Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 56. 27 Richard von Krafft–Ebing, Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (Vienna: Hölder, 1900): 4–8. 28 Cesare Lombroso, “The Criminal,” Putnam’s Magazine 7 (1910): 793–96, repr. in The Criminal and Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso Published in the English Language

50

E V A B I S C H O F F 

nal’ had originally been introduced by Enrico Ferri and Cesare Lombroso. In contrast to these two Italian criminologists, however, German medicopsychiatric and criminological experts stressed the interdependence of hereditary factors with external influences, such as familial and social environment, education, individual conduct, and unhealthy influences on the embryo.29 They considered individuals of such ‘tainted’ condition to be Psychopathen (psychopaths) unable to adjust to the challenges of normal life and prone to deviant behaviour because they assumingly lacked the necessary will-power to withstand the seductions of criminality.30 As indicated by the expert opinions on Peter Kürten cited above, the notion of ‘psychopathy’ had a long-lasting influence within the German medical and criminological profession.31 Along with this particular appropriation of Lombroso’s and Ferri’s concept of the ‘born criminal’, the scientists also adopted a number of their basic racist premisses, which were also prevalent in colonial discourse. Most notable among them was the assumption that ‘degenerates’ and ‘savages’ shared basic corporeal characteristics, such as overwhelming beastlike instincts and insensibility to pain.32 The latter was often referred to in justifying the brutality of corporal punishments – for example: “As we learn from experience, corporal punishments cannot be neglected with regard to the natives. Moreover, they do not consider them to be an extraordinary hardship.”33 Periodical Literature during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. David M. Horton & Katherine E. Rich (Lewiston N Y : Edwin Mellen, 2004): 343–49, quotation from 345. 29 Karl Birnbaum, “Entartung,” in Handwörterbuch der medizinischen Psychologie, ed. Birnbaum (Leipzig: Thieme, 1930): 116–20. For a concise account of the scientific debate on ‘degeneration’ in Germany, see Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2000): 63–68. 30 Karl Birnbaum, Die krankhafte Willensschwäche und ihre Erscheinungsformen: Eine psychopathologische Studie für Ärzte, Pädagogen und gebildete Laien (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1911): 56. 31 This historical concept of psychopathy differs radically from contemporary notions of this psychiatric condition. Van Onselen, who applies this modern idea in his interpretation of the Ripper case in an ahistorical manner, gives a concise summary of today’s forensic and psychiatric notions which link sexual murder to the so-called Anti-Social Personality Disorder (A S P D ). See van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies, 425–27. 32 Lombroso, The Criminal, 345–46. 33 Johannes Gerstmeyer, “Körperliche Züchtigung,” in Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, vol. 2, ed. Heinrich Schnee (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920): 366ff. In the German colonies there existed an elaborate, yet often ineffective, juridical code to regulate the application of this punishment to curtail its severe effects.



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

51

The other concept Krafft–Ebing was referring to, neurasthenia, had been introduced by George Miller Beard in his study American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), to designate a depletion of “nerve-force” resulting from a combination of factors.34 He argued that neurasthenia was the result of an excess of modern civilization, manifested in such diverse phenomena as “steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” and which occurred mostly among the urban upper or middle classes of the industrialized north-eastern parts of the U S A .35 Yet, he continued, this excess was caused by the climatic condition on the North American continent, which uniquely influenced the members of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’.36 As such, Beard considered neurasthenia as a form of colonial neurological condition.37 Although the German-speaking medical profession had debated the lack of ‘nerve-force’ or other forms of neurological weakness as early as the 1860s, no conceptual framework had been developed. Instead, Beard’s notion of neurasthenia was embraced enthusiastically in scientific as well as in popular discourse. This fact prompted Joachim Radkau to describe the closing decades of the Wilhelminian Empire as the “Zeitalter der Nervosität”38 (Age of Nervousness). Both phenomena, ‘degeneration’ and neurasthenia, were perceived to be inherently interconnected. Among the first to establish this connection was the British sociologist Herbert Spencer.39 Although the German-speaking medical experts did not unanimously share Spencer’s conviction that acquired traits such as neurasthenia would be inherited, the majority supported this view. Moreover, they assumed that hereditary neuropathic or psychopathic dispositions ran particularly often among members of families of the Repr. New York: Arno, 1973: 13. Beard, American Nervousness, vi. 36 American Nervousness, vii, 151–60. 37 American Nervousness, vii–viii. 38 Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Propyläen, 2000): 57–61. See also Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers, 1765–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001): 423, and Ursula Link–Heer, “Nervosität und Moderne,” in Konzepte der Moderne, ed. Gerhart von Graevenitz (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1999): 108–11. 39 “The Gospel of Recreation. By Herbert Spencer. Address at his Farewell Banquet, November 9th,” Popular Science Monthly 22.3 (1883): 354–59, quoted in Rebekka Haken, “Dr. George Miller Beard (1839–1883) und seine Lehre von der Neurasthenie: Konjunkturen eines Konzepts” (doctoral dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2004): 199. 34 35

52

E V A B I S C H O F F 

so-called ‘lower classes’.40 As shown above, ‘degeneracy’ was identified with ‘savagery’: i.e. with a supposedly lower level of evolutionary development. Thus, the discriminatory discourses on the ‘lower classes’ and the ‘lower races’ were deeply intertwined. Similar concerns about the ‘habitual criminal’ and an allegedly imminent ‘degeneration’ in Britain had influenced the introduction of the Habitual Criminal Act in 1869 and the Prevention of Crimes Act in 1871.41 According to these general reflections on psychopathy and ‘tainted’ physiology, criminals such as Peter Kürten were examined closely in search of allegedly inheritable and corporeal signs of ‘degeneration’. In his case, the psychiatrists and physicians were convinced that they had found evidence that he and his ancestors suffered from alcoholism, incestuous desires, various mental diseases, epilepsy, pathological bragging (“Grossmannssucht”), a far too animated imagination, increased physical sensitivity, and an exacerbated sexual drive.42

Keeping the Beast in Check However, the distinction between health and ‘normality’ on the one side and ‘degeneration’, neurasthenic disposition, and psychopathy on the other was not as clear-cut as such assessments suggested. As demonstrated above, neurasthenia was thought to be both an acquired condition and an inherited physiological one. Moreover, neurological disorders such as psychopathy could not be detected easily. Psychiatrists estimated that about ten percent of the population were hidden cases, and they debated the influences of media such as films, newspaper reports, and (pulp) novels.43 Karl Birnbaum, Die krankhafte Willensschwäche, 56. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P 1993): 182. 42 Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen den Arbeiter Peter Kürten, Prof. N. Sioli, 14.11.1930, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/728, 45–52, 267–68; Karl Berg, “Der Sadist,” in Der Sadist: Gerichtsärztliches und Kriminalpsychologisches zu den Taten des Düsseldorfer Mörders Peter Kürten, ed. Michael Farin (Munich: belleville, 2004): 137–38. 43 Albert von Schrenck–Notzing, “Beiträge zur forensischen Beurtheilung von Sittlichkeitsvergehen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathogenese psychosexueller Anomalien [Part 1],” Archiv für Kriminologie 1.1 (1898): 17; Karl Birnbaum, Ueber psychopathische Persönlichkeiten (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1909): 75. See also Cornelia Brink, “ ‘ Nicht mehr normal und noch nicht geisteskrank. . . ’: Über pathologische Grenzfälle im Kaiserreich,” WerkstattGeschichte 33 (2003): 39–40. 40 41



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

53

So-called ‘psychopaths’ were thought to be particularly vulnerable to immoral influences seducing them into criminality. Therefore, apart from determining the kind and degree of ‘degeneration’ which Kürten displayed, the medical experts who examined him tried to identify the contagions he had been exposed to. Repeatedly, in the interviews they conducted with him, the experts asked Kürten whether he knew of prominent Lustmörder and if these killers acted as role models for him. Apart from recent German sex killers, they asked him most frequently about the case of Jack the Ripper, as it had already been mentioned in seminal studies such as Krafft–Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.44 Here is one of many examples demonstrating that the London murderer was remembered so vividly and perceived to be so closely linked with Kürten’s case that the psychiatrist conducting the interview misjudged the time-frame by almost twelve years and suggested a connection which was more than unlikely: Not long ago, about 1900, there was this story about Jack the Ripper, have you read about it? Yes, I read all the reports and stories on it, I devoured them, really. Have you been influenced by them in any way? Yes, I must admit that I most likely got the idea to disembowel [my victims] from these reports.45

With ‘psychopathy’ being difficult to detect and the presumed ubiquity of male sexual aggressiveness, the task of determining male sexual ‘normality’ was a delicate one, for two reasons: first, the presence or absence of corporal signs of ‘degeneration’ gave merely clues, not definite answers. Thus, no man could be sure if he was incriminated by heritage or not. Second, since a certain amount of aggressiveness was thought to be ‘healthy’ in male sexual behaviour, ‘normality’ was a matter of personal conduct.

44 Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen den Arbeiter Peter Kürten, Prof. N. Sioli, 14.11.1930, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/728, 249; Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen Peter Kürten, Dr. M. Raether, 2.1.1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/731, 221; Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen Peter Kürten, Prof. Hübner, 26.3.1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/730, 214–15; Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 58–59. 45 Ärztliches Gutachten in der Strafsache gegen Peter Kürten, Prof. Hübner, 26.3.1931, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 17/730, 91.

54

E V A B I S C H O F F 

Therefore, medical experts considered constant self-observation, self-control, and an economy of will-power to be of the utmost importance. Krafft– Ebing even perceived life itself to be a “never-ceasing duel between the animal instinct and morality” in which “only will-power and a strong character can emancipate man from the meanness of his corrupt nature.”46 Generally, the psychiatrist assumed that, in “the civilized man of to-day, in so far as he is untainted, associations between lust and cruelty are found, but in a weak and rather rudimentary degree.” The few contrary occurrences had to be “attributed to distorted dispositions.”47 And, although Ellis did not share his colleagues’ unreserved admiration for civilization and culture, he nevertheless shared Krafft–Ebing’s belief in male self-control and restraint. Male evolutionary heritage, ‘natural’ aggressiveness, and desire to inflict pain notwithstanding, Ellis argued that when “a man is convinced that he is causing real and unmitigated pain” during sexual intercourse, “he becomes repentant at once. If this is not the case he must either be regarded as a radically abnormal person, or as carried away by passion to a point of temporary insanity.”48 By describing excessive sexual violence as an effect of insanity or ‘tainted’ physiological heritage, medico-psychiatric experts established a discursive link between civilization, male health, and self-control: ‘health’ became synonymous with ‘civilization’, which in turn was conceptualized as an historical, evolutionary process of successfully containing male aggressive sexual impulses. Thus, bourgeois moral standards and codes of conduct were perceived to be the highest point of this ethical evolution so far.49 ‘Primitives’, psychopaths, sadists, and criminals, conversely, were considered to be in the same ‘savage’ condition, physiologically and ethically characterized by lack of control over their own impulses and desires, embodying earlier stages of human evolutionary development. This view ultimately led to the “conflation

46 Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 3. Women, by contrast, as long as they were “physically and mentally normal, and properly educated,” were thought to have “little sensual desire” (8). 47 Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 54. 48 Ellis, Love and Pain, 71. 49 Krafft–Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 2–5.



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

55

of types of sexual Otherness” which included not only criminals but also members of the indigenous population of the colonies.50 Thus, the ‘abnormal’, the sadist, was considered to have ‘degenerated’ individually back to the state of the ‘primitive’. The ability to control one’s own body and sexual impulses was thought to be the central characteristic of white healthy masculinity, distinguishing it from other masculinities. Yet this white manly self-control was thought to be at risk in the very circumstance in which it was needed most: the colonial situation. Experts such as Iwan Bloch and Arthur Hübner – the latter being one of the four psychiatrists examining Peter Kürten – argued that in tropical climates the white male’s nervous system would be put under constant pressure by “the completely new and alien environment.” As a result, Europeans would be prone to mental diseases.51 In addition to the harmful climate, the scientists argued, the nervous system would be strained by the destructive influences of alcoholism, venereal diseases, or malaria. This stress could result in a form of nervous breakdown: the so-called Tropenkoller. Bloch described it as “a special kind of lustful cruelty”: in other words, of sadism.52 He considered it to be the reason for indiscriminate acts of extreme violence: It almost exclusively occurs among Europeans in official administrative positions of great influence and power which they did not have at home [. . . ] mostly in areas in which all restrictions on traditional morals and social conventions are non-existent, where civilized man can follow his instincts and where he finds himself facing an ‘inferior’ race that he considers and treats as if they were animals or half breeds.53

And, just as with psychopathy and sadism, individuals who possessed a weak neurological constitution – or, worse, were hereditarily ‘tainted’ – were considered most vulnerable to this form of nervous disease.54 50 Sander L. Gilman, “Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Degeneration: From a Theory of Race to a Race to Theory,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Edward J. Chamberlain & Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia U P , 1985): 73–75. 51 Arthur Hübner, Lehrbuch der forensischen Psychiatrie (Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1914): 978–79; Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 624. The quotation is from Werner, “Geisteskrankheiten,” in Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (vol. 1): 689. 52 Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 624. 53 Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 624. 54 Ludwig Külz, Blätter und Briefe eines Arztes aus dem tropischen Deutschafrika (Berlin: Süsserott, 1906): 158.

56

E V A B I S C H O F F 

German medical experts were not alone in theorizing about the destructive influence of the tropical climate on European bodies. The fear of male nervous breakdown was also part of the medical literature of other European or Western colonizing countries. British authors of advice manuals warned their readers about the “General Debility” resulting from a “prolonged exertion in a climate which is naturally enervating.” If no preventive measures were taken, “man often falls into a state of weakness and languor which, if it does not absolutely incapacitate him, certainly makes him disinclined for active work, and renders his life to be more or less a burden to him.”55 U S American physicians also worried about the impact of tropical neurasthenia on white male bodies. As Warwick Anderson has demonstrated, male nervous breakdown, also called “brain-fag,” “philippinitis,” or the “white man’s psychic burden,” was considered a significant threat to U S military and administrative personnel during the Philippine–American War and the ensuing occupation.56 Anxieties about the impact of the colonial environment on the physiology of white men were accompanied by concerns about the negative effects on his cultural and ‘civilizatory’ identity. Constant exposure to the ‘primitive’ culture of the indigenous population of the colonies supposedly caused a loss of European moral values: i.e. a process of ‘going native’.57 These concerns were known throughout all European colonial empires and were most often debated in the context of settler colonies.58 In German colonial literature, Leigh Hunt & Alexander Kelly, On Duty under a Tropical Sun: Being some Practical Suggestions for the Maintenance of Health and Bodily Comfort and the Treatment of Simple Diseases. With remarks on Clothing and Equipment for the Guidance of Travellers in Tropical Countries (London: W.H. Allen, 1882): 65–66. 56 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2006): 130–32. 57 Reconstructed in, for example, Rebecca Weaver–Hightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2007): 132–41, and Daniel B. Thorp, “Going Native in New Zealand and America: Comparing Pakeha Maori and White Indians,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31.3 (2003): 1–23. 58 Warwick Anderson, “Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-Century France and England,” Victorian Studies 35 (1992): 135–57; Alison Bashford, “Medicine, Gender, and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 130–32; Richard Eves, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: Debates over Climate and Colonization in New Guinea, 1875–1914,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.2 (2005): 317–18, 324; David N. Livingstone, “Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” Journal of Historical Geography 28.2 (2002): 168–70; James S. Duncan, In the Shadows 55



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

57

this cultural contamination was referred to as verkaffern and was seen as closely connected to interracial marriage and miscegenation. German men who married an indigenous woman were thought to lose all sense of ethical and cultural values, of social order and national pride. These people ‘go native’ [verkaffern], as it is called; the constant contact with the coloured female, with her associates and relatives, drags them down to a point beyond hope or help. It is hard to imagine how such a man, whose emotional and ethical values have degenerated below the lowest level of white European standards, with his horde of wild, unruly, and dirty mongrels, can ever again become a valuable member of the nation.59

All forms of ‘degeneracy’ could be warded off by adhering to a ‘white’ (i.e. bourgeois) way of life, preferably facilitated by marriage to a European woman and a strict regime of personal physical and mental hygiene.60 As the German physician Ludwig Külz noted, “We will not change the climate, but we can change our personal conduct to counter climatic influences.”61 Aiming at all bodily functions, this regime regulated the white man’s personal diet, his sleeping patterns, his personal space, and even his clothing. Moreover, he was urged to monitor the physical and hygienic condition of his indigenous servants.62 As alcohol was considered to enhance the negative influences of the climate, its consumption was vehemently condemned. European men were encouraged to pursue healthy (and sober) leisure actiof the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Aldershot and Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2007): 8–12, 43–65. 59 “Die südwestafrikanischen Bastards,” Kolonie und Heimat 1.13 (1908–1909): 6. 60 Adda von Liliencron, “Ein Wort über den Deutschkolonialen Frauenbund und seine Aufgaben,” Kolonie und Heimat 1.20 (1908–1909): 9. This aspect has been the object of extensive historical research in recent years, along with the reconstruction of the Mischehendebatte (debate on miscegenation). Most recent examples are: Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001): 79–130, 139–45; Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003): 77–96; Katharina Walgenbach, “Die weisse Frau als Trägerin deutscher Kultur”: Koloniale Diskurse über Geschlecht, ‘Rasse’ und Klasse im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005): 77–83, Anette Dietrich, Weisse Weiblichkeiten: Konstruktionen von ‘Rasse’ und Geschlecht im deutschen Kolonialismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007): 243–50. 61 Külz, Blätter und Briefe eines Arztes, 31. 62 Hans Ziemann, Gesundheits-Ratgeber für die Tropen (Berlin: Reimer, 1913): 12–19; Albert Plehn, Kurzgefasste Vorschriften zur Verhütung und Behandlung der wichtigsten tropischen Krankheiten bei Europäern und Eingeborenen für Nichtärzte (Jena: Fischer, 1906): 7, 15.

58

E V A B I S C H O F F 

vities such as playing musical instruments, attending the theatre, reading, and joining a sports club to reduce or even eliminate opportunities for drinking.63 However, there is one important difference to be noted: whereas the term ‘going native’ or verkaffern designated the loss of cultural identity, the concept of the Tropenkoller referred to a form of physiological ‘degeneration’ of the nervous system.64 In contrast to their British colleagues, German medicopsychiatric experts and authors of colonial advice literature depicted the Tropenkoller as the worst-case scenario. Male sexual impulses and aggressiveness enforced by the climate resulted, if not carefully kept in check by a rigid regime of self-control, in sadistic excess, even criminality. This was thought to endanger the German colonial project in general. Their own nervous, psychotic condition rendered them unable to govern themselves, let alone to govern (colonized) others. By behaving like ‘savages’ themselves, colonizers lost their right to rule as colonizers. Accordingly, advocates of German colonialism pointed out that the “nervous man not only suffers from his condition himself but also seriously affects his environment, and will never be able to handle the natives properly.”65 Moreover, charges against members of the colonial military or administrative personnel who had exercized excessive violence and displayed extreme brutality were dismissed by German state officials as an exceptional lack of judgement and temporary loss of control caused by climatic influences.66

63 Friedrich Plehn, Tropenhygiene, mit spezieller Berücksichtigung der deutschen Kolonien: Ärztliche Ratschläge für Kolonialbeamte, Offiziere, Missionare, Expeditionsführer, Pflanzer und Faktoristen (Jena: Fischer, 1906): 243–47. 64 This distinction has so far been neglected by researchers. See, for example, Stephan Besser, “Tropenkoller: The Interdiscursive Career of a German Colonial Syndrome,” in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. George S. Rousseau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 303–20. 65 Oscar Bongard, Wie wandere ich nach deutschen Kolonien aus? Ratgeber für Auswanderungslustige (Berlin: Süsserott, 1907): 12. 66 The most prominent case among them was that of Carl Peters. See Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 70–76; Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte: Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition H I S , 2004): 346–54; Besser, “Tropenkoller.”



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

59

Peter, Jack, and the Beast How, then, did these anxieties about male nervousness, Tropenkoller, and sadism relate to general debates on masculinity in Britain and in Germany at the time when the crimes of Jack the Ripper and Peter Kürten occurred? As Judith Walkowitz has demonstrated in her seminal study of the case, City of Dreadful Delight, the Ripper’s crimes were interpreted in the context of the (re)negotiations of social, racial, and gender difference. In the light of a women’s suffrage movement that was gaining more and more momentum, the discourse on sexual murder effectively buttressed male authority over female bodies, (re-)inscribed bourgeois gender norms, and made the scientific concept of the violent nature of male sexuality known to a general audience.67 Gender and sexuality, however, were not the only contested terrains during the 1880s. In fact, the urban space of the capital of the British Empire itself was disputed: anarchist terrorists claimed the public space as a political arena. Increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants aggravated an already existing housing shortage among the urban poor and dramatically altered the ethnic composition of this particular stratum of London’s population. By the end of the 1880s, the capital city of the British Empire was imagined as a “dark continent.”68 Social reformers who wanted to improve the living conditions of the urban poor investigated the population of the city’s East End – Whitechapel, Aldgate, and Spitalfields – as if they were objects of anthropological studies.69 Driven by much the same concerns as German physicians and criminologists in the 1880s and 1890s, scientists warned against influences of “toxins like alcohol and tobacco,” “urban overcrowding, poor ventilation, diet and sexually transmitted diseases” which supposedly resulted in a generally “impoverished nervous system.”70 Anxieties about the decline of the moral and physical condition of the classes dangereuses had been circulating in public discourse since the 1860s.71 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 220–21. George Sims, How the Poor Live (1883), quoted from Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 27, who in turn quotes from an excerpt repr. in Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers, ed. Peter Keating (Glasgow: William Collins, 1976): 85. See also Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 201; Onselen, The Fox and the Flies, 39–43, 46–48, as well as Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 17, 26, quotation from 27. 69 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 25–38. 70 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 191. 71 Faces of Degeneration, 191. 67 68

60

E V A B I S C H O F F 

This discourse transcended the spatial and political boundaries of London or the British ‘mother country’ in two ways. On the one hand, it relied on the same racist paradigms as those that structured technologies of regulation and control in the governing of colonial populations. On the other, the existence of an urban, criminal, and ‘degenerated’ underclass “threatened the utopia of internal unity in this age of empire.” This undermined British claims to ‘superior civilization’ and the “viability of the ideology of a cohesive and unified ruling race,” thereby challenging the country’s position as an imperial power as such.72 In contrast to the British debates on urban spaces and populations, German anxieties about white masculinity and the loss of white male self-control during the years of the Weimar Republic were tied to concerns about the dissolution of social cohesion and the ethical ‘degeneration’ of society as a whole. The contemporaries of the cannibal sex killers perceived two main reasons for this assumed loss of morality and civilization: the destabilizing influences of World War I and the hyperinflation of 1923.73 With regard to the murders committed by Fritz Haarmann and Karl Denke, the socialdemocratic newspaper Vorwärts, for instance, noted “that only against the background of the economic predicament, which is more severe in Germany than anywhere else,” would individuals or “degenerated humans” hatch the idea of satisfying their “individual craving for meat” by “trading in human flesh.”74 The disintegrating influences of World War I were thought to have a particularly strong impact on German men. Their aggressive impulses, which had been encouraged during active military service, lay bare and open after the conflict had ended and could not be contained – a phenomenon summed up in the concept of Kriegsverwilderung75 (war savagery): “In many warriors, deeper layers of the soul are exposed. Animal instincts surface, that lay hidden in times of peace. The beast is aroused and cannot easily be put

Faces of Degeneration, 184. Historians have developed sophisticated arguments about the social and psychological impact of hyperinflation. See, for example, Martin H. Geyer, Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914–1924 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998): 382–99. 74 “Kannibalen,” Vorwärts (31 December 1924). 75 Robert Heymann, Sexualverbrecher. Das Verbrechen: Eine Sittengeschichte menschlicher Entartung (Leipzig: Lykeion, 1930), vol. 1: 63–64. 72 73



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

61

back to sleep at the sign of coming peace.”76 Thus, the discursive link between Lustmord and anxieties about moral ‘degeneration’ (of society in general and of men in particular) was already well-established when Kürten’s case was debated. Despite these differences, there are a number of similarities between the British and the German context. Most important among them is the fact that, by the time the crimes occurred, reports on Jack the Ripper and Kürten were shrill notes in a multi-voiced cacophony on male sexuality. On the British side, spectacles of monstrosities and criminality were part of Victorian popular and literary culture.77 Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886,78 with its stage adaptation first mounted in 1887, was only the most prominent among them. Moreover, feminist anti-prostitution campaigns and the scandal raised by the reports on ‘white slavery’, published by the Pall Mall Gazette and entitled the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” problematized male and female sexuality.79 As such, the reports on Jack the Ripper were part of an ongoing process in which different “concepts of masculinity were created, maintained, and policed.”80 Quite similarly, Lustmord was a frequent topic in arts and literature in Weimar Germany – for example, in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (first published in 1929) or in paintings by Otto Dix (Lustmörder. Selbstportrait, 1920) and George Grosz (Der kleine Frauenmörder, 1918). In fact, although the phenomenon had been debated by medico-psychiatric and criminological experts since the 1870s, it became most popular after World War I.81 Kankeleit, “Heldentum und Verbrechen,” Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform 16 (1925): 194. The author’s first name is not given in the journal. However, it is most likely that the author was Otto Kankeleit, physician and psychiatrist at an asylum for alcoholics in Hamburg from 1929 to 1933. 77 Philip Landon, “Great Exhibitions: Nature and Disciplinary Spectacle in the Victorian Novel” (doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, New York, 1995). 78 London: Longmans, Green. 79 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81–115. 80 McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 10. 81 Friedemann Pfäfflin, “Zur Lust am Lustmord,” Der Nervenarzt 53 (1982): 548; Martin Lindner, “Der Mythos ‘Lustmord’: Serienmörder in der deutschen Literatur, dem Film und der bildenden Kunst zwischen 1892 und 1932,” in Verbrechen, Justiz, Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Joachim Linder & Claus–Michael Ort (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999): 280. 76

62

E V A B I S C H O F F 

Moreover, just like the Ripper’s case in London in 1888, Kürten’s case was debated against the background of a heightened sense of connection between sexualized violence and masculinity that had hit the press in two forms: first, through press coverage of the preceding cases of sexual murder – those of Grossmann, Haarmann, and Denke.82 Second, there were the reports and pamphlets which appeared during the occupation of the Rhineland, arguing against the assignment of French colonial troops, especially the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, who had been recruited mainly in West Africa.83 Between 1919 und 1923 numerous publications described the Schwarze Schmach (black disgrace) – the sexual threat these African soldiers allegedly posed to white German women. Especially the texts written by extreme right-wing authors described the African men as vampires, coloured sadists, or black beasts who lacked the ability to control their ‘primitive’ sexual desires because of their ‘savage’ physiology and who mangled the bodies of their victims with their teeth.84

Conclusion As my brief analysis of medico-psychiatric and criminological material relating to the infamous Lustmörder Jack the Ripper and Peter Kürten has demonstrated, the cannibal acted as an explanatory model for sex criminals. The scientific explanations referred to anthropological and biological theories of the evolutionary ‘nature’ of male bodies and their sexuality. Authors such as Richard von Krafft–Ebing and Havelock Ellis assumed that the exercize of power and the infliction of pain, once an evolutionary necessity to ensure the survival of the fittest and strongest male, still constituted an inherent part of the evolutionarily ‘more advanced’ bodies of white European males. Therefore, instead of a clear-cut binary distinction between ‘normal’ men and criminals, the experts effectively mapped out a continuum of male sexual Siebenpfeiffer, Böse Lust, 221–33. The ‘Black Peril on the Rhine’ is the object of a growing body of scholarly work which, alas, cannot be discussed in detail here. See Christian Koller, ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), Jean–Yves Le Naour, La honte noire: L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2003), and Mass, Weisse Helden – schwarze Krieger. 84 Koller, Von Wilden aller Rassen, 239. 82 83



Jack, Peter, and the Beast

63

(ab)normality: as every man was thought to be driven by violent impulses, ‘normality’ was a matter of degree and personal conduct, not of an underlying difference of any kind. Consequently, all scientists emphasized the exercise of self-control as the defining characteristic of healthy white men. They contrasted this with the brutal and impulsive behaviour of psychopaths, criminals, and ‘natives’ whose nervous system was allegedly either impaired by heredity or not ‘advanced’ enough in the first place. Criminals and neurotics, in turn, were perceived as ‘degenerates’ who individually regressed to the mental and physical state of a ‘savage’. As Richard Dyer has demonstrated, this concept of white male masculinity has determined the construction of hegemonic masculinities in Western societies up to the present day. Men are regarded as divided between their powerful sex drive and their more or less well-developed sense of self-control.85 Male self-control – another aspect highlighted in my analysis – was also regarded as the basis for ‘racial superiority’ and European colonial rule. However, the tropical climate of most colonies was considered a serious threat to both the physiology and the morality of male Europeans. Cultural and physical ‘contamination’ by the colonial environment was thought to result in their cultural ‘degeneration’ (‘going native’ or verkaffern) – and the deterioration of their nervous system (the Tropenkoller). The latter was explicitly seen as a manifestation of sadism. Generally, male tropical nervousness was considered to undermine white men’s capability to govern themselves and others. Accordingly, we find in both British and German colonial and psychiatric-medical literature the same preoccupation with anxiety about the loss of white male bourgeois conduct, nervous breakdown, and the ‘superiority’ of European men, as well as an elaborate discourse on hygienic practices to prevent these effects. Yet significant differences are also to be noted. First, although British and German advocates of colonialism alike expressed their anxieties about the loss of male self-control and ‘evolutionary’ moral ‘superiority’, they were only partly referring to the same concepts. While British commentators theorized about the social, cultural, and ethical downfall of white men in the tropics (‘going native’), German authors not only focused on this social ‘contamination’ (verkaffern) but also discussed the possibility of physiological ‘degeneration’, or Tropenkoller. Second, with regard to the anxieties about male neurasthenia or psychopathy and the contexts with which these concerns were 85

Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997): 14–15, 27–28.

64

E V A B I S C H O F F 

associated, we find almost reversed positions: whereas, in Britain, the case of Jack the Ripper was closely connected with debates about the physical and moral ‘degeneration’ of the urban poor, particularly in London, the Lustmörder in Weimar Germany were seen as representations of the moral decay of society as a whole in consequence of World War I and hyperinflation. Here, loss of male self-control was synonymous with the social and ethical decomposition of the ‘body politic’.



Decolonization of the Public Space? (Post)Colonial Culture of Remembrance in Germany

J OACHIM Z ELLER

T

of the German empire of 1871 was not – as is the general consensus – an “imperial episode without consequences”1 for Germany. With or without formal colonial possessions, for centuries Germany has been closely connected to the European colonial project. Not even the Federal Republic of Germany can be regarded as an ‘unburdened’ former colonial power, as which it is still often perceived at home and abroad.2 With the gradually spreading awareness that Germany is a postcolonial society comes the need to work through a largely forgotten colonial history, one that has become overgrown with many myths. The colonial past has hardly found any purchase in the collective memory of German society up to this point; indeed, German colonial history has been described as a “latent topic.”3 Waves of remembrance alternate with waves of forgetfulness or even of suppression. Nevertheless, in historical scholarship and cultural studies, there has been a regular boom in publicaHE COLONIAL POLICY

1 Klaus J. Bade, Imperialismus und Kolonialmission: Kaiserliches Deutschland und koloniales Imperium, ed. Bade (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982): 10. 2 See Joachim Zeller, “Germany: The Latecomer,” in The Age of Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007): 238–53. On the diverse culture of imperial remembrance in Britain, with its late decolonization, see Elizabeth Buettner’s chapter in this volume. 3 Gesine Krüger, “Vergessene Kriege: Warum gingen die deutschen Kolonialkriege nicht in das historische Gedächtnis der Deutschen ein?,” in Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen europäischer Nationen und der U S A , ed. Nikolaus Buschmann & Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003): 120–37.

66

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

tions stimulated by postcolonial studies. Since then, the concept of ‘entangled histories’ has offered a further transnational impetus to reconsider the era of colonialism as a global history.4 In the following I do not intend to deal with current trends in the academic study of German colonialism. Instead, using mostly current examples, this chapter will examine Germany’s postcolonial remembrance culture. It will ask how and by whom public space is used to confront the general public with the ‘presence of the colonial past’. When I refer to ‘public space’, I mean primarily commemorative culture – the symbolic practice of engaging with colonial monuments and street names which up to this day can still be found in German towns. I will concentrate mostly on symbolic politics in Germany. The reception of colonial monuments that still stand in Germany’s former colonies will be addressed only in some selected cases.5 What stands out about the postcolonial memory culture of Germany? In considering this question, one aspect is of particular interest: can one speak of a decolonization of public space? In answering this question, I rely on the concept of ‘double decolonization’. This concept tries to make clear that not only the former colonies are to be decolonized; a ‘decolonizing of the former colonizers’ is also on the agenda. In this regard, it is necessary to discuss whether, in today’s media society, the medium of the monument is still a fit one for the shaping of ideas in public. If we now turn to the colonial monuments, one is immediately struck by one thing: the monuments to be found today in German towns seem to be 4 Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002). 5 For further literature on colonial monuments in Africa and Germany, see: Winfried Speitkamp, “Kolonialherrschaft und Denkmal: Afrikanische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur im Konflikt,” in Architektur und Erinnerung, ed. Wolfram Martini (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000): 165–90; Joachim Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Eine Untersuchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2000), and “Kolonialkrieg und Denkmal: 100 Jahre Politik mit der Erinnerung,” in Namibia – Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte: Widerstand, Gewalt, Erinnerung, ed. Michael Bollig, Larissa Förster & Dag Henrichsen (Cologne: Minerva, 2004): 124–43; Kolonialismus und Erinnerungskultur: Die Kolonialvergangenheit im kollektiven Gedächtnis der deutschen und niederländischen Einwanderungsgesellschaft, ed. Kathrin Gawarecki & Helma Lutz (New York, Munich & Berlin: Waxmann, 2005). On the postcolonial remembrance cultures of France, see, for example, Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).



Decolonization of the Public Space?

67

largely unnoticed; they long ago forfeited their commemorative function. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze’s three-volume series Deutsche Erinnerungsorte from 2001 endeavoured to conduct a comprehensive stock-taking of the cultural memory of the Germans. However, there is neither an entry on ‘colonialism’ nor an article on any of the concrete colonial sites of memory.6 This would seem to support a case for the supposed irrelevance not only of colonial monuments but also of the very topic of colonialism. However, a closer look reveals quite a lively engagement with the monuments in question in recent years. The monument, as an instrument of social legitimization, has been sought out precisely to shape the politics of historical memory.7

The (Post)Colonial History of Colonial Monuments If we look at the public memory culture of the last few years, we find the most spectacular project in Hamburg in 2004/2005. The temporary reerection of the Wissmann monument, for decades in storage, provoked a great sensation. The project, initiated by the artist Jokinen, was not at all aimed at bringing new honour to the colonialist Hermann von Wissmann (1853–1905, traveller in Africa and governor of German East Africa). Rather, Jokinen intended to create a “Nachdenkmal Raum” (post-monumental space) connected with the web forum www.afrika-hamburg.de. This Internet portal invites visitors to engage in a critical debate on Germany’s colonial history and its aftermath, still largely marginalized today. The Hamburg example is certainly the most interesting recent project to employ the medium of the monument to create a postcolonial memory-space. In working out this participatory concept, Jokinen found an original way of dealing with such inherited symbols.8 Also innovative was the transformation of the Wissmann monument into its own counter-monument, into a monument with its own varied history. Once it stood in Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa (Figure 1). It was dismantled by the British in World War I, and then, from 1922 onwards, stood Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. Étienne François & Hagen Schulze, 3 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001). 7 On the concept of politics of memory in general, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London & New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). 8 On www.afrika-hamburg.de and www.hamburg-postkolonial.de (both accessed 30 January 2010). 6

68

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

in front of the university of Hamburg, where it served the colonial revisionist movement as a setting for numerous commemorations up to World War II – especially the union of Ostafrikaner (in this case meaning former soldiers of the East African colonial troops) which was celebrated every year in Hamburg and which incorporated the monument into its festivities.9 In 1924 and 1934, the fortieth and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of German colonization was also commemorated in Hamburg.10 After World War II – in a period of decolonization – the Wissmann monument was no longer in, or of, use. In an “anti-imperialist action” in 1968, students finally tore the sculpture of Wissmann off its base11 (Figure 2). The history of the Wissmann monument illustrates well the changes that determined the public culture of memory in the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial age. The monuments erected in the colonies before World War I were first and foremost signs of hegemony, symbolic appropriations of the conquered space. Their aim was to make the foreign possessions German; the monuments demonstrated the German Reich’s claim to its ‘protectorates’12 (Figure 3). The monuments were built to endure for generations and to convey the message of the supremacy of the ‘imperial race’ over the subjugated native populations in the colonies, who were to be made to forget that they had themselves once been masters in their lands. The Senegalese historian Cheich Anta Diop explains this process in these terms: “Extinguishing and destroying historical consciousness belonged at all times among the methods of colonization, enslavement, and the effort to make peoples into bastards.”13 The best-known example of such imperial monuments is surely the equestrian statue standing to this day in Windhoek, Namibia.14 In contrast to monuments in the colonies, colonial monuments erected before World War I in the ‘mother country’ were intended to popularize and propagate the colonial idea, with its connotations of greatness, national

Afrika Nachrichten 1924, 362–63. Afrika Nachrichten 1938, 228–29; Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 1938, 278. 11 Joachim Zeller, “ ‘ Deutschlands grösster Afrikaner’: Zur Geschichte der Denkmäler für Hermann von Wissmann,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 12 (1996): 1089–111. 12 See, generally, Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler. 13 Cheich Anta Diop, Civilisation ou barbarie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981): 272. 14 Joachim Zeller, “Das Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek/Namibia: Ein deutsches Kolonialdenkmal im Wandel der Zeiten,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 9 (1995): 773–94. For further details, see also the chapter on “Deconstructing Colonial Monuments.” 9

10



Decolonization of the Public Space?

69

prestige, and world-power status. The aim of commemorating ‘great German colonial pioneers’ – such as Hermann von Wissmann, Carl Peters, or soldiers who had fallen in the colonies – was to strengthen the identification of Germans with the overseas colonial empire. After the early demise of Germany’s colonial empire in 1919, the old colonial monuments and the new ones erected up to the end of the 1930s became shrines for the German colonial movement, places where its supporters would rally and disseminate neocolonial propaganda (Figure 4). For our discussion, it is important to note that the early decolonization of Germany was not accompanied by a decolonization of the mind – something analogous to the de-nazification efforts after 1945.15 An awareness of wrongdoing could not develop after 1918/19, because of belief in the ‘theft of the German colonial empire’, which re-apportionment most Germans found illegitimate. In the Versailles Treaty, the removal of the colonies from Germany had been justified by the fact that the Germans had been incapable and brutal colonizers. The German public considered this to be a strategic lie; accordingly, the term Kolonialschuldlüge (fabrication of colonial guilt) was widely used. The term was coined by Heinrich Schnee, the last governor of German East Africa.16 Schnee thereby connected the discussion focusing on the loss of the colonies with the general discourse on the Versailles Treaty and the allegation that Germany had started World War I, another accusation which many Germans regarded as a deliberate lie (the so-called Kriegsschuldlüge – ‘fabrication of war guilt’), especially in right-wing circles.17 After the end of World War II, many of the colonial and military monuments that had not been destroyed during the war and were still standing were taken down, including all those in East Germany.18 There are no more colonial monuments to be found in the eastern parts of Germany that today form part of Poland.19 Similarly, all colonial monuments were deNevertheless, it is worth noting that the concept of ‘decolonization’ was formulated in Germany in 1932 by the left-wing liberal economist Moritz Julius Bonn. 16 Heinrich Schnee, Die koloniale Schuldlüge (Munich: Knorr & Hirth, 1924). 17 Afrika Nachrichten 1925: 448. See also Sandra Mass, Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006): 47–55. 18 Directly after the war, colonial monuments were destroyed in Frankfurt an der Oder, Dresden, Halle, Mannheim, and Münster. 19 This includes the colonial monuments in Wrocaw (Breslau), Gdańsk (Danzig), Klodzko (Glatz), Kołobrzeg (Kolberg), Nysa (Neisse), Słupsk (Stolp), Cieplice 15

70

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

stroyed in the Soviet sector of occupied Germany and subsequently in the G D R (Figure 5). The dismantling of monuments is linked to a general policy of antifascism, whose aim was to erase the inconvenient inheritance of German imperialism and legitimize the G D R as a new Germany that had cut its ties with the tradition of the German Empire.20 By contrast, in the Allied or western zones and subsequently in the Federal Republic of Germany, most colonial monuments were preserved. Only in very few cases were colonial monuments demolished, often directly after 1945 – in the context of an antifascist policy, not a decidedly anticolonial one.21 However, the further preservation of most colonial monuments in West Germany was not so much an expression of a procolonial policy or a conscious upholding of colonial traditions. Rather, West German society was focused on coming to terms with the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Against that background, the memory of German colonialism had to take a back seat. Colonial monuments were certainly not the focus of attention during the decades following World War II. In the context of the ensuing worldwide process of decolonization, the old eurocentric view of the world and history had eroded. In West Germany, the 1968 student movement inspired the toppling of a number of monuments. As already indicated, in 1968 students tore the Hamburg Wissmann monument off its base, thereby signalling indictment of ‘neocolonialism’ and the ‘capitalist world economic system’ and expressing solidarity with the ‘Third World’. It was also left-wing students who, in a 1978 ‘anti-imperialist action’, tore down and stole the ‘South West Africa monument’ in Göttingen. Today, only the bare plinth (with an information plaque) remains at the location22 (Figure 6). (Warmbrunn), and Waterberg (a former small German settlement between Leszno and Śmigiel near Poznań [Posen]). One should also mention the colonial war memorial in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (Königsberg). An exception is the still-preserved colonial war memorial in Kętrzyn, the former East Prussian locality of Rastenburg. 20 After the war, colonial monuments were dismantled in the following cities of the G D R : Döberitz, Bernburg, Leipzig, Neuhaus an der Elbe, Stendal, Weimar, Weissenfels an der Saale, and Zeitz. After reunification, two of the dismantled monuments were reerected: in 1991 the Gustav Nachtigal monument in Stendal, and in 1995 the Carl Peters monument in Neuhaus an der Elbe. 21 Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich & Vienna: Hanser, 1995): 35–36. 22 Joachim Zeller, “Andauernde Auseinandersetzungen um das Kolonialkriegdenk-



Decolonization of the Public Space?

71

Deconstructing Colonial Monuments From the late-1970s, however, the idea developed of criticizing colonialism not by breaking taboos through the destruction of monuments but by maintaining the colonial monuments consciously as stone witnesses to the past. This included placing some colonial monuments in museums. Quite a number of colonial monuments were re-dedicated as anticolonial monuments, usually as a result of efforts by ‘Third-World’ and solidarity groups or the anti-apartheid movement (Figure 7). Their messages were made clear by attaching plaques that commented critically on the monuments to former heroes. Among those now commemorated were the local populations killed in the colonial wars, who had until then been banished from memory. The symbolic upgrading of African, Pacific-Islands, and Chinese victims was an attempt to remove the guilt derived from the colonial crimes that were committed in the name of Germany. We find examples of this in Hanover23 (1988), Bremen (1990/1996), Nuremberg (1998), Düsseldorf (2004), Brunswick (2005), and Göttingen (2006/2007).24 A similar monument initiative to those mentioned took place recently in Wilhelmshaven. In 2005, in the Wilhelmshaven Christ and Garrison Church, a plaque was dedicated in memory of the suffering of the African population in the colonial war of 1904–1908 in Namibia, suffering that had hitherto gone unarticulated. A Plexiglas plate, installed over an older plaque (a marble memorial from the years before World War I, memorializing some German colonial soldiers who fell in the ‘Rebellion in German South-West

mal in Göttingen: Eine Chronik,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Goettingenkolonialadler.htm (accessed 30 January 2010). 23 In 1988, a commemorative plaque against colonialism was attached to the monument dedicated to Carl Peters in Hanover. The inscription read: “This monument was erected in 1935 by National Socialists. It was a meant as glorification of colonialism and Herrenmenschentum. For us it is a reminder to work – according to the Charter of Human Rights – for the equality of all people and races.” 24 Joachim Zeller, “(Post-)Koloniale Monumente: Denkmalinitiativen erinnern an die imperiale Übersee-Expansion Deutschlands,” www.afrika-hamburg.de/denkmal5.html (accessed 25 January 2010); Joachim Zeller, “Zwischen Wilhelmshaven und München: (Post-)Koloniale Erinnerungskultur in Deutschland,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden & Joachim Zeller (Erfurt: Sutton, 2008): 267–74.

72

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

Africa’), shows an historical photograph of Herero prisoners of war and a text from the oral tradition of the Herero. Although the initiative in Wilhelmshaven found public support, the two municipal parish priests responsible repeatedly had to put up with accusations of a lack of patriotism and respect for the dead.25 There have also been veiling actions – for instance, in Brunswick in July 2006. Pupils at a comprehensive school draped the colonial monument (dating from the 1920s) with white cloth and rolls of paper covered with text. The artistic initiative was meant to initiate a public discussion about Germany’s colonial past. However, there were also many initiatives that failed, such as that in Münster in the 1980s. The local Africa Study Group (Akafrik) wanted to build a stone memorial plaque beside the colonial war memorial on Ludgeriplatz, with the inscription: ‘We remember the victims of the genocide under German colonial rule in Namibia’. The Akafrik initiative was unsuccessful; despite repeated attempts, a lasting installation of the Namibia memorial plaque could not be achieved. The municipal authority of Münster rejected it with the – questionable – arguments that the concept of genocide should not be over-emphasized and that unacceptable analogies with National Socialist extermination practices might be imposed on observers.26 In this context, it is informative to compare the cultures of remembrance of the former ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’. Here, I choose a comparison with Namibia (formerly German South-West Africa), because it constitutes a special case with regard to monuments. Unlike the other former colonies of the Wilhelminian Empire, all of the German monuments in the country were maintained unchanged after the end of German colonial rule. Even after the independence of Namibia in 1990, the iconoclasm feared by many whites did not come to pass. Some ‘German Namibians’ still use the Windhoek equestrian monument or the German military cemetery on the Waterberg for the laying of wreaths. The version of history promoted in the speeches given during such commemorations is still strongly ethnocentric; German colonial rule tends to be glorified and is not seen as a burdensome chapter in their history. Of course, there have also been efforts in independent Namibia to Zeller, “(Post-)Koloniale Monumente.” See Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler, 215; for an update, see Joachim Zeller, “Das Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek (Namibia) – Die Geschichte eines deutschen Kolonialdenkmals,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Zeller-Reiterdenkmal-1912.htm (accessed 26 January 2010). 25 26



Decolonization of the Public Space?

73

revise the one-sided public memory-culture that only takes into account the history of the whites and their perspective. Newly erected monuments and numerous re-namings of streets now take account of the ‘black’ history of Namibia. The – still controversial – Namibian national monument, the ‘Heroes Acre’ in Windhoek, was dedicated to fulfil this project. The ‘Heroes Acre’ is a commemoration and a memorial at the same time and can be read not least as a sort of counter-monument, crowing self-confidently opposite the numerous monuments to the former white (German and South African) colonial masters.27 The most important German colonial monument is still the Windhoek equestrian statue (Figure 8). In 1994, the decolonization impulse brought forth the ‘rider initiative’, initiated by some personages in the Germanspeaking section of the population, which aroused intense public discussion. Obviously, many German Namibians were aware of the anachronism manifested in the heroic monument, embodying as it does ‘white superiority’ and black subordination. The initiative called for an “addition to the rider monument in the form of a memorial stone encouraging national reconciliation.” The key sentence of the planned plaque read: “We remember in a spirit of reconciliation all victims of military struggles from the beginning of colonization up to state independence.” While similar plaque initiatives in Germany incorporated into their inscription design a fundamental distance from the monument and the colonial history memorialized, the inscription for the equestrian statue remained free of any criticism. This can be explained by the fact that the ‘rider of the southwest’ still represents an untouchable symbolic figure for the majority of the German-speaking population.28 For the planned inscription in Windhoek, only one possible compromise could be found that maintained and carefully adapted the inventory of colonial tradition to suit the changed political conditions. As is clear here, the equestrian statue, like the other numerous German colonial monuments and buildings in the country, is still granted considerable significance as an object of identification for German Namibians. In Germany, by contrast, there is – apart from a few Joachim Zeller, “Granatenwerfer und andere Helden: Namibia weiht seine neue nationale Gedenkstätte ein,” iz3w. informationszentrum 3. welt 264 (2002): 5. 28 See Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler, 243; for an update, see Joachim Zeller, “Das Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek (Namibia) – Die Geschichte eines deutschen Kolonialdenkmals,” www .freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Zeller-Reiterdenkmal-1912.htm (accessed 30 January 2010). 27

74

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

associations upholding the tradition of Germany’s colonial troops29 – mainly a ‘negative’ identification with such monuments. To continue the story, it was not possible to place the memorial plaque on the Windhoek equestrian statue, because the National Monument Council of Namibia decided in 2004 to leave all national monuments unchanged. However, in August 2009 the equestrian statue was dismounted; a museum celebrating Namibian independence will be built instead. The monument will be re-erected some 100 meters away in 2010. Nevertheless, there has been no lack of iconoclastic fantasies, as the wall painting at the Commercial Bank of Namibia Theatre School in Windhoek shows. This mural from the year 2001 shows a white rabbit sitting on the base of the Windhoek equestrian statue while the components of the bronze rider spin through the air.

Black Activism and Colonial Monuments in Germany Except for the monument initiatives already mentioned, it is noteworthy that a number of actions were organized by members of the Afro-German community. In June 2004, black Germans protested in Berlin in front of the Neue Wache against amnesia regarding colonial crimes. The impetus was the Namibia Resolution of the German Parliament (Bundestag) on 17 June 2004, which many felt was insufficient. In Berlin’s Neue Wache, the central memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany, the victims of the colonial wars are not explicitly mentioned. The protesters admonished the whitemajority society to be aware of ‘colonial crimes – the empty spaces of German history’ (Figure 9). There has also been the establishment of new monuments, as in 2005 by Green Party politicians and by the chairman of the executive board of the association Afrika-Forum e.V., Victor Dzidzonou, who was born in Togo. In Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse he dedicated a memorial plaque commemorating the West Africa Conference of 1884–85 (Congress of Berlin). The marker is the first site in the historical topography of the German capital to memorialize the victims of colonialism. The monument references not only the Congo 29 This includes the “Traditionsverband ehemaliger Schutz- und Überseetruppen / Freunde der früheren deutschen Schutzgebiete e.V.” (Traditional Association of Former Defence and Overseas Soldiers / Friends of the Former German Protectorates), founded in 1956. See Janntje Böhlke–Itzen & Joachim Zeller, “Eine schöne Erinnerung: Wie der deutsche Kolonialismus heute verherrlicht wird,” iz3w. informationszentrum 3. welt 297 (2006): 14–17.



Decolonization of the Public Space?

75

Conference, one of the central events of European colonial history, but also the colonial war of 1904–1908 in German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia), which, as the plate explains, ‘ended in a genocide’ (Figure 10). However, only a small group of people were present when the monument was unveiled at the end of February 2005. When, in May of that year, some three months later, the ‘Monument to the murdered Jews of Europe’ next to the Brandenburg Gate was opened to the public, all leading political figures joined thousands of people at the inaugural ceremony. The almost demonstrative lack of interest in the West Africa Conference and in the colonial genocide that Germans committed in the twentieth century, in contrast to the great attention paid to the Holocaust, marks the differentiae of the culture of remembrance and of the postcolonial situation in Germany.30 Other initiatives arranged by Africans and Afro-Germans include ‘anticolonial city walks’. Such an anticolonial walk in April 2004 led through the so-called ‘African quarter’ in the district of Berlin-Wedding to the adjacent 30 There is some debate as to whether and to what degree there are analogies between this colonial genocide and the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt is always quoted as a witness for the prosecution, since her reading of Nazi tyranny also encompasses the historical roots of colonialism and imperialism: see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951): chapter 7. In more recent times, Reinhart Kössler and Henning Melber have argued emphatically that “the uniqueness of the Holocaust [is relative, to the extent] that its singularity is to be found in the synthesis of different forms of violence but absolutely not in a complete denial of any continuity with the exterminatory practices of colonialism”; Kössler & Melber, “Völkermord und Gedenken: Der Genozid an den Herero und Nama in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1904–1908,” in Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Susanne Meinl & Irmtrud Wojak (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2004): 59. Modern research is at pains to provide empirical evidence for the analogies. If one focuses on such motivational concepts as ‘race’ and ‘space’, one can hardly ignore the structural affinities between colonialism and the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination, while reference to genocide and other colonial crimes also contradicts the traditional claim that the europeanization of the world was a progress-oriented enterprise. See Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 in Namibia and its Aftermath, ed. Joachim Zeller & Jürgen Zimmerer (London: Merlin, 2008); Joachim Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. Dirk A. Moses (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2004); Genozid und Gedenken: Namibisch–deutsche Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Henning Melber (Frankfurt am Main: Brandel & Apsel, 2005); Birthe Kundrus, “Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen: Überlegungen zur ‘Kolonialisierung’ des Nationalsozialismus,” WerkstattGeschichte 43 (2006): 45–62.

76

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

communal garden plots of Dauerkolonie Togo e.V.31 The participants confronted the residents with information about the numerous colonial street names of the quarter. They commemorated the victims of African colonization as well as those of the neocolonial structures in the world economy that continue to this day. As another example, the contribution of street names to ‘mental mapping’ is also clear in Munich, whose urban topography boasts colonial street names as well. The local Green Party initiated an appeal in the city council to decolonize street names in the so-called ‘colonial quarter’ in the district of Trudering.32 After heated debate, it was decided in 2005 to rename Von-Trotha-Strasse, which, since the end of 2007, reads “HereroStrasse.” Other cities in recent years have also renamed streets, especially those that bear the name of the German colonial conquistador Carl Peters. The various ways in which monuments can be received is illustrated by the ‘Africa Stone’ in the garrison cemetery in Berlin. The Africa Stone (formerly called the ‘Herero Stone’)33 is dedicated to German defence-force soldiers who fell during the colonial war between 1904 and 1908 in German South-West Africa. Commemorative events have taken place there, such as the commemoration of the centennial of the ‘battle at the Waterberg’, in mid-August 2004.34 On that occasion, a provisional commemorative plaque was erected with the inscription: ‘To the memory of the victims of the German genocide in Namibia 1904–1908’. It was stolen a short time later, however. Later in the commemorative year of 2004, unknown persons poured red paint over the Africa Stone – in actual fact, a protest against the widespread lack of interest among the German public in their colonial history. In 2009, a Namibia stone was added to the Africa stone, particularly commemorating the victims of German colonial rule in Nambia. If this represents an anticolonially motivated response, we can also find affirmative engagements with the monument. These include the annual laying of a wreath by the Traditionsverband ehemaliger Schutz- und Überseetruppen / Freunde der früheren deutschen Schutzgebiete e.V. (Traditional Association of ForZeller, (Post-)Koloniale Monumente, and “Zwischen Wilhelmshaven und München.” See Ulrike Lindner, “Das Kolonialviertel in München-Trudering,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande, ed. van der Heyden & Zeller, 293–99. 33 Joachim Zeller, “Der ‘Herero-Stein’ in Berlin,” Namibia Magazin 1 (2001): 28–29. 34 Joachim Zeller, “Berliner Gedenkveranstaltung zur Waterbergschlacht 1904 (2004),” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Rez-Waterberg-Berlin.htm (accessed 27 January 2010). 31 32



Decolonization of the Public Space?

77

mer Defence and Overseas Soldiers / Friends of the Former German Protectorates). The members of this association openly cultivate an exculpatory image of colonial history, whitewashing German colonial history, not least through their Internet presence (www .traditionsverband.de), on which they try to influence a broader public with their procolonial image of history and its nationalist – and from time to time also racialist – ideas.35

Conclusion Public space is sought out and used as a site for politicized discussions of history. The monument initiatives presented here are understood as instruments of a (provocative) counter-public. Mostly initiated by ‘Third-World’ and solidarity groups from the left of the political spectrum, these actions are aimed at counteracting the – often bemoaned – colonial amnesia and promoting international understanding. In this respect, one could speak of ‘history politics from below’. However, in the German state’s official commemoration policy, colonialism still plays no role, or at most a marginal one, just as colonialism has not found its way into Germany’s foundational national myths. We can speculate about the socio-political effects of these commemorative initiatives. Can such heavily symbolic acts of memory in the public sphere help raise the awareness of colonial history, hitherto marginalized, and thus contribute to a decolonization of the mind? There is no easy answer, because there is no way to measure this empirically with any exactness. It must be noted, though, that in our media age it is incomparably easier to reach the public through film, the Internet, print media or exhibitions. If such monument initiatives only strike a rather marginal, local resonance, this is connected not least with the fact that colonialism has remained, all in all, a stepchild in German commemorative culture. Many people in Germany and in other European countries consider the topic of colonialism as too ‘historical’, something that supposedly does not offer the sort of personal connections that can inspire action. When considering in detail the debates inspired by commemorative initiatives, it is clear that Germany’s colonial past is still largely bound to a simpliOn the erection of the Namibia stone, see Joachim Zeller, “Einweihung des Namibia-Gedenksteins in Berlin,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/2009-ZellerNamibiagedenkstein-Berlin.htm (accessed 30 January 2010). See generally Böhlke-Itzen & Zeller, “Eine schöne Erinnerung.” 35

78

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

fied interpretation that swings between (self-)accusation and apologia.36 Such dichotomous visions of history can hardly do justice to the very complex historical reality, however. Indeed, a subtly differentiated and critical discourse about colonial history does take place in the ‘former colonial power’ of Germany, but this debate only involves an academic minority or relevant pressure groups. They face a widespread lack of interest among the broader public, if not an enduring colonial nostalgia that goes hand in hand with mechanisms of suppression. In any event, the postcolonial commemorative culture in Germany can only be understood in the context of a globalized culture of remembrance. Besides the narratives of the Holocaust, which also dominated cultures of remembrance outside Germany after 1945, other crimes are slowly finding their way into the collective memory of humanity. Along with the gulag and apartheid, the narratives of modern colonialism are also being included. Some people have questioned this culture of ‘negative memory’ – for example, the Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka. Soyinka complains generally about the unwillingness of most white Europeans to self-critically examine their violent past: namely, European colonialism.37 However, the worldwide demands for reparations for the history of slavery and colonialism have also touched Germany in the form of the Herero lawsuit. The correlations between the Holocaust, crimes of colonialism, and other crimes against humanity – all connected with various demands for reparation and atonement – will be the challenges for a cosmopolitan memory in the future.38 Contrast this with the opinion that the historian Charles Maier has recently expressed: Maier speculated that, in the context of the globalized world order, the history of colonialism would be established as a new master-narrative replacing other competing grands récits of the modern age – such as that of progress or the Holocaust.39 If Maier is proven right, then the monument Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000): 245–46. 37 Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999). 38 Natan Sznaider, “Verhandlungspartner: Elazar Barkans Theorie der Wiedergutmachung,” review, Frankfurter Rundschau (30 September 2002). See also Elazar Barkan, Völker klagen an: Eine neue internationale Moral (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2000). 39 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (2000) 3: 807–31. 36



Decolonization of the Public Space?

79

initiatives introduced here appear in a new light – as a symptom of a changing – decolonized – historical consciousness. The Federal Republic of Germany would then become what it is: a “future former colonial power.”40

F I G U R E 1: The Hermann von Wissmann monument in Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa (today Tanzania), erected in 1909; contemporary picture postcard. (picture postcard: Joachim Zeller)

40

Krüger, Vergessene Kriege.

80

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

F I G U R E 2: Students topple the Hamburg Wissmann memorial in an anti-imperialist action in 1967. After further attempts to destroy the Wissmann memorial, the monument was moved to a depot in 1968. (photo: Hamburger Abendblatt, 9 August 1967)



Decolonization of the Public Space?

81

F I G U R E 3: The Bismarck tower, erected in 1901 at Cap Nachtigal, Victoria (Limbe), Cameroon. The tower is still well-preserved today. (photo: Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 1906: 121)

82

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

F I G U R E 4: “Kolonial-Ehrenmal,” Bremen, erected in 1932. The monument consists of the figure of an African elephant, built from bricks, the inscription reads “For our colonies.” Besides being a war memorial it should also be a symbol for Germany’s persisting claims to the lost colonies. In connection with Namibia’s independence in 1990, the monument was finally re-dedicated as an anti-colonial memorial, as several pressure groups (‘Third-World’ groups, solidarity groups) had campaigned for. (photo: collection Joachim Zeller)



Decolonization of the Public Space?

83

F I G U R E 5: Saxonian colonial war memorial, 1913, Dresden. At the turn of the year 1946/47 the remains of the monument were dismantled, according to Directive no. 30 of the Allied Control Council on the abolition of war memorials and National Socialist monuments of May 1946. At this point, the bronze constructions were already missing; most probably they had been smelted during the war when metals were collected for the war effort. (photo: Stadtplanungsamt Dresden)

84

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

F I G U R E 6: Centennial of the German–Herero War on 12 January 2004: a commemorative action of the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Peoples) at the so-called ‘South West Africa memorial’ in Göttingen. The society realized more of these commemorative activities, also at the colonial monuments in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Münster, and Düsseldorf. The banner reads ‘Genocide does not expire. 100 years ago: genocide by the German defence force in Namibia’. In 1978, the bronze eagle and the inscription had been stolen by persons unknown. (photo: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker e.V., Göttingen)



Decolonization of the Public Space?

85

F I G U R E 7: In October 2004 an inscription was added to the colonial war memorial in Düsseldorf (erected in 1909). Third-World groups from the Protestant Church in the Rhineland had donated the plaque, which was dedicated to the ‘People of Namibia, victims of the genocide by German troops during the colonial war 1904–1907 in German South-West Africa’. (photo: A. Neumann)

86

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

F I G U R E 8: The Windhoek equestrian monument in Namibia, erected in 1912. The monument was seen less as a war memorial than as a symbol of the German colonial hegemony. Even today, representatives of the German-speaking minority in Namibia meet at the equestrian monument, the most important place for commemorative activities apart from the German war cemetery on the Waterberg. (photo: Joachim Zeller)



Decolonization of the Public Space?

87

F I G U R E 9: In June 2004, members of the Afro-German community protested against the neglect of colonial crimes in front of the Neue Wache, the central commemorative space of the Federal Republic of Germany in Berlin. The motive for the protest action was the recent Namibia Resolution of the German parliament that was seen as not sufficient. In the Neue Wache, victims of colonial wars are not explicitly addressed. (photo: U . Winkler)

88

J O A C H I M Z E L L E R 

F I G U R E 10: The Green Party politician Dr Victor Dzidzonou at the memorial he initiated in Berlin in 2004/2005. The monument commemorates the West Africa conference of 1884–85 (Congress of Berlin) and the genocide against the Herero and Nama during the years 1904–1908. (photo: Joachim Zeller) 

“Setting the Record Straight”? Imperial History in Postcolonial British Public Culture

E LIZABETH B UETTNER

I

N 1966, THE

O V E R S E A S S E R V I C E Pensioners’ Association’s journal reprinted what it called a “welcome tribute from the press” – in this case, the Sunday Express. As an example of praise for Britain’s imperial endeavours and those who carried them out in her name, the following editorial was singled out by retired colonizers, who re-circulated it as an all-too-rare instance of their efforts and sacrifices being properly commended by an otherwise biased and ignorant Britain. It succinctly articulates defences of Britain’s imperial record that both pre-dated and long outlived the particular moment when it was recorded: Tomorrow an event occurs that marks the finish of the old Imperial mission. The Colonial Office vanishes, merged into the department of Commonwealth Relations. Can you imagine how the passing of the Empire will be gleefully applauded by our so-called progressives, sitting smug and self-righteous in their Hampstead seminars? They will see 1st August 1966 as the day that closed the history of centuries of exploitation; that ushered in an idyllic new brotherhood of man. What do T H E Y know about it? In the name of the Colonial Office, thousands of dedicated selfless men and women went out to wild, remote lands scattered across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific. Where once there was dark superstition and savagery, they shone the light of Christianity. They showed how the sick could be cured, instead of being driven away to die in the jungle. How the land could be made to yield good crops. How beasts could be made to grow from pathetic skeletons into sleek, fat cattle.

90

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R  Many of the district commissioners and the other Colonial officers spent 30 or 40 years on a steamy island or in an arid shrubland village acting as doctor and priest, friend and marriage counsellor, and even father to their charges. They were far from well paid. Today some of them are eking out their pensions in humble guest houses in Cheltenham or Bournemouth. Yet what a rich consolation they have. For they can be certain that they did more for the Colonial peoples in one day than our stay-at-home progressives will accomplish in a lifetime.1

Encapsulated here are the attitudes of British former participants in the Empire, in this instance repeated largely to other repatriates like themselves reading the colonial service pensioners’ magazine. In the immediate aftermath of a spate of decolonizations when the British Empire was largely wrapped up, those personally involved took comfort in whatever supportive commentary found expression in wider public contexts. Assertions like the above which emphasize the value of imperial activities after they drew to a close hark back to defences of British colonizers and the British Empire already familiar during the 1960s, but also herald newer forms of vindication at a time when the Empire was largely dead and widely discredited.2 This type of commentary proved to be a taste of more – much more – to come, with such views gradually gaining public prominence between the late 1970s and the present. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a postcolonial history of the British Empire – an empire which, crucially, is still lodged in living memory and occupies the realm of lived experience for many Britons today. The version of postcolonial history examined here is one largely written by, and for, a British audience – one seemingly imagined as primarily white. These narratives constitute the postcolonial insofar as they emerged in the period following the end of empire, yet this chronological form of postcolonial analysis could not be more different from the interdisciplinary body of scholarship that positions itself as informed by postcolonialism. As a critical approach, postcolonialism is overwhelmingly concerned with interrogating and contesting both colonialism and its legacies. The polar opposite of the interpretations examined below, yet symbiotically inseparable from them, 1 “The End of a Regime,” Overseas Pensioner 12 (1966): 17; originally published in the Sunday Express (31 July 1966). 2 Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003): 336.



“Setting the Record Straight”?

91

postcolonialism “commemorates not the colonial but the triumph over it,” as Robert Young puts it. Equally important, postcolonial theory insists upon “undo[ing] the ideological heritage of colonialism not only in the decolonized countries, but also in the west itself.”3 Colonial mind-sets remained powerful within ex-colonizing nations well beyond formal transfers of power overseas. As it emerged, decolonizing the colonizer proved an extremely protracted process. Bill Schwarz’s question, “is Britain yet – or fully – postcolonial?” indeed invites a resoundingly negative answer.4 Schwarz’s assessments of postcolonial Britain are particularly pertinent to the themes considered here, for he reminds us of the multiple forms the postcolonial can take that scholars may not always welcome. “There is no reason to assume that the popular dimensions of the postcolonial are necessarily progressive,” he warns, a caveat borne out by the arguments expressed by authors discussed below.5 This chapter explores several core elements of historical narratives that have gained an enthusiastic audience beyond narrowly academic circles, thereby playing a role within British culture at large. Its chief focus is on written texts, which coexist with other reassessments of empire within Britain that have appeared on radio, film, the stage, and television.6 These lingering traces of empire also take material form in private family collections, archives, museums, and a range of public spaces in Britain and other ex-colonizing European nations alike (with the postcolonial history of German imperial monuments examined by Joachim Zeller in his

3 Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 60, 65. 4 Bill Schwarz, “ ‘ Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette’: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-Colonial Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 14.3 (2003): 265. 5 Bill Schwarz, “Actually Existing Postcolonialism,” Radical Philosophy 104 (2000): 17. 6 Among a growing body of research on this theme, see especially the contributions to British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2001); Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005); John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999): 99–123; and Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005): 203–38. For an informed but critical assessment of work that asserts the ongoing impact of decolonization on metropolitan Britain, see Stephen Howe, “Internal Decolonization?: British Politics since Thatcher as Post-Colonial Trauma,” Twentieth Century British History 14.3 (2003): 286–304.

92

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

contribution to this volume providing an important illustration of these diverse manifestations).7 The British renditions under examination here are overwhelmingly supportive of the imperial project, and their main features were, as seen above, already discernible in 1966, ready to be resuscitated at different moments of the ever-lengthening period after imperial rule drew to a close. First, they revolve around portrayals of British imperial participants as either heroes or victims, and indeed often as both at the same time – a trend that scholars including Paul Gilroy and Bill Schwarz have identified.8 Second, they explicitly endorse particular types of accounts as well as particular types of people recording them as the most appropriate interpreters of imperial history. This leaves other voices either ignored or condemned as illegitimate, a theme considered in conclusion.

The Evidence of Experience Crucially, ageing ex-colonizers themselves as well as their descendants have been decisive players in the production of accounts that defend and revalidate both the empire and those Britons who experienced it personally.9 The urgent task, many felt, was education – ‘setting the record straight’ – so that the public would gain greater awareness of colonizers’ accomplishments, investments, and sacrifices. The result would be a fitting eulogy for a recently deceased empire. Having experienced it first hand, many believed themselves to be the most suitable interpreters of empire’s true characteristics and achievements – far more appropriate than the “stay-at-home progressives” 7 Joachim Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Eine Untersuchung der Kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2000); Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Stephen Heathorn, “‘The Long Retreat of Stone Generals’: Imperial Memory, Decolonisation and the Repatriation of Imperial Monuments from Sudan, 1956–60,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, special issue: Nation and Empire (2005): 43–61. 8 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004): 103, 115; see also Bill Schwarz, “ ‘ The Only White Man in There’: The Re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968,” Race & Class 38.1 (1996): 73. 9 I have explored this theme in greater depth in Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004), and “Cemeteries, Public Memory, and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,” History & Memory 18.1 (2006): 5–42.



“Setting the Record Straight”?

93

who had never come closer to empire than the proverbial liberal Hampstead seminar room. That empire had recently become history made it even more imperative to re-write it in a valedictory and celebratory rather than a critical mode, deploying “the evidence of experience” (to use Joan Scott’s phrasing) as a powerful weapon in the struggle to vindicate participants and polish a tarnished reputation following an era of imperial decline and collapse.10 Because the last generations of colonizers were growing older, they recognized that the time remaining for them to tell their stories was limited. From the late 1970s on, more and more returned colonials strove to re-position empire as a history of which Britain should be proud rather than ashamed or forgetful. Representations of empire as romantic and glamorous, as a creditable aspect of Britain’s history, and as an acceptable source of nostalgia proliferated, often emanating from former participants or else foregrounding their versions of events. These appeared in print, taking the form of memoirs, novels, and histories, as well as through contributions to museum exhibitions and a stream of radio and television documentaries such as Plain Tales from the Raj, Plain Tales from the Dark Continent, and a succession of others.11 Similarly, shaping the archival record has counted as one of the most important tasks facing ageing ex-colonials in the late-twentieth and early-twentyfirst centuries. Since the early 1980s, oral history projects, the circulation of questionnaires, and requests for donations of private papers, memoirs, photographs, and film were undertaken at a number of British archives, including the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections, the Rhodes House Library at Oxford, the Cambridge South Asian Archives, and, most recently, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which opened in Bristol in 2002. Discussing the Oxford Development Records Project in 1980, members of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association 10 Joan Wallach Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 22–40. 11 Alongside my own engagements with British imperial nostalgia in Buettner, Empire Families, 252–70 and “Cemeteries, Public Memory, and Raj Nostalgia,” see, in particular, Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” Granta 11 (1984): 125–38, repr. in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 87–101; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1993): 142–49; Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997): 184–206; and Antoinette Burton, “India, Inc.? Nostalgia, Memory and the Empire of Things,” in British Culture, ed. Ward, 217–32.

94

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

who had responded to calls for contributions were told that they could “take a great deal of credit for setting the record straight,” having enhanced the “archive of Britain’s colonial achievement.” Their magazine argued that “imperial history is popular again and because of the rich variety of evidence historians are coming to a more balanced understanding and fewer misrepresentations are reaching print.”12 Museums and archives concerned with imperial history are not viewed disinterestedly by individuals with a personal stake in the narratives of empire that circulate within as well as beyond their walls and are set to outlive those who witnessed the Empire first-hand. O S P A has watched the emerging collections at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum with a proprietary eye, asserting that the museum and its library would “embody a physical memorial to our Service.” Helping document imperial history, in short, was a central plank of “our commitment to be a guardian of the good name and reputation of [Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service] and its antecedents, and to spread understanding.”13 While imperial repatriates are now an ageing group whose numbers become smaller with each passing year, their role in determining how empire is remembered ‘at home’ appears certain to outlive them as subsequent generations grapple with their print and archival legacy. Those who gained the desired “understanding” would ideally come to recognize that empire was overwhelmingly about the selflessness, hard work, and sacrifice of its British representatives and about positive repercussions beyond decolonization – not about racism, oppression, exploitation, and either national or personal gain. Former participants and others with family histories overseas were certainly not the only voices responsible for promoting affirmative renditions in which the Empire did far more good than harm and in which Britons involved were resoundingly vindicated. Far from it: empire nostalgia and historical revisionism have emanated from a range of other sources, some being academic but many either emerging from or being directed at a non-scholarly community. The proliferation of biographies, histories, and documentaries “University of Oxford Development Records Project,” Overseas Pensioner 39 (1980): 10. “Forty-second Annual General Meeting of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association,” Overseas Pensioner 84 (2002): 13. On archival politics, see Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford U P , 2003): 20–26, and Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). 12 13



“Setting the Record Straight”?

95

about the Empire and about imperial Britons shows no signs of abating, and from this profusion several recent examples stand out. The manner in which they were reviewed in British broadsheets reveals just as much about wider attitudes to empire as the actual content of such texts, if not more.

Textual Postcolonial Apologism Tim Jeal’s 2007 biography of Henry Morton Stanley provides an excellent case in point. As reviewers proclaimed, Jeal problematized the Victorian explorer’s severely compromised reputation as a brutal racist who was crucial to the establishment of the Belgian King Leopold II ’s atrocity-ridden domination of the Congo. Some reviews were quite critical of Jeal’s efforts to “rehabilitate one of the most complex heroes of Victorian Britain,” but the majority were enthusiastic.14 Instead, it was urged, mitigating circumstances needed to be taken into account. Stanley was a victim far more than a villain: “the illegitimate son of a promiscuous mother who abandoned him […] to the workhouse,” he required courage on his journeys through Central Africa, which entailed risking his life. He “respected Africans and despised racists” and was “decent and tender-hearted”; besides, “other explorers did worse,” and his name was partly tarnished due to “the conduct of his subordinates.” Crucially, “Stanley was duped by [King Leopold], believing he was simply creating trading posts along the Congo for the benefit of the people who lived there.” His achievements as an explorer are highlighted, “even though this legacy was later violently corrupted by [Leopold].” He deserves to remain a hero: Like Livingstone, Stanley wanted to see the eradication of the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade and he believed that the best way to achieve this was to open up the African interior to European civilization and trade. Despite his essential humanitarian impulses, he has been made ‘a scapegoat for the postcolonial guilt of successive generations.’15

Among the critical responses, see Kevin Rushby, review of Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), Guardian (24 March 2007). 15 Other reviews of Jeal include “Courage of Explorer,” Daily Express, 23 March 2007; John Carey, “A Good Man in Africa?,” Sunday Times (18 March 2007); Tim Gardam, “Livingstone was Just the Beginning,” Observer (1 April 2007). 14

96

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

His intentions were good and his courage and achievements heroic, is the verdict; barbarism characterizes not Stanley but, rather, the African slave traders and other European colonizing powers, in this case Belgium. Other similarly revisionist biographies have appeared that aim to overturn ideas about the author Elspeth Huxley and the white settler society in Kenya of which she was part and of which she wrote extensively. While it may have been “unfashionable to like her work” in the 1960s and 1970s, her biographer Christine Nicholls disagrees with scholars who have portrayed Huxley as an “apologist for white settlement” and instead stresses the value of her literary output.16 Nicholls, like Huxley, was keen to counter representations of settlers as racist, sexually promiscuous, heavy-drinking “Happy Valley” aristocrats by commemorating the “ordinary” settlers who were committed to the land, who laid foundations for a modern economy, and whose relationships with Africans were characterized by mutual respect. Huxley and Nicholls alike preferred to remind readers that “most of Kenya’s farmers ploughed all their profits back into their farms, making them miserably poor in material things.”17 Huxley, it is underscored, “always abhorred the social colour-bar”; Kenya was “a land she loved.”18 For her part, Nicholls, her publisher notes, “grew up in East Africa and knew many of the people in Elspeth Huxley’s circle.” Time and again, one finds the biographers and historians of imperial events and people having personal histories that connect them with these worlds, or else their immediate aftermath. Such ties are typically held up as a virtue and are intended to portray authors as knowledgeable authorities about the topics they describe. In other instances, they are simply unproblematically noted as a matter of course. Niall Ferguson’s introduction to his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, written to accompany his television series broadcast by Channel 4 in 2003, falls into the latter category. Countless members of his own family had imperial histories that extended into the early postcolonial period. His father spent two years working as a doctor in late-1960s Nairobi, taking his wife and children with him. “Thanks to the British Empire,” Ferguson wrote, “my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa […] scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief. We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of 16 17 18

C.S. Nicholls, Elspeth Huxley: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002): 442–43. Nicholls, Elspeth Huxley, 172–73. Elspeth Huxley, 190, 443.



“Setting the Record Straight”?

97

Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security. It was a magical time […]. I suspect my mother was never happier.”19 The account that ensues in both his bestselling book and on the nation’s television screens is one in which the case against the British Empire is described as well-known, and thus able to be summarily dismissed with scant discussion. Instead, as Ferguson emphasizes, the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labor than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.

“Remarkably non-venal administrations” implemented these progressive measures. “It was not just my family that benefited from these things,” he concludes.20 Colonizers and colonized alike were the better for the British Empire. Ferguson’s approach throughout his book and television series involved a barrage of biographical anecdotes about rogues, heroes, and do-gooders. The first group are largely portrayed as safely distant in time, populating the Empire of the eighteenth century with its fair share of opportunists and getrich-quick schemers out for themselves. The nineteenth century, however, succeeded in ridding the Empire of its British villains, consigning them to the dustbin of history as imperialism reformed itself. Bad imperialists were largely cordoned off at a safe chronological distance from the present, leaving the later stages and its aftermath free for the valorization of heroes, good works, and grateful natives. Nationalists and anticolonial insurgents, meanwhile, receive little attention and decolonization even less (the latter meriting fewer than ten pages out of more than four hundred). Empire’s birth and heyday constitute the bulk of Ferguson’s text, while its decline and fall are dealt with as quickly as possible, with scant attention paid to events and aspects that might blemish a commendable record. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain’s empire remained a model, while bad im-

19

Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane,

2003): xiv. 20

Ferguson, Empire, xxii.

98

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

perialism was that practised by Belgians in the Congo, by the Japanese in China, and by the Germans under Nazism.21 Comparative history, in renditions like Ferguson’s, is deployed as a convenient tool to validate Britain’s imperial ‘achievements’ and minimize its negative features (if not obliterate them altogether). Invoking the histories of other imperial powers simply to defend Britain’s own record constitutes a recourse to comparison that foregoes any attempt to engage with scholarly methodologies.22 Evaluating British and German encounters in their respective southern African colonies at the turn of the century, Ulrike Lindner’s chapter in this volume suggests the colonial roots of postcolonial arguments like Ferguson’s; both German and British accounts purport to demonstrate the supposed superiority of one colonizing nation by favourably contrasting its practices with another’s. Rather than constituting a systematic comparison, such proclamations demonstrate how colonial histories and postcolonial historiographies alike are deeply ‘entangled’ and interconnected, with imperial projects, along with subsequent verdicts about their merits and failings, shaped by judging the methods of rule by erstwhile competing powers.23 Despite Ferguson’s own exposure to Kenya in the 1960s, his book about empire completely ignored the Mau Mau uprising and Britain’s crackdown that had lasted for much of the previous decade. Two academic books on the Kenyan insurgency that attracted immense public attention reveal the response to accounts that emphasize British brutality meted out to African antagonists at a time when Britain was struggling to hold on to its remaining colonies: Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya and David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the 21 Ferguson, Empire, 295–97, 335, 338–43, 363. For a perceptive critique of this television series, see Jon Wilson, “Niall Ferguson’s Imperial Passion,” History Workshop Journal 56 (2003): 175–83. 22 Recent considerations of the field of comparative history include Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen & Maura O’Connor (New York: Routledge, 2004), and Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History & Theory 42.1 (2003): 39–44. 23 Important contributions to the field of ‘entangled’ or ‘connected’ histories (and, relatedly, histoire croisée) include Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (1997): 735– 62; Michael Werner & Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History & Theory 45.1 (2006): 30–50; “AHR Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112.3 (2007): 710–99.



“Setting the Record Straight”?

99

End of Empire, both of which appeared in 2005.24 Elkins and Anderson both challenge received versions of the last years of empire as a time of orderly, dignified, and planned retreat following rule predicated upon a benevolent civilizing mission. Of the reviews published in the British press, most concede that Elkins’s and Anderson’s accounts offer much in terms of a corrective version of events in 1950s Kenya, but many qualify their endorsement in highly significant ways. Many dispute the large numbers of deaths Elkins proposes and are particularly hesitant to accept her analogies between British behaviour in Kenya and repression as enacted by the Nazis or under Stalin. Other reservations and qualifications are even more suggestive. One reviewer writing for the Daily Telegraph noted how the “terrible doings” recorded in these books are “painful to those of us who love Kenya and admire what some distinguished white settlers have achieved there” – settlers who often “worked very hard for small return.”25 Another, while stating that “there can be no excuse for what happened” in Kenya, emphasized that “both authors are righteously indignant at Britain’s conduct of the war, yet do not say what alternatives existed. They make no attempt to put themselves in the authorities’ shoes, faced with nightly massacres in which oath-taking and witchcraft played an unpredictable part.” Elkins’s and Anderson’s versions are dismissed as “one-sided”: Neither author was in Kenya during Mau Mau. They present an image of the British that will be unrecognisable to the many thousands of doctors, vets, nurses, teachers, farmers, engineers, district and administrative officers who gave their lives to that country without ever torturing, raping, or murdering anyone.26

Other reviewers conceded that some Britons involved in counter-insurgency may have acted inappropriately, but these were the minority – the ‘bad apples’. In large part, however, the British government and administration are absolved from much of the responsibility, which is shifted onto either the white settlers or to the Africans, the ‘loyal Kikuyu’, who were also instru24 Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2005). 25 Max Hastings, “The Dark Side of Empire,” Daily Telegraph (10 January 2005). 26 Nicholas Best, “They Died Cursing the British,” Sunday Telegraph (16 January 2005).

100

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

mental collaborators in repressing Mau Mau. Africans working on Britain’s behalf to quell the insurgency thereby serve two key functions: either they illustrate the desired loyalty to the colonizer exhibited by segments of colonized society (which was commendable), or else they are accused of having perpetrated the most brutal acts (which was, in part, understandable, given their purported lack of civilization – exemplified by references to witchcraft and oath-taking).27 Just as some commentators wish to portray the British ‘bad apples’ in Kenya as the exception rather than the rule, so, too, do apologists for empire stress that events like Mau Mau and its repression were not the British norm. Elkins’s and Anderson’s accounts of Mau Mau are, for the most part, admitted to be useful correctives to the story of British decolonization as dignified and free of the unseemly conflicts that plagued French, Belgian, and Portuguese decolonizations in Indochina, Algeria, the Congo, and Angola (to name but a few). But excesses in Kenya are depicted as thankfully exceptional, as commentators such as Niall Ferguson are eager to stress. In this manner, the master-narrative of a benevolent, well-intentioned, and decent British Empire and its British agents can be largely upheld.28 For that matter, what alternative awaited Kenyans and other formerly colonized peoples after the British left? As one reviewer of Elkins and Anderson concluded, “Kenya today, like most of Africa, is tragically damaged by weak government and chronic corruption. The Kenyan people are victims of their own rulers.”29 In short, in the search to find an alternative cast of villains to British colonizers, other colonizing powers in tandem with colonized collaborators and successor regimes emerge as favoured choices. Even when apologists concede that they have a point, critics of empire are still commonly written off as illegitimate, sometimes simply because they could not know how it had been, since they had not been there themselves. Furthermore, scholarly 27 On the ‘loyal Kikuyu’, see Robert Oakeshott, “Mau Mau and all that,” Spectator (5 March 2005). John Darwin, meanwhile, concludes his review of Elkins and Anderson by stressing “how heavily the Government depended on its local allies (both Kikuyu and whites) and how little it dared to restrain their excesses […] the history of colonialism may be a record of crime, but there were lots of fingers in the colonial pie.” Darwin, “No Tea and Farewell, Just Brutal Repression,” Times Higher Education Supplement (30 September 2005). 28 Niall Ferguson, “Home truths about famine, war and genocide,” The Independent (30 April 2007). 29 Hastings, “The Dark Side of Empire.”



“Setting the Record Straight”?

101

critics from formerly colonized countries are overwhelmingly ignored by the mainstream British media, which largely gives coverage to books and other productions that foreground British voices and British imperial experiences.30 Verdicts voiced by the ex-colonized, when heard at all, are acknowledged when they demonstrate the desired complicity with, and gratitude for, erstwhile colonial projects. In such accounts, the subaltern actor may, on occasion, be permitted to speak, but mainly when repeating or reinforcing the script preferred by those in charge of the production.31 Postcolonial defenders of Britain’s imperial record and legacy frequently insist that those once ruled by Britain were, and remain, largely appreciative. Many ex-participants recalling their time overseas describe returns after decolonization when they were warmly welcomed by Africans or Asians, encounters subsequently deployed in efforts to counter charges that the British were exploitative colonial oppressors.32

Critiquing American Critics of Empire In recent years, some of the most vilified critics of empire who have replaced the proverbial “smug progressives in their Hampstead seminars” are not the formerly colonized but, rather, foreign academics – academics from the U S A in particular. An early prominent example was the minor furore in 1996 over the news that the general editor of the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire scheduled for publication in 1998 and 1999 was American. Led by a veiled attack by Lord Max Beloff in the popular monthly journal History Today, the controversy received additional coverage in British national newspapers. “Charges of anti-British prejudice and political correctness are flying as Professor Roger Louis of the University of Texas settles into the post of editor-in-chief,” the Sunday Times reported. Critics feared that his “Anglo-American team will rewrite history and misunderstand the imperial ethos.” As Beloff put it, “this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not just to set the record straight, but to write the record, and it may be fumbled in a Jon Wilson makes this point with respect to Ferguson’s “Empire” television series in Wilson, “Niall Ferguson’s Imperial Passion.” 31 On related themes, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg & Cary Nelson (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1988): 271–313. 32 Anthony Kirk–Greene, “Towards a Retrospective Record,” Overseas Pensioner 85 (2003): 20. 30

102

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

rush to be fashionable. Traditionally, Americans do not like the empire.” Other historians concurred: “you can’t write that whole period off as jingoism and exploitation,” commented Lawrence James, while Jan Morris added that many Britons “did a lot of good” in the Empire. An Oxford don “who did not wish to be named” wondered: “What are the Americans doing writing our history for such a venerated institution as the Oxford history series? We are going to suffer the backdraft from the Texas campus, which is pretty liberal.”33 Such critics were silenced following the volumes’ publication when it was commonly agreed that Louis and his contributors did the Empire justice. In fact, it is fair to say that the Oxford History of the British Empire volumes have been widely viewed by academics in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies as having failed to give adequate space to many newer themes and approaches that have come to the fore in a ‘fashionable’ interdisciplinary scholarship in which many (although by no means all) contributors are, indicatively, American.34 While Louis was exonerated, Americans have remained suspect contributors to the history of the British Empire, and the nationality of those whose works are deemed overly critical of empire is often implicitly, if not explicitly, stated in non-academic reviews of their work. Caroline Elkins was commonly referred to as either a Harvard professor or as an American in critical reviews of Britain’s Gulag in the British press cited above. Similarly, one reviewer of David Gilmour’s 2005 book paying homage to the Indian Civil Service concluded that “Gilmour quite rightly rejects the view of some revisionist historians, principally across the Atlantic, John Harlow & Lesley Thomas, “Historians Feud over US Editor of Empire,” Sunday Times, 21 January 1996; see also Max Beloff, “The British Empire,” History Today 46.2 (1996): 13–20. 34 Valuable review essays discussing the volumes, and noting their thematic gaps and many contributors’ hostility towards alternative (often postcolonial) methodologies, include Stephen Howe, “The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29.2 (2001): 131–41, and Douglas Peers, “Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?: The Revival of Imperial History and the Oxford History of the British Empire,” Journal of World History 13.2 (2002): 451–67. On the long-standing divisions between historians of the British Empire and scholars identifying themselves as operating in the field of postcolonial studies (with this divide becoming blurred, but far from obsolete, by scholars embarking upon a ‘new imperial history’), see Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24.3 (1996): 345–63. 33



“Setting the Record Straight”?

103

that people joined the I C S not because they were inspired by an ideal but simply because it was a smart career move for any well-educated thruster on the make.” On the contrary: as the reviewer proceeded to add, “unmitigated careerism was far less likely to be found among the men who ruled India than in, say, American academic circles today.”35 Gilmour’s ardent dislike of American academic critiques of imperial administrators was much in evidence when he reviewed my own book, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, in the London Review of Books. Indeed, Gilmour spent considerably less time discussing specific themes my book focused on than he did railing against the substantial number of “American studies of British India that could not find a single decent motive to attribute to officials who had spent a good part of their careers digging canals, building roads and organizing famine relief” – followed by reference to “Buettner, herself a young American historian.”36 Gilmour was not alone in highlighting my nationality as a reason why my views of British India should be questioned. In autumn of 2004 I was invited to give a talk at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, which was attended by a fairly sizable audience consisting in large part of people who had once lived and worked overseas themselves. Among the themes I discussed was the practice of British families in India of employing many servants and viewing them in various ways – some affectionately, some quite negatively and condescendingly. I subsequently received a letter from a woman who had attended the talk which used the “evidence of experience” – and over multiple generations at that – to refute my arguments: “My grandparents loved their Indian servants and looked after them well, as did my father in South Africa and as did my husband and I in various parts. We all must have done something right to have had all our maids, ayahs, cooks etc. give long years of loyal service.” She then added, “Your criticism, being American, I thought a bit rich – it was not until Kennedy was your president did things look up for blacks in [the] U.S.A.”37 Acknowledging and contesting celebratory versions of imperial history that remain widely available for public consumption is an essential task for 35 Geoffrey Moorhouse, “The Old Scenes Shall Rise Again,” Guardian (1 October 2005); David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: Pimlico, 2007). 36 37

David Gilmour, “Calcutta in the Cotswolds,” London Review of Books (3 March 2005). Letter from Sheila Bevan to Dr Elizabeth Buettner, 7 November 2004.

104

E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R 

academics who seek to further a critical assessment of imperialism and an understanding of its legacy. The prevalence and popularity of affirmative narratives of British imperial history and its agents show how resilient the “mythology of benevolent imperialism” remains up to the present day.38 Indeed, it would seem that the proponents of such attitudes derive strength and sustenance from what they perceive as attacks on their redoubt. They are a force scholars dismiss at their peril and with which they must seriously grapple, for they have considerable ongoing resonance. In early 2005 during a tour of Africa, Britain’s then Chancellor of the Exchequer (and subsequently Prime Minister) Gordon Brown claimed that it was high time Britain stopped feeling the need to apologize for its colonial history. “We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it,” he argued; we should talk […] about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.39

That imperial heritage might remain an appealing facet of Britishness today, and in future, is a theme well worthy of thorough analysis – not least because we surely have not heard the last of it.



38 Benjamin Zachariah, “Rewriting Imperial Mythologies: The Strange Case of Penderel Moon,” South Asia 24.2 (2001): 58. 39 “It’s Time to Celebrate the Empire, Says Brown,” Daily Mail (15 January 2005).

S ECTION II: ——————————————————————————————————

(T RANS )N ATIONAL C ONSUMER C ULTURES : F ROM ‘K OLONIALWAREN ’ TO ‘E THNIC C UISINE ’

(Trans)National Consumer Cultures Coffee as a Colonial Product in the German Empire

L AURA J ULIA R ISCHBIETER

N

OWADAYS, COFFEE

is the second most important global trade commodity after oil, the most important foreign exchange guarantor for many agrarian-oriented producing countries, an attractive source of income tax, and a favourite beverage. In 2006, Germans drank an average of 146 litres of coffee per person, followed by beer with 130 litres.1 As a luxury food, a Genussmittel,2 coffee contributed decisively to the transformation of European society from a need-oriented to a consumption-oriented society. Not only were colonial goods like coffee increasingly consumed in Germany, their production as well as their trade also changed dramatically through the globalization process over the course of the nineteenth century. The interdependence between an accelerating distribution of internationally traded consumer goods and the differing contexts of their consumption has only recently been taken into account in academic research. Choosing a product as a starting-point for analysis enables one to track the global interconnections of production, the market, and consumption. As a globally traded commodity and a product of European mass consumption, coffee lends itself to an exemplary investigation of this connection.

Press release 2007 of the German Coffee Organization, www.kaffeeverband.de (accessed 12 January 2010). 2 Genussmittel is difficult to translate into English. The term ‘luxury food’ refers to exclusivity as opposed to the German term that refers to enjoyment without nutritional or necessarily monetary value. 1

108

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

A solution to the problem of having to let an elaborating product history flow into a ‘total history of a commodity’ is provided by the concept of ‘glocalization’.3 It enables a focus on the complex interchange between local and global as well as enquiries into processes of homogenization and heterogenization. Globalization and localization are not understood as separate entities but, rather, as closely interactive processes. Global and local interdependence can be analyzed from a regional point of view. Accordingly, one does not have to take into consideration all the countries in the world that produce and consume a given commodity, along with all combined trading channels and arenas. Instead, it is the investigation of a local situation within global transformation processes that facilitates the understanding of global social and cultural dynamics as well as their influence on local development and vice versa. Consequently, I advocate the national region as an adequate starting-point for an analysis. The following accordingly examines regional actors from the German Empire involved in global and national trade. The aim here is to analyze the interactions, entanglements, and practices of actors connected with coffee as a product. The current debate on globalization and its history, on methodological approaches (transfer, comparison, and entanglement) and research perspectives (‘transnational history’)4 also contributes to opening new perspectives on the imperial past. To discuss the ‘commodity chain’ of a product such as coffee, the dichotomy between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ must be given up and attention directed towards the colonial in the capitals.5 Taking into account hierarchical interconnections and exchanges between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, the following study concentrates on geteilte Geschichten – i.e. histories that are both ‘shared’ and ‘divided’.6 From this perspective, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ must be treated as an overlapping and entangled analytical field, determined by

See Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995): 15–20. 4 See Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 5 See Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Bram Gieben & Stuart Hall (Cambridge: Polity, 1992): 275–320. 6 Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002). 3



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

109

“both global patterns and local struggles.”7 Commodities like coffee are a good starting-point to take into account the transnational and hybrid character of German society and its shared European colonial legacy. However, this entails not just emphasizing economic interactions and interdependencies, but also simultaneously elaborating upon the social effects as well as local reactions and social segregations resulting from the circulation of goods like coffee.8 From this vantage-point, I will examine the changes that were brought about by a non-European colonial product in local developments within the German Empire. First I would like to address the question of the relevance and function of coffee consumption in German society around 1900. That is: Who consumed coffee? Which class-specific ideas were connected with it? And to what extent did the need for coffee entail socio-political consequences? Secondly, I will explore the role played by this demand for coffee in colonial agitation and marketing strategies, thereby enquiring into the concrete ideas and stereotypes about both self and other that were associated with coffee as a colonial product. Thirdly and finally, I will discuss national strategies in marketing and advertising coffee.

Consuming Coffee: The Diversification of Consumer Life and the Birth of the Consumer as a Political Category Around 1900, drinking coffee on a daily basis had become customary in almost all regions and social circles in Germany. The annual consumption of pure coffee, about 4.6 pounds per person at the time of the German Empire’s inception, increased to more than 6.1 pounds at the turn of the century and reached its intermediate maximum of 7.2 pounds in 1909.9 On average,

7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000): 4. 8 For economic interdependence, see Laura Julia Rischbieter, “Globalisierungsprozesse vor Ort: Die Interdependenz von Produktion, Handel und Konsum am Beispiel ‘Kaffee’ zur Zeit des Kaiserreichs,” Comparativ 17.3 (2007): 28–45, and Steven Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500–1989, ed. William Gervase Clarence–Smith & Steven Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003): 21–49. 9 See Francis J.F. Hopwood, “Tea and Coffee 1908: Return to an Order of the Honorable House of Commons,” Parliamentary Papers X C V I Supplement (1908, 1911).

110

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

people older than fifteen years consumed 9 pounds of coffee per capita between the years of 1909 and 191310 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: German coffee consumption 1835–193511

However, for the most part, it was coffee substitutes such as chicory, often mixed with pure coffee, that were consumed in private homes. In 1914, about 400 million pounds of coffee were consumed, compared to approximately 350 million pounds of coffee substitutes.12 Because coffee substitutes were often concealed and always remained just a surrogate for the real, pure 10 See Statistisches Reichsamt, ed. Die Statistik des Deutschen Reichs im Jahre 1–246 (1884– 1913), and Hans Eberhard Buchholz, “Imports and Consumption of Coffee in Germany” (doctoral dissertation, Göttingen University, 1961, appendix table I I ).

Albert Hesse, Gewerbestatistik (1904; Jena: Fischer, 1914): 263. See Franz Findeisen, Der Kaffeehandel (Halle: John, 1917): 114. There are only hints about the ratio of coffee beans to coffee substitutes. From advertisements of coffee-substitute firms, one can conclude that one spoonful of coffee substitute was added to three spoonfuls of coffee beans; see, for example, the advertisement for Franck Coffee in 1895, reproduced in “Die Hauptstadt der Cichoria”: Ludwigsburg und die Kaffeemittel-Firma Franck, ed. Städtisches Museum Ludwigsburg (Ludwigsburg: Städtisches Museum, 1989): 137. 11 12



111

(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

coffee, the precise dimensions of their consumption are hard to determine. The production of coffee substitutes was ranked fourth-highest in the German Empire in terms of the number of companies and employees involved as well as corporate sizes within the food industry. However, the number of people employed in the coffee-bean processing industry increased during the period of the German Empire, while the number of employees in the coffeesubstitute industry decreased: Major companies

Employees

In small companies

1907

1907

1907

In mid-size companies 1907

Coffee bean

687

5,789

17.1 %

47.8%

Coffee substitute

214

4,861

4.2%

36.9%

1907

Employee development 1882–95

Employee development 1895–1907

Coffee bean

35.1%

+ 310.3 %

+ 169.8%

Coffee substitute

58.9%

– 8.7 %

– 14.9%

In large companies

Figure 2: Companies and employees in the coffee industry13

The significant role played by coffee in bourgeois society may have contributed to the establishment of coffee as a product of mass consumption during the nineteenth century. In bourgeois society, coffee and its consumption served as a means of social distinction. Above all, the bourgeoisie perceived coffee as the beverage most befitting their idea of appropriate lifestyle. Coffee, its consumption, and its preparation became the standard of a ‘cultivated’ way of life. As one could read in the Hamburger Nachrichten of 27 July 1909, it was claimed that only “good German bourgeois families” could “prepare decent coffee, because such coffee belongs to the culture of taste,

13

Albert Hesse, Gewerbestatistik (1904; Jena: Fischer, 1914): 263.

112

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

to outer life-style.”14 In the nineteenth century, coffee became the epitome of a bourgeois beverage; it represented the bourgeois work ethic and its social function while also fitting into middle-class gender-segregated spaces: public Kaffeehaus (coffee house) versus private Kaffeekränzchen (coffee circle – a casual, usually feminine, gathering involving coffee consumption and conversation). Therefore the dissemination of coffee was considered an appropriate socio-political activity for the middle classes. Indeed, by subsidizing the sale of coffee beans from the 1890s onwards, and by promoting the distribution of coffee (for example, through particular kinds of coffee houses, the so-called Volkskaffeehallen, ‘coffee halls for the people’), the bourgeois reform movement tried to encourage the lower classes to go to work regularly and to lead a ‘proper’ way of life, particularly without alcohol.15 The physiological effects of coffee and its value for people’s health had already been discussed since the very beginning of European coffee consumption, and these debates intensified after the discovery of caffeine in 1820 by Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge. Opinions ranged from extolling coffee as a cure-all to wholly negative descriptions indicting the beverage as a poison for the body. But even though its potential physiological effects were already heatedly debated by contemporaries, coffee consumption was still granted strong psychological significance because it induced “a feeling of well-being, with no drowsy side effects and promotes working.”16 As a distinctive delicacy for some, coffee simultaneously satisfied the needs of the impoverished majority in the German Empire because, “while a delicacy in itself, coffee today, as a consequence of its indispensability, can also really be considered a nutrient – especially for the less well-off circles.”17 14

N. Jacques, “Noch einiges über den Kaffeegenuss,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 27 July

1909, tr. mine. 15 See: Jakob Tanner & Heidi Witzig, “Kaffeekonsum von Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Kaffee im Spiegel europäischer Trinksitten, ed. Daniela U. Ball (Zürich: Johann Jacobs Museum, 1991) 153–68; Benno Fromm, Die Wohltätigkeitsvereine in Berlin (Berlin 1894); Bernd Pastuschka, “Die Geschichte der Hamburger ‘Kaffeeklappen’ seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert: Die sozialstaatliche Versorgung der Hafenarbeiter durch den ‘Verein für Volkskaffeehallen’ ” (M.A. thesis, Hamburg University, 1989). 16 Findeisen, Der Kaffeehandel, 113, tr. mine. In 1909, the same argument was also introduced in the Reichstag debates. In this context, the positive function of coffee for poorer people was emphasized in order to bolster political opinion against raising tariffs. Verhandlungen des Reichstages: Stenographische Berichte 237 (1909): 8844–54. 17 Ludwig Deutschmann, Der Kaffee-Grosshandel (Berlin: Hobbing, 1918): 8, tr. mine.



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

113

Accordingly, one finds surprisingly few references to coffee consumption as a status-symbol in sources dating from the 1890s onwards. Instead, statements about the stimulating and satisfying effect of the hot drink and its easy integration into the industrial workday dominate the texts, which emphasize the feasibility of fitting coffee consumption into one’s schedule.18 A cup of coffee turned a cold meal into a warm one and, for financial reasons, often represented a replacement ‘food’ for the urban as well as the rural population. Coffee was mostly consumed in the mornings and evenings, usually with potatoes or bread, and its consumption was understood as a necessity and not as an extravagant enrichment of a meal.19 Since coffee could be integrated especially well into the daily work routine, the demand also affected its commercialization in the urban space: the culture of coffee houses underwent a revival in the form of confectioneries, city cafés, and coffee gardens. Coffee consumption, however, also experienced an ever-increasing growth in popularity beyond these public spaces: i.e. on an everyday basis in private homes and in the workplace (factories, shops, and offices).20 The distribution of inexpensive coffee ‘to go’ began to expand rapidly. Already in 1909, Hamburg’s coffee halls sold 1.7 million cups of coffee.21 By the turn of the century, it was a widespread practice in the lower classes to replace warm meals with coffee, either fully or partly. These ‘new damaging effects’ of coffee were discussed widely. Coffee beans, however, remained an above-average priced food in comparison with other foods consumed on a daily basis, even when the simul18 See the twenty-three reports on the consumption of colonial goods in forty-six states and communities which covered the entire German state except for Bavaria. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 314.1, BVIII/8–9, BVD/1, 6–7. 19 See Bernhard Quantz, Zur Lage des Bauarbeiters in Stadt und Land: Eine volkswirtschaftliche Studie mit Haushaltsrechnungen und einem Überblick über die Entwicklung der baugewerblichen Verhältnisse Göttingens seit 1860 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1911), Elisabeth Gnauck–Kühne, “Die Lage der Arbeiterinnen in der Berliner Papierwarenindustrie: Eine sociale Studie,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 20 (1896): 429, and Susanne Rausch, “Ernährung und Sozialhygiene: Die Ernährung der Kleinbauern in der Eifel,” Zeitschrift für Ernährung 1.2 (1931): 63. 20 See Bundesarchiv Berlin (B A B ), R 8034 II/261, 5, and Ulrike Thoms, “Er stärkt und nährt die matten Glieder: Kaffee in der Arbeitswelt,” in Kaffee: Vom Schmuggelgut zum Lifestyle-Klassiker: Drei Jahrhunderte Berliner Kaffeekultur, ed. Peter Lummel (Berlin: be.bra, 2002): 49–60. 21 Pastuschka, Die Geschichte der Hamburger “Kaffeeklappen”, 85.

114

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

taneous growth in the cost of living is taken into consideration. Therefore, the rise in consumption can only be partly accounted for by the continuous fall in coffee prices beginning in the 1890s and by the increase in real income.22 Indeed, at least four factors led to the expansion of demand for coffee in the German Empire. The first was coffee’s symbolic function in the bourgeois life-style. Here, conspicuous (coffee) consumption became a medium of performing habitus, understood as a system of distinctive signs and practices of distinction.23 Secondly, at the same time, its psychological function as a stimulating beverage came to the fore. Indeed, coffee proved so successful in the industrialized working world because it responded to the idea of the body as a machine; it was especially valued because it kept the body-machine going. Thirdly, this vitalizing and satiating effect, combined with the possibility of easily integrating coffee consumption into the workday, underscores coffee’s enormous value for the majority of the physically hard-working sector of industrial society. These three factors as well as, fourthly, the social function of coffee consumption during the workday and the leisure activities of all classes turned coffee into a publicly and commercially significant commodity, creating new sales and consumer outlets. At the turn of the century, what was formerly a luxury beverage had finally developed into a product of mass consumption in a process whose after-effects started to require socio-political action. The social changes accompanying the development of the German Empire from an agricultural to an industrial nation, as well as the perceived threat from the Social Democratic Party and the masses of workers supporting it, forced the political leadership into welfare service: i.e. toward an extension of state functions.24 The satisfaction of mass consumer needs was seen as an effective strategy against unpopular political movements, but it also meant recognition that the majority of the population took part in consumption.25 Coffee consumption, seen as a weapon against alcohol and as an essential stimulant to enhance Hans–Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 3: Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995): 606. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Le Sens Pratique; Paris: Minuit, 1980; tr. Cambridge: Polity, 1990): 52–66. 24 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1086. 25 See Christoph Nonn, Verbraucherprotest und Parteiensystem im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1996), and Jörg Smotlacha, “Kaffee: Vom Massenartikel zur Luxusware: Politische Debatten im Deutschen Reich, 1909–1923” (M.A. thesis, Hanover University, 1997): 14–15. 22



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

115

work performance, was especially stressed by the national health bureau and in the debates of the Reichstag.26 Health issues, however, were not the only interests related to coffee. Since coffee tariff revenues held an important position in the state budget,27 the arguments fostering coffee consumption were juxtaposed with a tax policy that deepened the existing inequality of income distribution by increasing coffee tariffs.28 This balancing act between a fundamental willingness to make concessions in order to humour consumers’ desires and a higher coffee price resulting from increasing import duties in the course of the Finance Reform of 1909 inevitably led to controversial political debates in the Reichstag and the daily press. The controversy was further fuelled by the newly implemented practice of coffee evaluation by the Brazilian state of São Paolo. In 1906 and 1907, the municipal government of São Paolo tried to prevent the negative consequences of overproduction along with the dramatic drop of world market prices for coffee by officially buying approximately ten million sacks of coffee.29 This purchase was, inter alia, also financed by German banks. The increase in coffee prices as a result of the Empire’s finance reform in 1909 and the upward revaluation of coffee by the Brazilian government led to massive demonstrations in Germany. In 1909, the newspaper Die Post reported on “coffee wars”30 in the course of which residents of Cologne protested against coffee price increases with resolutions and boycotts. These protests were commented on in daily newspapers with quite a lot of understanding and sympathy, and in 1911 the Deutsche Tageszeitung even stated that “a coffee war required the use of extreme weaponry.”31 During the election campaigns of 1912 and 1913, the questions of which factors had contributed to the coffee price increases and which political party was to be held respon26 See Verhandlungen des Reichstages: Stenographische Berichte, 5 July 1878, 19/20 June 1909, 26 June 1909, 10 July 1909, 10 January 1911, 11 February 1911, 31 January 1913; Kaiserliches Gesundheitsamt, Der Kaffee, 114–15. 27

Eighty percent of the state income consisted of customs and consumer taxes. In

1913, coffee ranked at 11.2 percent of customs income, just behind wheat and tobacco. 28 Customs imposed tariff rates of 40 Reichsmarks between 1873 and 1909, and of 60 Reichsmarks between 1909 and 1918, per 10 kg of raw coffee. 29 See Thomas Halsey Holloway, The Brazilian Coffee Valorization of 1906: Regional Politics and Economic Dependence (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1975). 30 Die Post (21 September 1909), tr. mine. 31 Die Deutsche Tageszeitung (23 February 1911), tr. mine.

116

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

sible for the situation turned into a political issue, and the relationship between global (economic) interdependence and social issues on the domestic level became very obvious. To quote an example from the StaatsbürgerZeitung: Our own government, our own farmers are denied taxes and protection, but money is spent on Brazilian farmers to save them from bankruptcy and to use this money for usury against the German people. Conservative outlook, liberal politics. Two opposing poles which cannot be bridged, but which the people must be aware of in order to come to a decision during the elections.32

These protests and the never-ending coffee-price debates reveal a significant socio-political potential for conflict. Moreover, they stress the socio-political significance of consumer goods in general and of the foreign product ‘coffee’ in particular within imperial Germany.

‘Colonial Coffee’: Perceptions and Constructions of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ Although coffee was a product of mass consumption and a daily beverage in 1900, in many respects it remained an exotic colonial product. As such, it could be used for different purposes. On the one hand, pictures and illustrations for coffee evoked the exoticism of the countries of origin. Here, the creation of difference for the construction of European stereotypes of ‘self’ and ‘other’ became useful in popular culture as well as in marketing strategies. On the other hand, the general desire for cheap coffee was cleverly exploited in the political arena, especially for colonial agitation. The argument that coffee crops grown in Germany’s own African colonies would make pure coffee affordable for everyone was used by colonial propagandists to sell the idea of acquiring German colonies, especially to bourgeois and petit-bourgeois levels of society. According to the Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial-Economic Committee), “each and every pound of coffee inherently contains an advertisement for the colonial idea.”33 Coffee was grown primarily in the Usambara Mountains of German East Africa. From the 1890s onwards, thirteen German plantation companies were established with the goal of growing coffee in German East Africa. 32 33

Staatsbürger-Zeitung (7 May 1913), tr. mine. Kolonie und Heimat in Wort und Bild 11 (1908): 4, tr. mine.



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

117

Together with eight private German coffee farmers, they managed to continuously increase their crop yields but, due to poor quality and high prices, the German consumer had to display a significant degree of patriotism to buy this coffee.34 As the specialized journal for tropical planters Der Tropenpflanzer wrote, “only the patriotism of German consumers allows for any sale at all.”35 In fact, ninety percent of the imported and consumed pure coffee originated in Latin America, nine percent was imported from Java and Sumatra via Amsterdam, and very little stemmed from Germany’s own colonies.36 It was a desire fostered purely by political considerations that made cultivation in German colonies appear a reasonable proposition. In fact, economically speaking, coffee cultivation in the colonies of German East Africa was never profitable and remained the “troubled child of colonial activities.”37 But the problem was to be solved through ‘education’ in colonial thinking. In 1898, Gustav Meinecke, editor of the Kolonial Blatt and member of the Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, wrote: “The fact is that the German people must somehow be educated in colonial enterprise. Once this training period is over, private initiative in Germany will become stronger and more active.”38 Significantly more common in German homes than colonial coffee from German East Africa were the rather romanticized descriptions of its cultivation to be found in magazines and adventure novels.39 The experience of foreigners and the ‘foreign’ in imperial Germany was mostly second- or third-hand and “under these conditions […] reduced to experience in dealing Regarding individual plantation companies, their directors, investors etc., see Komitee zur Einführung der Erzeugnisse aus den deutschen Kolonien, ed. Deutsches KolonialAdressbuch 1–18 (1897–1914); B A B R 1001/8001; R 8023/435; R 8024/109–111, 119, 126, 130, 132, 134, 154, 173, 180, 182. 35 P. Kümpel, “Kaffee: Nebst einigen allgemeinen Bemerkungen über die Mittel und Wege zur Nutzbarmachung unserer Kolonien,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1900): 191, tr. mine. 36 1,577 tons were imported from German East Africa in 1912, compared to 172,572 tons of coffee from other regions, mainly Latin America. Statistisches Reichsamt, ed. Die Statistik des Deutschen Reichs im Jahre 1913 (1913). 37 Otto Warburg, “Ergebnisse und Ansichten der kolonialen Landwirtschaft,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1906): 11, tr. mine. 38 Ferdinand Wohltmann, “Zur Methode des Kaffeepflanzens in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1898): 170, tr. mine. 39 See, for example, Karl Falkenhorst, Der Kaffeepflanzer von Mrogoro: Erzählung aus OstAfrika (Dresden & Leipzig: Köhler, 1895). 34

118

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

with perceptions of foreigners.”40 Thus references to the ‘foreignness’ of coffee primarily functioned in the context of Germans’ self-imaging, as a popular children’s song from the beginning of the nineteenth century demonstrates: “C-o-f-f-e-e. Don’t drink so much coffee. The Turkish drink is not for kids. It weakens the nerves, it makes you sick. Don’t be a Muslim who can’t do without it!”41 This round composed by Carl Gottlieb Hering (1766–1853) is typical, insofar as coffee, a product of daily consumption but of ‘foreign’ origin, quickly and impressively enables the production of stereotypes and images of the self and others – in other words, the creation of social identity through contrast. Adventure novels in particular used this form of stereotyping to explain to young people of both sexes their respective social roles as white middle-Europeans through the medium of difference. Indeed, this concept is omnipresent even in adult literature, such as the autobiography of the German settler Magdalene von Prince in German East Africa.42 The connection between coffee and its ‘colonial origin’ also recurred in novel coffee brand items that tried to attract new customers through packaging, posters, trade cards, flyers, neon (advertising) signs, advertising columns, and enamel plates. In the process of industrialization and its attendant urbanization, the majority of the population was no longer able to produce its own food. The resulting industrial mass production of foodstuffs required novel communication strategies for potential consumers to become familiar with these (new) industrially manufactured products. At the same time, the latter had to be endowed with social importance in order to arouse a need for them. The rise of coffee from a luxury to a daily product in the course of 40 Hartwig Gebhardt, “Kollektive Erlebnisse: Zum Anteil der illustrierten Zeitschriften im 19. Jahrhundert an der Erfahrung des Fremden,” in Kulturkontakt und Kulturkonflikt: Zur Erfahrung des Fremden, ed. Ina–Maria Greverus, Konrad Köstlin & Heinz Schilling (Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Kulturanthropologie & Europäische Ethnologie, 1987): 517, tr. mine. On books for children and young readers, see Ansgar Häfner, “Das Kinder- und Jugendbuch als Träger und Vermittler von Fremdbildern” in the same volume, 563–70. 41 Sabine Knopf, “ ‘ Nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank’: Der Kaffee im Kinderbuch und im Märchen,” in “Die Kaffeegesellschaft”: Drei Jahrhunderte Kaffeekultur an der Weser. Eine Ausstellung des Porzellanmuseums Fürstenberg und der Sammlung Eduscho, ed. Museum der Porzellanmanufaktur Fürstenberg (Bremerhaven: Nordwestdeutscher Verlag, 1992): 77, tr. mine. 42 Magdalene von Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1904).



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

119

the nineteenth century led to a diversification of consumer groups who (as potential buyers) had to be addressed via advertising. At the same time, many coffee companies forced their way into the German market and tried to win the favour of customers with their specific roasts and blends. Nevertheless, the majority of coffee beans sold represented ‘anonymous’ blends and roasts. In order to distinguish themselves from their national competitors, companies developed presentation brands and trade brands that were then used in advertising campaigns. Presentation brands were characterized by a standardized blend of different beans, by continuous production, by constant quality coupled with a specific roasting, as well as by standardized packaging and product names. In contrast, trade brands marketed different coffee products but always advertised them with the company name and/or company logo.43 Prior to the outbreak of World War I, almost 11,000 illustrated daily newspapers, weekly entertainment magazines, and home magazines in print reached a mass audience with their advertisements for coffee. The German patent office published a brochure in which firms could register their logos, advertising images, and slogans as copyrighted trademarks.44 Only a minority of coffee advertisements was illustrated in the German Empire.45 Most advertisements were just text. Here, the exoticizing product descriptions were often at odds with the true origin of products. Even though imperial Germany satisfied more than ninety percent of its coffee demand at the time through imports from Latin America, only two of the 261 names registered as brand-name coffees referred to that region.46

43 Neither layout nor trade brands included all the features of a present-day brand product. Substitute coffee represented the exception, as in ‘Kathreiner’s Malz Kaffee’, brought to the market in 1892. In everyday usage, however, products were called brand articles when they “were brought onto the market under a certain name, not anonymously”; Walter Herzberger, Der Markenartikel in der Kolonialwarenbranche (Stuttgart: Poeschel, 1931): 4. 44 See Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Nachweisung der im Deutschen Reiche gesetzlich geschützten Waarenzeichen 1–3 (1886); Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Warenzeichenblatt 1–28 (1894–1914). 45 In 1913, ‘no-name’ bean coffee made up about seventy percent of turnover (Herzberger, Der Markenartikel in der Kolonialwarenbranche, 101). 46 It was manufacturers’ names that were primarily used as product names. It then followed that names referred to the geographical location of production (Kaiserliches Gesundheitsamt, Der Kaffee, 154–55).

120

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

Illustrated advertisements often featured characters that would seem familiar and trustworthy to the viewer, supplemented by colonial flora and fauna to hint at the ‘exotic’ nature of the country of origin. Aside from that, an important aspect of advertising imagery was ‘displaying foreignness’. The representation of black individuals as servile, obedient, or inferior to the white European was a traditional advertising theme. These illustrated advertisements ‘emphasized’ a difference between colonial masters on the consumer side and black coffee slaves on the producer side (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: German coffee advertisement

They are thus a testimony to the relationship between nutrition and power, also betraying the systematic interdependence between colony and metropolis, production and consumption.47 These connections as well as the 47 See Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Elizabeth Sifton / Penguin, 1985): 58–73.



121

(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

racism inherent in the pictures of black Africans and other non-Europeans have been studied by various scholars.48 But why and how often German coffee firms used these images has yet to be explored – as does the transformation of advertising strategies that came about with the development of coffee from a luxury good to a product of mass consumption. The question of the producers’ intentions in using these images leads to a paradoxical answer: the firms chose these images because they were familiar to the observer (i.e. one had become accustomed to seeing them) and were supposed to trigger an approved associative link with the consumer.49 With the use of European/African contrasts in advertisements, coffee firms negated new consumers’ social reality, since coffee drinkers in these illustrations belonged to the homogeneous group of ‘civilized’ Europeans and not to a specific class. If all illustrated advertisements – and not just those depicting black Africans – are taken into account, and their content as well as the frequency with which they were used are analyzed, an interesting picture emerges: Year

Coffee advertisements total

Advertising illustrations total

Subject: exotic flora and fauna

Subject: black people

Subject: white Germans

1895

22

11

3

1

7

1899

86

49

7

5

37

1912

289

47

5

5

35

Figure 4: Coffee advertisement statistics50

See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995): 207–31. On the development of racist image advertisements in the German Empire, see David M. Ciarlo, “Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire: Colonialism and German Mass Culture, 1887–1914” (doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2003), and Sabine Wolter, Die Vermarktung des Fremden: Exotismus und die Anfänge des Massenkonsums (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005). 49 Bernhard Wities, “Das Wirkungsprinzip der Reklame: Eine psychologische Studie,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 2 (1906): 151–53. 50 Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Warenzeichenblatt (1895, 1899, 1912). 48

122

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

Quantitatively, the depiction of black Africans represented the minority of motifs chosen in coffee advertisements. The available image of the ‘civilized’ European confronting ‘wild’ Africans was very rarely reproduced, while newly popularized, less controversial, and thus commercially more useful images were increasingly created. For instance, motifs illustrating the countries’ exoticism (depictions of flora and fauna such as palms, coffee plants, or elephants) were used instead of imperial interactions. In a few cases, exoticism was exploited in order to confer a positive meaning on the product by linking it with an African person portrayed as desirable (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: German coffee advertisement



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

123

The majority of coffee advertisements favoured the use of specific logos as a strategy to distinguish themselves from other firms and their products. The firm and/or its specific product formed the essential feature of the advertisement. The ‘exotic’ origin of the coffee bean was not displayed, nor was the connection between coffee and its ‘colonial origin’. For example, Kaiser’s Coffee Company GmbH, the biggest retailer in the food industry before the beginning of World War I,51 marketed all of its products under a single trademark – a laughing coffee pot – rather than as individual brand products. Another prominent example of such a strategy, and one that required an enormous advertising effort, was the successful introduction of the decaffeinated H A G coffee, developed by Ludwig Roselius in 1907, and its marketing as a ‘healthier’ coffee bean: “fullest coffee enjoyment – without damaging side effects.”52

Conclusion To this very day, the coffee plant grows exclusively in tropical climates. This is the basic premise for the role of coffee as a colonial product: i.e. the asymmetrical relationship between its production in one part of the world and its consumption in another. Only in the course of the twentieth century did coffee producers also become coffee consumers. Today, Brazil is one of the biggest consumer markets for coffee, along with the U S A and closely followed by Germany. The interaction between coffee-producing and coffeeconsuming countries generated changes that have superseded notions of a one-sided (economically based) dependence of producing countries on consuming countries. The accelerated spread of globally traded goods at the end of the nineteenth century altered the relations between producing and consuming societies. One can distinguish three main aspects of the societal effects that the circulation of (colonial) goods like coffee had in the German Empire:

Kaiser’s Kaffeegeschäft GmbH, Files in copy. Archive of the Max Planck Society, Rep. IX: Mitglieder Akten, 1 Josef Kaiser; Julius Hirsch, Die Filialbetriebe im Detailhandel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der kapitalistischen Massenfilialbetriebe in Deutschland und Belgien (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers, 1913): 27–67. 52 Stefanie Kunze, “ ‘ Kaffee-H A G schont ihr Herz’: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung eines klassischen Markenartikels in der deutschen Kaffeebranche 1906–1939,” Hamburger Wirtschafts-Chronik 4 (2004): 100, tr. mine. 51

124

L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R 

1. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the consumption of coffee became an indispensable component of everyday life. (Substitute) coffee and its consumption were a part of everyday food patterns and an important element in leisure activities of all classes of the German Empire. Even though for the consumer masses the use-value of a product like coffee still dominated, there were first signs of a tendency to view it increasingly in terms of its symbolic and communicative function and its importance in leisure activities. This diversification was especially visible in the spread of public places of consumption. Coffee, as a ready-to-drink product, was sold where there was a demand: at work, in the canteen, on the street, and in fastfood restaurants, like that of the Aichinger brothers in Berlin or in Kaffeeklappen at Hamburg harbour. This, however, did not lead to unified consumption practices or a homogenization of places of consumption. The distinguished afternoon coffee table with its social rituals remained one among many other places and types of consumption. The product, its preparation, and the places where it was consumed diverged considerably within the German Empire. 2. The consequences of the German Empire’s global economic integration were negotiated in the course of timperial finance reform and in the wake of consumer protests – not only in terms of foreign trade, but also in terms of consumers and consumer society. The drinking of coffee had become such an indispensable feature of everyday life that the demand for it took on a prominent socio-psychological, hence political, significance for the functioning of society. The satisfaction of mass consumer needs became a core component of policy-making. Citizens began to see themselves as consumers and, as such, started to articulate political demands. The dependence of social peace on the availability of colonial articles for all citizens of every class rose in relation to the increasing significance of coffee as a daily product. 3. The consumption of ‘exotic’ food items such as coffee played an important role in shaping the perception and construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in intensive processes of negotiation. The spatial and cultural distance connected with coffee as a colonial product left room for the elaboration of ideas and illustrations of exoticism and difference. In their reference to the German colonies, these images did not mirror any genuine reality. Instead, they tended to be the expression of a political strategy that skilfully exploited global economic connections and the demand for coffee to feed colonial agitation. In parallel, behaviour guidelines and rules of conduct could be formulated through the creation of difference. In this respect, images of dif-



(Trans)national Consumer Cultures

125

ference and the stereotypes they generated were a part of the national culture of coffee consumption in the German Empire. Traditional advertising in the Empire celebrated exoticism in order to both use and fuel colonial desire. Coffee-processing companies simultaneously developed a new strategy and reproduced an established one in order to advertise ‘their’ article. Indeed, even when coffee beans still represented an expensive food, emphasizing the luxuriousness and exclusivity of the product was probably no longer applicable as an advertising strategy to address the impoverished majority of consumers in the German Empire who (as potential buyers) were an important target-group of coffee advertising. Therefore, producers highlighted the article’s ties to German processing companies or the product’s uniqueness and its specific features rather than dwelling on coffee’s ‘exotic origin’ along with associated stereotypes. To this day, however, coffee remains a product advertised through images of exoticism and eroticism, as is obvious in, for example, the contemporary German Melitta Auslese T V commercial that evokes “Brazilian fire and temperament,” thus emphasizing the alleged exoticism and eroticism of Latin America. The bottom line of German coffee advertising today is not the creation of difference in the sense of contrasting (pejorative) otherness with a (positive) self but, rather, presentation of the brand product as a source of attractiveness and as part of a positive life-style. The historical roots of this advertising tradition lie precisely in the differentiation of consumer goods through the increasing application of marketing techniques at the end of the nineteenth century. The geteilte Geschichten perspective – in the double sense of ‘shared’ and ‘divided’ histories – is therefore just as essential in the present as it is in an analysis of our past. To this day, the concrete (economic and social) consequences of the interdependence between production, trade, and consumption of coffee remain difficult to grasp and to anticipate.



Transcultural Tea Times An Overview of Tea in Colonial History

C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAM

I like a nice cup of tea in the morning, For the start of the day you see, And at half past eleven, For my idea of heaven, Is a nice cup of tea. I like a nice cup of tea with my dinner, And a nice cup of tea with my tea. And when it’s time for bed, There’s a lot to be said, For a nice cup of tea!1 “Morning, Jeeves,” I said. “Good morning, sir,” said Jeeves. He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table by the bed, and I took a refreshing sip. Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, and not a drop spilled in the saucer. A most amazing cove, Jeeves. […] He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.2

T

H E A B O V E T W O Q U O T A T I O N S are literary examples of how intrinsic ‘the good old cup of tea’ is to the English socio-cultural consciousness. The comfort and charisma of tea and its associated

1 Alan Patrick Herbert, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” part of the libretto for the musical Home and Beauty (1937). Quoted from Tea Dance: Another Cup (C D ; Whittard of Chelsea & Past Perfect, 2005). 2 P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988): 7.

128

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

rituals, however, are not just confined to the English; it has had and still has a prominent place in the culinary practices and social customs of several other cultures around the world. My objective in this chapter is to trace an historical overview of the cultivation, manufacture, and trade of this beverage, thus weaving a web of transcultural (i.e. transcending and translating across cultural boundaries) significance of tea through diverse time-frames and socio-political and gendered contexts. Tea has left its mark on every civilization, due to the fact it has been adapted to suit the cultures it has reached. This can be attributed to the fact that tea often requires elaborate rites of preparation and consumption – hence the diverse degrees of inventiveness which allowed for the expression of individual tastes. Piya Chatterjee describes the journey of the tea leaf “from the mountains of southern China to the parlors of Georgian and Victorian England”; tea – the leaf and liquid – soon “became one of the most important commodities to circulate in the expanding trade on ocean frontiers.”3 The beverage can be read as a medium through which narratives of global expansion and conquest are conveyed. Incorporated into the more visible histories of European expansion are tales of desire and imagination which fed an increasing demand for tea and initiated its journeys from the East into the parlours of Europe. The consumer culture surrounding tea during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries initially signified the pleasures afforded by the discovery of the ‘strange’. Travelling from that exotic nexus of ‘Oriental mystery’ – China and India – tea would acquire a very quotidian significance of English gentility, as observed (albeit rather irreverently!) by Marlene Dietrich: The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently and nothing can be done, [. . . ] until ‘a nice cup of tea’ is quickly made.4

Through consumption rituals, tea delineated new domains of desire, very much associated with femininity and its leisured culture, signalling the emergence of new interior worlds. Victorian ideals of domesticity and its femin3 Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2001): 45. 4 Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich’s A B C (1962; New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984): 154, www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?t=5530 (accessed 21 January 2010).



Transcultural Tea Times

129

ized domains of the private came to be inscribed by this interiority, which in itself indexed gender and class transformations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the iconic status of tea as a beverage of the British aristocracy had moved outwards beyond drawing rooms and parlours. Its popularity among the emerging middle class and a growing urban working class made for further commercial demand and expansion. Thus the cultural practices of consumption would provide the administrative and mercantile impetus for British plantation settlements in India. Stuart Hall illustrates the web of relations between Britain and its chief colonies, where the products of the British Empire constituting tea consumption can be identified: People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been here for centuries; symbolically we have been here for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that have rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others besides me […] that are the cup of tea. [. . . ] Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English without that other history. The notion that identity has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same is nonsense. As a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.5

Indeed, where would the English cup of tea be, without the leaf from India and the sugar,6 white or brown, from the Caribbean? Thus that very English Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony King (London: Macmillan, 1991): 48–49. 6 Although considered expensive within the general household budget, tea was cheaper compared to coffee and chocolate and could hence be afforded by the working classes. Beatrice Hohenegger comments on the use of sugar with tea and its cultural significance, which was a source of culinary comfort to those of lesser means: “sweetened tea became not only the preferred but the essential beverage of the working poor in late eighteenthcentury England. […] sweet tea became the cheap alternative to real food and offered the temporary illusion of a hot, nutritious meal”; Hohenegger, Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West (New York: St Martin’s, 2006): 100. In the 1790s, Sir Frederic Morton Eden studied the diet of the poorer classes of the country and discovered that many regularly 5

130

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

cup of tea contains several homes and several cultural presences. Despite certain anxieties about cultural identity, it is apparent that Caribbean, Indian, and English histories are all intertwined and inscribed on each other. The production and consumption of tea (and sugar) stretches across the globe, building bridges between countries and cultures, crossing boundaries and acquiring new meanings in diverse cultural contexts in the course of history.

Arriving in England European references to tea in China (as early as 1559) provided positive descriptions of tea and its moderating influences, all of which were instrumental in charting tea’s travels overland to Europe. China had kept European trade at bay for over two hundred years, making the curtailed supplies of tea all the more expensive, hence more desirable.7 By the sixteenth century, the European imagination was captured by China, and commercial interest followed, growing rapidly.8 Papal and royal envoys brought tributes of tea as well as porcelain and other fine tea equipage back to European courts. Since interest in the beverage had grown among the upper classes in Europe by the mid-1600s, the Dutch9 decided to re-export the tea they had bought tea and sugar; it took some five to ten percent of a labourer’s income to keep his family in tea and sugar for a week. See Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire (London: Robinson, 2004): 44. 7 During the Ming dynasty, China turned into an inward-looking nation. Convinced of their superiority to other cultures, the Chinese soon isolated themselves from foreign influences. Declared illegal in 1521, direct trade between the Chinese and foreign countries was gradually phased out. Tea sales were subsequently effected through intermediaries. See Moxham, Tea, 59. 8 Thus the ‘Orient’ instigated a desire in the imagination of discovery; the traditional Chinese beverage was the catalyst for the tea spaces which helped to channel the increasing obsession with all things Oriental that spread through the West at this point in time: “Drinking a Chinese beverage in Chinese ceramics was naturally linked to admiring Chinese things, new designs, lacquers, silks and Chinese gardens”; Alan & Iris MacFarlane, Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (London: Ebury, 2003): 81. The Chinese interest in things ‘occidental’, however, did not match the European hunger for Chinese wares; this lack of interest continued well into the nineteenth century and profoundly influenced East India Company trade. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 32. 9 The Dutch were the first European nation to begin drinking tea. In the early sixteenth century, they began exporting Chinese tea through their trade base in Java, Indonesia. Tea soon became the most popular beverage round the mid-seventeenth century in Holland.



Transcultural Tea Times

131

shipped from China to Portugal, France, and Germany. These early journeys of discovery were thus the pivot of the royal patronage of maritime travel and mercantilism that would form the fundamentals of a European empire in the ‘East’. The tea and opium trades10 formed a famous triangle of exchange which would contribute to the unravelling of Chinese dynastic rule as well as the planting of tea in India. British merchants purchased tea from their European rivals before the first direct import nexus was established by the newly constituted East India Company (E I C ) in 1689. The association of tea with British royalty was forged with the arrival of the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, who became the wife of Charles II in 1662, who brought a casket of tea and the islands of Bombay as part of her dowry. This circumstance, along with the E I C ’s present of Chinese tea to Charles II , caused the king to ban imports of tea from Holland, thus effecting a monopoly of the tea trade for the company in Britain and its colonies. Tea imports were restricted for the remainder of the seventeenth century, owing to the taxes imposed. Consumed as a beverage as well as a medicine, tea remained a novelty in England until the end of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century saw a phenomenal rise in the demand for tea as a luxury commodity. Alan MacFarlane observes: “the whole business of tea became a national obsession in the eighteenth century, filling the long enforced leisure hours of millions of women.”11 Through the early nineteenth century, tea remained an expensive upper-class luxury, since high taxes12 were levied on tea in order to offset the See Jane Pettigrew & Bruce Richardson, The Tealover’s Companion: A Guide to Teas throughout the World (London: The National Trust, 2006): 11–12. The first shipload of tea arrived in Amsterdam from Japan in 1610. Tea became popular more as a medicine than as a beverage; among the greatest champions of tea in Europe was the Dutch doctor Cornelius Bonteko (1647–83). See Ute Kruse, Ch’a-Tchai-Tee: 150 Jahre indische Teegeschichte (Norden: Ostfriesisches Teemuseum, 1993): 12. 10 The Chinese were importing two and a half million pounds of Indian opium annually by 1830; it is unclear why they showed preference for opium produced in India. For a detailed discussion of the opium trade between the British and the Chinese, see Moxham, Tea, 64–70; and Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 128–36. 11 MacFarlane, Green Gold, 86. 12 High taxes on tea caused clashes between the British and their North American colony, where tea had entered colonial social circles in the 1660s. Dependence on British goods marked the colony’s pre-industrial cultural economy, entailing imitations of Englishness through culinary and consumption practices. The 1773 Tea Act allowed the E I C

132

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

high shipping costs. However a considerable black-market economy ensured that the working classes had access to tea through smuggling.13

Transplanting Tea to India Chinese tea was paid for in silver during the nineteenth century, which soon caused the E I C to face an almost insurmountable deficit. In order to cover this deficit, the E I C managed to wrest the Indian opium trade to Indonesia from the Dutch E I C and redirected it to China, declaring a monopoly in 1773, which incidentally was the same year as the Boston Tea Party.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, this manoeuvre and the subsequent successful planting of tea in India had broken the Chinese hold over its precious commodity. The ultimate project of cultivating tea in India15 was considered an Edenic vision of cultivating civilization, in order to provide the precious commodity to impose taxes on tea shipped from England to North American colonies. When tea clippers reached Boston in December 1773, a group of colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded three of the ships and threw 340 chests of tea into the harbour. Thus the Boston Tea Party marked tea-drinking as a negative act of identifying with Englishness among the upper classes in the New World. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 34–35. For a concise account of the American boycott against the 1773 imposition of the Townshend taxes on tea and its political implications, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Uprising against the East India Company,” Political Science Quarterly 32.1 (1917): 60–79. 13 For detailed descriptions of tea smuggling and adulteration in eighteenth-century England, see Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 89–97. 14 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) describes this landmark incident in American history in “The Ballad of the Boston Tea Party,” read at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1874: The waters in the rebel bay Have kept the tea-leaf savor; Our old North-Enders in their spray Still taste a Hyson flavor; And freedom’s cup still o’erflows With ever fresh libations, To cheat of slumber all her foes And cheer the waking nations! The entire poem was published in the Boston Evening Post (20 December 1773). See www .eldritchpress.org/owh/tea.html (accessed 21 January 2010). 15 The imperial botanist Joseph Banks first investigated the potential of cultivating tea in India as an alternative to China’s monopoly. The detailed descriptions by the Scottish



Transcultural Tea Times

133

for consumption in Europe. Chatterjee observes that colonization and cultivation could be justified by characterizing indigenous people by their assigned tasks and their allotted spaces on the socio-cultural grid, as delineated by the Raj. This was both the means and the aim of civilizing these ‘Others’ adequately to meet the needs of the planter Raj, while defining the capacity of the Raj itself to display its own leisure and luxury facilitated by the ‘Other’.16 The living metaphor of the Indian tea garden was thus to be effected through material histories, whereby the act of planting tea to convert the ‘wilderness’ of Assam, Dooars, and Darjeeling was predicated on human action. The ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ of the wild forest land was only possible if the indigenous people could be harnessed for the job, an enterprise that began in the late 1830s and went on under the aegis of the British till Indian independence.17 botanical entrepreneur Robert Fortune of Chinese methods of tea cultivation and manufacture provided the rough blueprints for tea production in India for pioneer British planters; Fortune was thus the herald of a commercial strategy that moved inexorably towards the direct colonization of India. Major Robert Bruce discovered that the tea plant was indigenous to upper Assam; Bruce’s accounts instigated a considerable debate about tea’s origins as an Indian plant, whereby the need to assert an Indian origin for tea was an important element of the imperial narrative. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 54–55. A most wretched chapter of British colonial labour history occurred in Assam, involving land annexation, taxation, and indentured labour. The assistant secretary of the Indian Association, Dwarkanath Ganguli, sent to Assam in 1886 to inquire into the working conditions in the tea gardens, observes: “The position of the labourers in many tea gardens is almost as bad, if it is not worse than the condition of the American Negro slaves before their emancipation.” See Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 153–60. Science, ideology, and economy have contributed to incorporating Assam into imperial and global commodity networks as a tea ‘garden’. While clearly serving British economic interests, imperial botanists focused on the vital scientific and strategic implications of the enterprise. The participation of the local Assamese in the colonial tea enterprise was generally limited to subsidiary roles as the region turned into a node of global extractive capitalism. For an in-depth account, see Jayeeta Sharma, “British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire’s Garden,” Indian Economic and Social Review 43.4 (2006): 429–55. 16 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 53. 17 British divestment in India began during World War II, particularly among small companies in eastern Assam. The departing planter Raj gave way to an Indian management, stemming from the aristocracy, the army, and the social elite, whereby anglicized manners and comportment ensured their positions in agency houses controlled from London. The distinction between sterling and rupiyah tea companies, however, was still

134

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

In the twentieth century, British Indian tea producers, compelled by the world wars and economic depression, also looked to the domestic market’s potential in the colony. In the promotion of the product as the national drink in 1930s India, tea was indigenized into the context of working-class masculinity; equally evoked were its long history of consumption and the gentility of imperial rule.18 The ideal Indian consumers were presented as ‘sons of the soil’ working the plantations. Yet the paradox here was that upper-class opponents of tea in England attempted to brand tea as a woman’s drink, the consumption of which would threaten masculinity. Could this prejudice have filtered through to the subcontinent and presented obstacles to the promotion of tea as a desirable beverage for the indigenous population? The indigenization of tea into Indian working-class masculinity could thus be read as a strategy to maintain the colonial representation of the colonized Indian man as effeminate.19 There was also a parallel advertising strategy which described a more feminized foregrounding, appealing to gendered kinship systems. Rural and middle-class modernity was predicated on the nation, with the heterosexual family unit at its centre. Once again, as in the English cultural context, tea was feminized through a nationalized ideal in India – the wife and mother of the Indian home.20 Thus domesticized in India by the British planter advertising campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s, the image of the Indian wife and mother was implemented to encourage Indian society to consume Rajproduced tea. This aspect of the feminization of tea bears similarities to English customs associated with tea consumption, in that many upper- and middle-class Indian women aspiring to upward social mobility adopted certain social practices inculcated by the British plantocracy. In this light, I will maintained, despite indigenous management. Further divestment procedures took place in the 1960s and the early 1970s. A more detailed history of the Indian tea industry will reveal that it depends on transnational capital investments. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 108–10. 18 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 95–97. 19 See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995): 80–81, 86–87. It is to be noted that questions of gender are intrinsically connected with the dynamics of colonial history. 20 For more in-depth analysis of these advertising strategies, see Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 110–13. While there is plenty to be said about Indian middle-class women as nationalist icons in colonial and contemporary times, I will not digress into this aspect, since it would exceed the scope of this chapter.



Transcultural Tea Times

135

regard the feminization of tea in the English context in a later section of this chapter, while addressing another less visible instance of the feminization of tea in the Indian context – namely, in the figure of the woman tea-plucker. Tea was constituted as the ‘quintessential’ Indian national commodity, since it was grown and manufactured in India, albeit at British behest, harvested and processed by Indian labour subordinate to the British colonial agenda. Thus, drinking Indian tea – especially from British-run plantations in India – seemed imperative, making India complicit in its colonization by the British. Besides providing labour and being consumers themselves, Indians also provided the plantation owners and managers with financial backing.21

English Tea Gardens The tea gardens of India, however, call to mind other ‘cultivated’ tea gardens back in England where, as Stuart Hall has observed, “not a single tea plantation exists.” But these tea gardens were of a different calibre; they were the precursors of the English tea rooms and tea shops as we know them today.22 Coffee houses had been a cultural institution in Britain since the eighteenth century. Owing perhaps to its cost and rapidly stimulating effects, coffee was equated with men and was considered a luxury beverage affordable only by the rich. These coffee houses were also meeting-places for writers and scientists, venues where ideas were circulated and exchanged. Tea was also served in these establishments, which were usually male arenas of social interaction. In 1717, Thomas Twining, the proprietor of a London coffee house, first opened a tea shop to be patronized by women in particular: Women were unable to buy tea over the counter in coffeehouses, which were men-only establishments. Nor did they wish to send their servants out to buy expensive tea with other household items, since that would mean entrusting them with large sums of money. […] At Twining’s shop however, women could buy this fashionable new drink […] for immediate consumption, and as dried

21 Indian traders subsidized the British colonial tea-planting industry, a circumstance which, as Chatterjee has pointed out, is “a significant but relatively unknown narrative in the annals of colonial and Indian business history” (A Time for Tea, 87). 22 MacFarlane, Green Gold, 79–82; Moxham, Tea, 37–41.

136

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M  leaves for preparation at home. […] They could also have special blends of tea made up for them by Twining to match their tastes.23

Twining’s enterprising move to include women as his clientele for beverages thus created culturally sanctioned spaces where women could engage in social interaction while fulfilling their designated domestic responsibility to procure tea for family consumption: the threshold between gendered public and private spaces had thus been crossed. Tea gardens became more popular towards the end of the eighteenth century. With its reputation for being a mild beverage compared to coffee, tea was considered suitable for women and children. English tea gardens were spaces where women could publicly socialize with their husbands and children, thus allowing English families to enjoy outings in the tea gardens or to attend parties in adjoining tea rooms. Beatrice Hohenegger comments on the success of the tea gardens reflected in the increased ease and permissiveness of English society: Their success was clear evidence of the ascent of the English middle class and its increasing wealth and access to leisure. By including the women as patrons, the pleasure gardens became the first public spaces that welcomed the presence of mixed company, not only in terms of social status but also where gender was concerned.24

These pleasure gardens also proved attractive to great literary, musical, and artistic figures. Indeed, tea had long captured the imagination, prompting poets to sing its praises and great intellectuals to argue its merits. The poet William Cowper (1731–1800) evokes the cosy atmosphere around the tea table in an English home and the comfort to be expected from the beverage: Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in. 25 Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses (London: Atlantic, 2007): 193. Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 87. 25 William Cowper, “The Task, Book I V : The Winter Evening” (1785), in Poems, vol. 2 (London: J. Johnson, 1785), http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/570.html (accessed 21 January 2010). 23 24



Transcultural Tea Times

137

The playwright Colley Cibber (1671–1757) allows one of his characters, Lord George Brilliant in his play The Lady’s Last Stake, to effusively exclaim: Tea! Thou soft, thou sober, sage and venerable liquid, […] Thou female tongue-running, smile smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, To whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, Let me fall prostrate and adore thee.26

Both Cowper’s and Cibber’s tea poems evoke the psychological value of tea in eighteenth-century England. This is depicted by the literature in its poetic and dramatic genres especially; it evokes emotional, visceral reactions indicating the beverage’s importance to a sense of security, with regard to its effects on consumption, its paraphernalia, and the domestic spaces in which it is imbibed. Simultaneously, the ‘femaleness’ of tea and its positioning against alcohol are focused on as exclusive virtues. Another notable piece of literary trivia regarding English tea gardens is the fact that Jane Austen (1775–1817) lived opposite one when she moved to Bath in 1801; she was a frequent visitor to Sydney Gardens, which had opened round 1795.27 That Austen was herself a great fan of tea is evident in the frequency with which she mentions the ritual of taking tea in most of her novels.28 Besides the availability of tea and victuals, these gardens were examples of how the elegant aristocratic countryside parks with their architecture and landscaping were adapted and transplanted into urban spaces. Places like Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Marylebone were popular venues for the London gentry and middle classes to promenade, for entertainment, gossip, and refreshment. As the eighteenth century drew to its end, however, the popularity of the tea gardens waned – the last one, Vauxhall, closed in 1859.

Colley Cibber, The Lady’s Last Stake or The Wife’s Resentment, in The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Esq., 5 vols., vol. 2 (London: J. Rivington, 1777): 211, http://books.google.de (accessed 21 January 2010). 27 For more detailed descriptions of Sydney Gardens, activities, and culinary fare enjoyed by Austen, see Katharine Reeve, Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Writer’s City (New York: The Little Book Room, 2006): 51. 28 For discussions of tea in Austen’s works, see Kim Wilson, Tea With Jane Austen (Madison W I : Jones, 2004). 26

138

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

Class Consciousness As mentioned earlier, tea was one of the pleasures that were generally enjoyed by the upper and middle classes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, tea consumption soon spilled over into the working classes; this was ensured by smuggling activities, which kept middle-class retail shops as well as working-class households supplied.29 By the end of the eighteenth century, for rich or poor, a regular supply of tea had become essential to the British as a nation. The trickle-down effect of tea consumption from the upper echelons of society to the humbler social strata gave rise to grumbles and criticisms among the upper classes about the over-enthusiasm of the poor for the middle-class beverage and its associated rituals. In the 1750s, there arose a lively debate between the English philanthropist Jonas Hanway (1712–86) and the celebrated intellectual and lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson (1709– 84).30 Known to drink fifteen cups at a sitting, Johnson mounted a heated defence31 in opposition to Hanway’s diatribe against tea (because it ostensibly led to nervous disorders). Leading public figures of the nineteenth century maintained that the consumption of tea encouraged bodily enfeeblement, laziness, and national degeneracy32 – grave evils, indeed, to be charged to an innocuous herb and beverage.

Quoting from Denys Forrest’s Tea for the British (1973), Hohenegger points out that the tea trade owed its greatest debt to tea smugglers’ clandestine dealings and reduced rates, which enabled the habit of tea-drinking to reach the remotest corners and the poorest homes of England (Liquid Jade, 97). 30 James Boswell comments on this altercation, believing that Johnson’s defence of tea against Hanway’s attack on the beverage was the only occasion on which Johnson engaged in journalistic sparring with his contemporaries. See Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: T. Cadell, F.C. & J. Rivington, 1822): 269–70. 31 Johnson scorned Hanway’s claim that tea-drinking led to an increase in nervous disorders. Johnson argued that, rather than blaming tea, those who led lives of idle luxury should be criticized, since they were most likely to be susceptible to nervous disorders. See Johnson, “Review of A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey,” The Literary Magazine 2.13 (1757); repr. in Johnson, Works, vol. 6 (London: W. Pickering, & Oxford: Talboys & Wheeler, 1825), quoted from http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tea.html (accessed 15 January 2010). See also “A Social History of the Nation’s Favourite Drink,” www.tea.co .uk/index.php?pgId=98 (accessed 16 January 2010). 32 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 44. 29



Transcultural Tea Times

139

These criticisms of tea’s effects on the nation’s physical and moral health point to a certain anxiety among the more privileged classes about the increasing demand for tea among the lower classes, an ever-expanding marketplace, and the associated disruption of existing class structures. Indeed, these developments gave rise to yet another tea institution which played a notable part in the growth of modern British economy and society: the worker’s tea break, which, as MacFarlane observes, “made life more bearable for it gave workers something to look forward to and became the central social ceremony during the long hours of drudgery in factory, small workshop, office or mine.”33 The proponents of the beverage in England advocated its virtues in the cause of temperance; tea was considered the panacea for that even greater corrupter of work discipline – alcohol: The reality was that the temperance movement was in large part a middle-class effort to reform the working classes and turn them into ‘productive’ members of society, instead of loafing around drinking beer. […] So it was that tea and the well-intentioned reformers who served it, although successful in bringing the issue of alcoholism to consciousness, were not as successful in eradicating it. What the temperance movement […] did succeed in doing was to increase tea consumption to levels never reached before. In the end, British subjects were hooked on both – tea and alcohol.34

Despite this failure of the temperance movement to eradicate the use of alcohol in favour of tea, tea did come to represent high morality and national progress, thus redeeming the institution of tea-time as the moment of rejuvenation of energy, morale, and motivation for the Victorian working classes. In the class-conscious yet mobile society of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England, signs of language and gesture as well as objects were interpreted constantly to place people socially. Tea became instrumental in exercises of social inclusion and exclusion: Anyone who was anyone had to be seen at the latest, fanciest tea party, not at the coffeehouse. It was tea parties that conferred social status – to the guest, who knew that by being invited, he or she ‘belonged’. And to the hostess who confirmed her position by showing off the latest tea sets […]. It was at tea

33 34

MacFarlane, Green Gold, 87. Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 108.

140

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M  parties that activities such as social climbing or matchmaking occurred and the latest society news was apprehended.35

The differences were often more subtle, whereby the art of impressing and showing that one was of the right background had to be explicitly learnt, rather like the arts of musicality, dressing, polite conversation, and other appropriate feminine accomplishments. Thus social rituals of tea consumption were symbolic re-enactments creating classed and gendered spaces. Here the images of the public tea garden and private parlour evince indelible connections between women and tea.

The Feminization of Tea Feminized significations of tea and its associated labour and consumption practices are apparent in diverse cultural contexts throughout history.36 The feminization of the commodity was integral to the English demand for and consumption of tea, sugar, coffee, and chocolate, since procuring these foodstuffs for the household and designating the time and manner of their consumption were often considered a feminine occupation. Besides this very obvious fact, tea settled into a paradox, reminiscent of the criticisms levelled at working-class consumption of the beverage. Opponents of tea found that 35 Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 87. MacFarlane observes: “The exact shape and style of the tea service and furniture, the flavour of the tea [. . . ], everything down to the way in which the fingers were used to pick up the teacup would indicate which social stratum the person came from” (Green Gold, 83). Tea was drunk from china tea services produced by porcelain works in Meissen, Bayreuth, and Ansbach. The secret of how to manufacture china porcelain was finally discovered in 1709 in Meissen, Germany. See Nadine Beautheae, Gilles Brochard, Catherine Donzel, Alain Stella & Marc Walter, The Book of Tea, tr. Deke Dusinberre (Le livre du thé, 1991; tr. 1992; Paris: Flammarion, 2nd ed. 2005). For further discussions of the history of the porcelain trade with regard to tea imports to Europe, see Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 110–15. 36 Women’s presence in plucking was most apparent in the imperial Chinese plantations of the T’ang dynasty onwards. Women’s hands and fingernails were scrutinized to ensure thorough cleanliness: it was believed that heat, perspiration, and body oils contaminated tea-leaf quality. Virgins were thought to pick the best tea, since they ostensibly had keener eyesight and displayed more dexterity than older women. Virgins’ plucking denoted purity and delicacy, endowing such teas with greater value. Hence, women’s labour was regimented through cultural codifications of bodily purity, contamination, and the construction of feminized virtue. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 27, and Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 22–23.



Transcultural Tea Times

141

the drink affected women’s health and thus threatened the moral health of the nation in its entirety.37 Through its iconicity with women, tea suggested a certain effeteness which threatened to emasculate the nation’s core values: Every century has its particular brand of “real men”. The eighteenth-century ones considered that any man choosing to participate in such debauched habits as tea drinking with the ladies, and submitting to strictures and etiquette dictated by them, was a man who had lost his manly virtues and was nothing more than an effeminate fop […] or else a dandy intent on seduction and abandonment.38

Hence, the feminine ritual of afternoon tea and the accompanying invocation of relaxation were considered to undermine the very masculine ethic of work, so necessary to industry and progress.39 Such fears are, of course, in direct contrast to the later British planter Raj agenda in India, which advocated tea as being advantageous for physical, moral, and, by extension, national health in the colony. An initial feminization of tea in the English cultural context can be seen in the introduction of the beverage into Britain in the mid-seventeenth century by Catherine of Braganza.40 By the late-seventeenth century, tea was being consumed as a temperate drink at court and was thus associated with the gentry and aristocracy. A poetic tribute by Edmund Waller to Catherine in 1663 not only lauds the herb in its connection with the new queen, it also

37 Jonas Hanway’s diatribe against tea in his correspondence with female friends laid out his concerns about the moral decrepitude threatening society, due especially to its consumption among the working classes as well as its dire effects on female beauty and children’s health. See “A Social History of the Nation’s Favourite Drink.” See also Johnson, “Review of A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey.” 38 Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 87. 39 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 44–45. 40 Before Catherine came to England, most people drank tea as a medicine rather than a flavourful beverage. The teas brought to Europe from Asia in the mid-seventeenth century were usually of inferior quality and taste, and most Europeans were ignorant of the proper brewing techniques for the best flavour. The Queen sought out the best teas available and taught the English ladies of the aristocracy how to brew tea. Catherine’s influence on English history was considerable: thanks to her sizable dowry, she became an important link between Europe and Asia. On acquiring Bombay through Catherine, Britain acquired a stronger hold on India, making Bombay its base of operations. See Laura C. Martin, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2007): 120–22.

142

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

draws attention to the Eastern regions where tea is produced as well as the British mercantile enterprise which transports the commodity to England.41 Although, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, people across Britain were consuming large quantities of tea, the custom of afternoon tea did not yet exist. Another instance of the English aristocracy’s creating iconic images of leisure coupled with femininity around the practice of tea-drinking was the introduction of afternoon tea. This institution is attributed to Anna Russell, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (1788–1861), who encouraged the serving of tea and cakes in the mid-afternoon to tide her over until the evening meal.42 Once the idea became fashionable among the aristocracy, such social gatherings soon became an essential part of English life among ladies of all classes. MacFarlane observes a feminization of the ritual of afternoon tea, since it provided a means for middle-class women to escape loneliness in their homes by inviting or going out to tea with their contemporaries.43 As pointed out earlier, the rise of women in domestic interior worlds was very much linked to tea, as was their subsequent breaching of public, traditionally male spaces outside the home. A further example of significations of the feminine is the tea table with its attendant tea paraphernalia, which did not just suggest a mere feminized fetishism of the commodity – ideologies of leisure were intimately connected to this feminization. The drawing room, the tea table, and the tea service were thus icons of stillness and plenitude, which required the presence of women to possess a certain civilized credence. These islands of rest and refreshment amidst the hubbub of daily life illustrate the privilege of not having to labour as well as the power of class that builds upon the idealized patriarchal vision of female non-work. Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 41. Waller’s poem can be found in Agnes Reppelier, To Think of Tea! (Boston M A : Houghton Mifflin, 1932): 30. Venus her myrtle, Phoebus has his bays Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise The best of Queens, the best of herbs we owe, To that bold nation, which the way did show To the fair region where the sun doth rise Whose productions we so greatly prize. 42 See Helen Simpson, The Ritz London Book of Afternoon Tea (London: Ebury, 2006): 15–16, and Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 41. See also www.tearoselane.com /tea_afternoontea.html and www.georgianindex.net/Tea/ttable.html 43 MacFarlane, Green Gold, 86–87. 41



Transcultural Tea Times

143

Upper-class women became aristocrats of interior spaces clearly demarcated by drawing rooms and parlours, creating a leisurely environment for idealized feminine comportment, its attendant pleasures a counterpoint to the more masculine imperatives of public work. English women’s non-work signalled the social status of their families – they would create the space of return for that masculine necessity of repose.44 A woman’s graceful and controlled body would provide the contextual reference for genteel rituals of taste. Agnes Reppelier addresses how literature (specifically, poetic verse) in the eighteenth century depicts this feminine embodiment of refinement, focusing on the woman’s fingers and lips in the act of drinking tea: Her two red lips affected Zephyr’s Bow To cool the Bohea and inflame the Beau While one white finger and thumb conspire To lift the cup, to make the world admire. 45

This particular depiction of the English lady clearly delineates socio-cultural expectations of heterosexual romance, where tea is instrumentalized as the means of securing the young lady’s future as a potential wife and mother. This focus on the English woman’s white fingers holding the teacup can be read against another manifestation of the Orient deployed in the imperial agenda of the tea plantations. This ‘Other’ image is of the tea-plucker’s fingers bunching the two leaves and a bud amidst tea bushes, where, Chatterjee observes, “the feminization of tea has come in a spiralling journey back to its ‘home’ in the colony, to be reproduced again and again within the postcolonial domesticities of an independent nation.”46 The South Asian American diasporic writer Bharti Kirchner renders the figure of the female teaplucker visible in her novel Darjeeling by having a main character, the teaestate manager, observe of the plantation workers: “Especially the women.” […] “it’s really true when they say ‘You can feel the touch of a woman in a cup of tea.’ Whenever I drink a cup, I am reminded of

Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 41. Reppelier, To Think of Tea!, 32. For a more critical account of this verse (attributed to a poet named Young who wrote it in praise of a Lady Betty Germaine), as well as Waller’s and Cibber’s verses and other literary efforts praising tea, see Reppelier, To Think of Tea!, 29–35. 46 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 113. 44 45

144

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M  their miserable existence. They labour so long and so hard without complaint. And what do they have to show for it?”47

Thus the image of the hitherto disembodied brown women’s fingers has been expanded in this novel to include a (fleeting!) glimpse of the female teaplucker’s body.48 However, while the male voice of the tea-estate manager draws attention to her laborious life on the plantation, the woman is still denied her own voice. Chatterjee points out how the image of the female tea-plucker is exoticized and commodified on tea-packaging for the twentieth and twenty-first century global marketplace.49 This iconic packaging of tea as woman bridges the Victorian domestic ideal around which imperial patriarchy would construct its terms of orderly civilization, and its dependence on tea cultivation in India (and Ceylon), through the labour of marginalized native women. Enduring into the present, these images are redolent with the shadowy presence of empires past in our quiet ‘cuppa’ of today. Thus one woman’s domestic pleasure in her private space is shaped and practised through the labours of another woman’s labour in a very public space. Women’s bodies are thus disciplined into stories of idealized interiority as well as labour across colonial contexts.50 At this point, it is imperative to recall that the eighteenth-century tea industry contributed to reinforcing slavery practices in the Caribbean. While the English sipped their tea brewed from tea grown and harvested in India, British ships transported human cargo across the Atlantic from Africa (and later India) to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations, once again for British teacups; as Hohenegger

Bharti Kirchner, Darjeeling (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2002): 17. For a more detailed reading of tea in South Asian diasporic women’s fiction, see Christine Vogt–William, “The Commodifying Cuppa: Tea in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Literature” (forthcoming). This essay is based on a paper given at the A S N E L conference in Regensburg, Germany, in May 2008. 49 On Lipton and The Darjeeling Tea Lady tea-packaging, the image of the woman teaplucker is the focal point of advertising the beverage, instead of a teacup, a teapot, a teabag, the two leaves and bud harvested, or any other possible iconography. For further discussion of contrasting images in artworks and commercial packaging of tea consumption and production, see Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 46–47. 50 Chatterjee reads “the narrative of ‘woman as tea’ is a feminised historical matrix of colonial and postcolonial labour and imperial leisure” (A Time for Tea, 43). 47 48



Transcultural Tea Times

145

remarks: “Where tea went, sugar followed.”51 Although slavery was abolished in 1834–38 under pressure from the anti-slavery movement52 and the less profitable economics of sugar slavery, tea consumption was not slowed. Especially after the 1850s, tea became an even more viable imperial product from British India. It was in the wake of the abolition of slavery that the system of indentured labour took hold – defined as a new system of slavery by Hugh Tinker;53 where tea had impacted Indian lives, sugar indeed followed. Hence, alongside the images of brown women’s fingers laboriously plucking tea leaf and white women’s fingers daintily holding teacups, another invisible bridge spans between Stuart Hall’s English cup of tea and its East and West Indian colonies. The Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge raises the spectre of the female Indian indentured labourer on Trinidadian sugar plantations: There are bold ones among them, proud women with fierce eyes, but many are insecure and frightened. […] they have been registered as indentured immigrants and have been assured of safekeeping until they arrive in Trinidad – Chinidad, land of sugar. […] the rickety bridge swings up and the ship is on its way […] my own great grandmother Gainder, crossing the unknown of the kala pani, the black waters that lie between India and the Caribbean. […] Gainder is a strong young woman and is soon transported to the plantation where she will

Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 101. During the agitation against slavery, opponents of slavery conducted propaganda against the E I C ’s involvement in the sugar industry and, by extension, the slave trade. The E I C subsequently began importing sugar from India in order to advertise their own commodity as being untainted by slavery. However, the E I C was well aware of their own culpability in slavery and bonded (or indentured) labour in India and the Caribbean. While the E I C knew that East Indian sugar was not all that different from West Indian slaveproduced sugar, they did not reveal this to the general public. The German scientist Andreas Marggraf (1709–82) succeeded in extracting sugar from the sugar beet, a discovery that went unnoted for about half a century until 1811, when it re-surfaced in France as part of Napoleon’s policy to circumvent the British blockades of French ports during the Napoleonic Wars. This allowed for a viable alternative source of sugar production, as opposed to sugar produced by slave and indentured labour; this, in turn, influenced the consumption of sugar and, indirectly, tea consumption, in Europe. See Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, 102. 53 See Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830 to 1920 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1974). 51 52

146

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M  work first as a weeder and then as a full-fledged cane-cutter, wielding her cutlass like any man for one-third of a man’s wages. 54

Like the tea-plucker in Kirchner’s Darjeeling, the indentured labourer, too, does not have her own voice; her story is told by her descendant, the protagonist of the novel. She traverses the tenuous rope-bridge of memory in her search for her foremother who crosses the gangplank (another swinging bridge) onto a ship bound from India for Trinidad, to take up a new life as a coolie cane-cutter woman,55 harvesting sugarcane to provide sugar for English tea cups.

Tea Shops in England In yet another leap across continents from India and the Caribbean back to the geographical centre of colonial operations, let us now regard the English tea-shop or tea-room. With the fading of the tea gardens by the mid-1800s, the tea-room became the arena where men and women, adults, and children could appear in public. The feminist critic Elaine Showalter observes: “Feminists championed the A B C [...] teashops and Lyons Corner Houses, which began to appear in the 1870s and 1880s, claiming that they provided women with the opportunity to participate in London’s cultural, intellectual, professional and political life.”56 Replacing the tea gardens, these tea rooms have become popular spaces where tourists and natives alike seek culinary comfort to allow themselves a temporary respite from the hubbub of daily life today. Raymond Williams

54

Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperFlamingoCanada, 2003): 3–4,

248.

See Espinet, The Swinging Bridge, 3–4, 293–294. Elaine Showalter, “Prada Queen,” London Review of Books (10 August 2000), www.lrb .co.uk/v22/n15/show01_.html (accessed 20 April 2007). Alan Macfarlane observes that taking tea together provided women with an arena within which to instigate coordinated action: It does not seem farfetched to suggest that many of the notable achievements of the great women of 19th century England […] owed a fair bit to communal tea drinking. The successful actions of women in widening democracy, in setting up social and charitable concerns, in organizing mission work and literary endeavours, the Women’s Institute, the Girl Guides and many other notable institutions, was partly made possible by meeting over tea. (Green Gold, 86–87) 55 56



Transcultural Tea Times

147

criticizes the tea shop in Cambridge as a food-space where he experiences the symbolic violence of those who claim authority over culture: I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the older and more respectable departments, was a different matter. Here was culture, [. . . ] in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not the great majority of them, particularly learned; [. . . ] but they had it and they showed you they had it. […] if that is culture, we don’t want it; we have seen other people living. But of course it is not culture, and those of my colleagues who hating the teashop, make culture, on its account a dirty word, are mistaken. If the people in the teashop go on insisting that culture is their trivial differences of behaviour, their trivial variations of speech habit, we cannot stop them, but we can ignore them.57

These last sentiments find an echo in Stuart Hall’s objection that “The notion that identity has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same, is nonsense.”58 Indeed, at first glance, the tea-shop and the teacup are curious entities used to address the exclusiveness of culture and to reflect on ideas of the self and the other. And yet, according to Williams, the tea-shop is an ideologically loaded space where a residual English ‘high culture’ reacts in opposition to the living culture of ‘other people’ – a somewhat colonial attitude. While Williams presents the tea-shop as a bounded space out of the ordinary, its occupants defending an exclusivity of culture, one could do well to consider Williams’s notion of the ordinariness of culture by thinking not simply of the exclusiveness of the tea-shop. Instead, one might reflect on the meaningful daily practices which congregate in – hence, open out – this space, constituting the diverse ways in which people, as both producers and consumers, put together culture, consisting of commodities, customs, and institutions of industrialized mass society.

Conclusion Despite Raymond Williams’s harangue against the snootiness of the Cambridge tea-shop, I personally find tea-shops charming spaces in which to 57 Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (London: Blackwell, 2001): 12. 58 Stuart Hall, “Old Identities, New Ethnicities,” 48–49.

148

C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M 

enjoy English culture as it is lived out before me, in whatever shape or form. Indeed, one of the icons of Englishness today is the tea-shop or, rather, the tea-room – a space defined primarily by the genteel rituals of tea consumption, along with its attendant culinary delights – scones, buttered toast, teacake, crumpets, muffins etc. One agrees with Williams that the arrogance he describes should be ignored, especially when such behaviour is predicated on the assumption that one culture is deemed superior to another, against the backdrop of tea-taking rituals. Whether in Betty’s Tearooms in York, England, the Avonlea tourist village on Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes, or the ‘colonial’ tea-room at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the English tea-room is an intriguing space in which to observe certain commonalities of behaviour among people from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds. In parallel settings, confronted with ‘spiced chai lattes’ at Starbucks, World Coffee or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Frankfurt, Toronto, York, Singapore, Sydney or Atlanta, I see resemblances to how tea is often brewed in India and in diasporic South Asian households and restaurants – with milk, sugar, and spices. This particular creation seems currently endowed with the added panache of being served up by upmarket American coffee bistro chains; something as familiar to South Asians as ‘masala chai’ has been ‘buffed up’ to appeal to a Euro-American clientele, making it a current ‘in’ beverage. Has the humble Indian cup of tea suddenly gained approval in its exoticism and been made fit for Western consumption? Indeed a veritable instance of glocalization. At the same time, an English cream tea in a ‘typical’ English tea-room has acquired a romantic, even nostalgic aura for tourists of any cultural background, eager to experience ‘proper’ Englishness.59 Tearooms can be found transplanted across the globe – all bearing the stamp of ‘authentic’ Englishness, complete with scones, jam, and clotted cream. These final ruminations on the transculturality of tea in colonial and postcolonial histories show that tea-drinking practices today evince both exoticism and cosmopolitanism when one regards the different cultural spheres where tea-drinking abounds, translated and transformed into beverage creaOn 6 May 2007, The Sunday Telegraph offered coupons for an “Afternoon Tea for Two” at over three hundred hotels and teashops nationwide, tempting the reader with the “opportunity to experience afternoon tea in a grand and elegant setting or at that quaint local teashop you always intended to visit”; see “Afternoon Tea for Two from just £10,” The Sunday Telegraph (6 May 2007): 33. 59



149

Transcultural Tea Times

tions suited to local tastes and needs. A popular summer beverage in North America, the ubiquitous iced tea (sweetened or unsweetened), was devised by an altruistic Englishman, Richard Blechynden, to cater for perspiring visitors to the Indian Tea Pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis.60 Currently, there seems to be a resurgent interest in tea, its customs and histories. Traditional Japanese ‘sencha’ and ‘chanoyu’ tea ceremonies are raved about, while the virtues of Chinese ‘white’, ‘green’, and ‘blooming’ teas, along with ‘Oolong’, ‘Pu-Erh’, and ‘Lapsang Souchong’, are extolled, and African ‘rooibos’ and ‘honeybush’ teas are enthusiastically slurped hot or cold with myriad flavourings. Meanwhile, black teas from India and Sri Lanka seem to be enjoying a renaissance on the global market, with tea connoisseurs and amateurs debating the delights of Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiri, and Ceylon teas, as well as Javanese and Kenyan blends.61 Tea has seeped into cultural and literary imaginations across the globe, influencing consumption rituals, fostering companionship and colonization, bringing comfort and suffering, causing political and social dissension. Here end these particular transcultural routes through diverse tea-times, illustrating how the beverage has inculcated Englishness – but, then again, is Englishness all that has been portrayed here? Indeed, there is a lot to be said for that nice cup of tea.



60

John Griffiths, Tea: The Drink That Changed the World (London: André Deutsch,

2007): 257–58.

See www.tea.co.uk/index.php, www.whittard.co.uk/CategoryHome.aspx?language =en-GB&cid=t1000, www.kato3.org/chanoyu/, among others. A list of tea websites is available at http://nobleharbor.com/tea/tearesources.html (accessed 21 January 2010). 61

Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures M AREN M ÖHRING

I

N 1 9 9 9 , C E M Ö Z D E M I R , a member of the European Parliament and former member of the German Parliament for the Green Party, published a book on immigration policies and multiculturalism in Germany. The title of the book reads Currywurst und Döner.1 He uses these two dishes as symbols of the integration of immigrants into German society, the latter (the döner) being the topic of his book.2 The title seems to suggest that Currywurst and döner kebab, both of them very popular fast foods in Germany, coexist peacefully, connected through the copula ‘and’. Whereas one might consider Currywurst as a German dish, the curry in it betrays that it has not been a traditional German food item for a long time.3 The döner kebab, on the

Cem Özdemir, Currywurst und Döner: Integration in Deutschland (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1999). A Currywurst is a chopped-up grilled sausage swimming in a hot ketchup-type sauce sprinkled with curry powder (see also fn 3 below). A Döner (henceforth döner kebab), like the Greek pitta gyros, has as its main ingredient meat – usually a mixture of compressed flaps of beef and lamb – sliced off a vertical spit (= kebab / gyros) and inserted into a pouch of unleavened bread along with various vegetables and flavourings. Like the pitta gyros, a variant of the döner kebab is also found elsewhere in the world (in anglophone countries it is often called and written ‘doner’). 2 Heike Henderson, “Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food in German Multicultural Literature and Society,” Glossen 20 (2004), http://alpha.dickinson.edu /departments/germn/glossen/heft20/Henderson.html (accessed 22 January 2010). 3 It is said that Currywurst was invented after World War II in Berlin, combining American ketchup with German sausages and adding curry to make it spicier. An alternative story of the origin of Currywurst, situating its invention in Hamburg, is given in 1

152

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

other hand – which may be considered a Turkish specialty – is, as it is sold in Germany, a Turkish-German invention. By choosing these two dishes, Özdemir seems to point to the hybrid nature of so-called national dishes. At the same time, he demonstrates that, despite their hybridity, specific food items come to serve as “metonym[s] for national cultures,”4 often in a very stereotypical or auto-stereotypical way. Food or food metaphors are powerful means of addressing questions of personal and social identities. But what do these foods, what does the döner kebab, tell us about immigrants or their integration into German society? Can they tell us anything about it – as Özdemir suggests? Does the enormous success of döner kebab signify a form of acceptance of Turks and GermanTurks in Germany? There are reasons to be very sceptical: “Integration is not the sum of all döner snack-bars in a street,” as Heribert Prantl put it in a newspaper article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.5 “Racists eat döner, too,” he concludes. I will elaborate on this aspect in the second part of this chapter. In the first part, I will provide a short overview of the history of the döner kebab in Germany, the images and narratives surrounding this fast food, and the processes of cultural negotiation involved in the production and consumption of the döner.

Döner Kebab as a Translocal Food Item Whereas Italian cuisine is still the most popular ‘foreign’ cuisine in Germany, döner kebab is the most successful fast food in the Federal Republic today, selling better than hamburgers. Indeed, in 1997, twenty-five tons were sold daily in Berlin, thirty-five tons in the eastern and a hundred and forty tons in the western part of Germany.6 The success story of Döner started in Berlin in Uwe Timm’s novel The Invention of Curried Sausage, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, 1995; New York: New Directions, 1995). 4 Shannan Peckham, “Consuming Nations,” in Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, ed. Sian Griffith & Jennifer Wallace (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1998): 172. 5 Heribert Prantl, “Reichtum im Gepäck: Geschichtslos, erinnerungslos; die Crux unserer Ausländerpolitik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (1 December 2003). 6 Felicitas Hillmann & Hedwig Rudolph, Redistributing the Cake? Ethnicisation Processes in the Berlin Food Sector (Discussion Paper FS I 97-101, Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, 1997): 19. In 2008 c. 200 tons were sold in Germany. See www.aeidd .com/A.E.I.D.D.%20ev/6_ausbildung/VereinderDoenerbetriebe.pdf (accessed 22 January 2010).



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

153

the early 1970s when Turkish snack-bars began to produce and sell döner kebab s for the first time. Turkish food in Germany is still predominantly served in rather small food-stalls, reflecting the status of Turkish food within the culinary hierarchy7 – and also mirroring the status ascribed to Turkish immigrants in Germany. In Turkey, döner kebab is usually served on a plate. Selling it in a pide, a Turkish flatbread, thus transforming it into a take-away meal, was probably an invention devised by German-Turks in Kreuzberg,8 the Berlin district with the highest concentration of Turks, or German-Turks, in the whole country. From Berlin, ‘Döner’ spread all over Germany; in the early 1980s, it had become popular in large cities and university towns; and in the early 1990s it became a fast seller in the former G D R . A huge industry has developed around the döner kebab, so that today more than a hundred manufacturing plants in Germany produce the meat and bread required.9

7 See Eva Barlösius, “Nahrung als Kommunikationsmittel: Über die kulinarische Hierarchie als Abbild zwischenstaatlicher Machtdifferentiale,” in Brücken zwischen Zivilisationen: Zur Zivilisierung ethnisch-kultureller Differenzen und Machtungleichheiten – das türkisch-deutsche Beispiel, ed. Hans–Peter Waldhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1997): 137–51. 8 As with any narrative of origin, different versions exist of who, how, and when the döner was invented. Cultural formations are always “marked and wrought by multiple intersections of engagement in the absence of any single or unique location of origin […] Culture in this view is constitutively cross-cultural, inescapably dialogical, fissured by movements and developments which frustrate the desire for absolute coherence and a singular rootedness”; Barnor Hesse, “Un/Settled Multiculturalisms,” in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 22. 9 Dorothea Schmidt, “Unternehmertum und Ethnizität: Ein seltsames Paar,” Prokla 30.3 (2000): 357. The mass production of döner meat was unknown in Turkey, but became a significant feature of the döner business in Germany. The German-Turkish manufacturers started to sell their produce not only in Germany, but exported it to Turkey, France, and other European countries and thus contributed to the worldwide success of the döner kebab. See “Der Dönerbusinessgeneral: Ahmet Basbug macht Fleischkegel für West und Ost nach den Regeln der Kunst und der Veterinärkontrolle,” Frankfurter Rundschau (12 November 1999).

154

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

Several local factors, influenced by both producers and consumers, have contributed to the success of ‘Döner’.10 In the early 1970s, the economic recession, together with high unemployment, hit immigrants disproportionately hard. To make a living, more and more immigrants started their own businesses, the majority of them in the food sector. Although the rate of selfemployment among foreigners in Germany has been lower than among German citizens11 (at least until the beginning of the twenty-first century), selfemployment has also become a major strategy of social and economic survival for immigrants in Germany. In contrast to the U K , where ethnic restaurants and grocery stores have a long colonial and postcolonial history, in Germany a considerable number of ethnic food stores and eateries were established only in the 1970s as a result of labour migration.12 Döner was produced not only for German-Turkish customers, but very soon also for the so-called open market.13 In the 1990s, only about ten percent of the patrons of a Döner snack-bar belonged to the German-Turkish population. Therefore, döner kebab was also adjusted to the local consumption habits of non-Turkish Germans. As a fast food, it played into the German predilection for street foods like Currywurst, Bockwurst, and hamburgers. Thus, compared to Turkey, the manner of eating döner kebab was changed significantly within the German context; in a similar way, Indian food in the U K was adapted to British tastes.14 It was probably the place of consumption: i.e. the informal snack-bar in contrast to the restaurant, that made more and more non-Turkish customers try döner kebab and other (German-)Turkish dishes. There are several reasons for this. First, in a snackbar, the interaction between staff and customer is significantly reduced – be Some of the following arguments have already been developed in Maren Möhring, “TransLokal: Ausländische Gaststätten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” traverse 14.3 (2007): 85–96. 11 In the U K and the U S A , it was exactly the other way round. See Ivan Light & Carolyn Rosenstein, Race, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship in Urban America (New York: de Gruyter, 1995): 202. 12 For a brief history of ethnic restaurants in Germany before 1945, see Maren Möhring, “Gastronomie in Bewegung: Migration, kulinarischer Transfer und die Internationalisierung der Ernährung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Comparativ 17.3 (2007): 68– 85. 13 Tim Fallenbacher, ”‘Ethnic Business’ in Nürnberg: Fallstudie Dönerkebap,” Mitteilungen der Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft 48 (2001): 259. 14 See the chapter on curry in the U K by Peter Jackson in this volume. 10



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

155

it in terms of communication or of time. Secondly, it can be argued that the everyday character of eating in a snack-bar and the categorization of Döner as a rather insignificant and cheap meal, consumed without sitting down and without using cutlery, make it more likely for customers to try this new, ‘foreign’ food.15 Creating a ‘Turkish’ fast food and selling it in snack-bars thus catered to German consumer habits. Regarding the composition of döner kebab, German tastes were taken into consideration as well. The pide, for instance, is a specific type of bread that is baked only during Ramadan in Turkey. However, it lost its meaning for German-Turks after it had developed into an essential part of Döner. It is not only filled with lamb or beef (and increasingly turkey, to circumvent the various red-meat scares) and salad, but also with various sauces that are uncommon in Turkey. In this sense, the famous döner ‘mit scharfer Sauce’ [‘with hot sauce’] is a German–Turkish invention, as illustrated by the fact that ‘mit scharfer Sauce’ is frequently not translated into Turkish, even when a customer otherwise orders his or her Döner in Turkish. Conversely, the name ‘Dönerkebab’, which translates into ‘roasted meat, grilled on a rotating spit’, was integrated into the German language without major modifications and also included in the Duden – the standard German dictionary – in 1991.16 In terms of both composition and consumption, döner is a product that has been re-combined in a specific way as well as in a specific locality. It can thus be described as a completely transnational or – more precisely – translocal food item. Its translocality consists not only in a re-signification of the product after it has been transferred to another place. Indeed, döner actually owes its very existence to a translocal context – comparable to chicken tikka masala in the U K . Because of its Turkish and German elements, it makes sense to call döner a transnational dish, but it is not only national contexts that are crossed in this case. It is also a specific place, Berlin-Kreuzberg, and its 15 Most of the successful ethnic fast foods are burger-like and have thus been easily integrated into the existing snack culture. See Warren J. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Food: The Corporate Melting Pot,” Food and Foodways 2.1 (1987): 1–30. 16 The impossibility of translating the names of (certain) food items is sometimes interpreted as a form of resistance to Westerners’ claims to knowledge and their attempts to appropriate the cultural artefacts and practices of other groups. See Sylvia Ferrero, “Comida sin par: Consumption of Mexican Food in Los Angeles. ‘Foodscapes’ in a Transnational Consumer Society,” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren J. Belasco (New York & London: Routledge, 2002): 204.

156

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

links with other places in Germany and Turkey to which the döner kebab owes its invention or its emergence. The meaning of a food item, however, is not defined by its ingredients, but by the images and narratives surrounding specific foods. Ayşe Çağlar has demonstrated that, in its early stages, the marketing of the döner kebab stressed its allegedly ‘exotic’ origin.17 Correspondingly, in many advertisements the producer of döner is depicted with a black moustache, marking him as ethnically different through a facial feature serving as the key signifier of ‘the’ Turkish male in the German press. As late as 1999, a journalist writing about a döner stall in Berlin emphasized the “buschigen Prachtschnauzer” (splendid bushy moustache) of the dönercı.18 Obviously, it is a gendered signifier that can be considered as either a biological or/and a cultural characteristic.19 As already mentioned, Döner was marketed as a Turkish specialty not only for German-Turks but also, and predominantly, for non-migrant Germans.20 To attract German customers in the 1970s and 1980s, a ‘folkloric discourse of Turkishness’ was used. It drew heavily on orientalist images, with the media providing much of the information on this ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ Turkish dish. In the meantime, this discourse was materialized in the decoration of many early döner kebab food-stalls.21 Orientalist images formed an intrinsic part of the döner product and its meaning during this period, implicitly pointing to the enduring impact of the colonialist imaginary on the configuration of cultural differences in Germany. Is the ethnic restaurant or snack-bar therefore nothing else but a “modernized reflection of colonialism 17 Ayşe Çağlar, “ ‘ McDoner’: Doner Kebap and the Social Positioning Struggle of German Turks,” in Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity, ed. Gary J. Bamossy & Janeen A. Costa (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995), 209–30. 18 Guido Eckert, “Eine Welt für sich: Auf Entdeckungstour durch die Berliner Wrangelstrasse – eine türkische Insel in der deutschen Fremde,” ZeitPunkte 2 (1999): 30. 19 David Parker has described the “general relationship between facialization and racialization” in more detail in his study of Chinese takeaways in the U K : “The Chinese Takeaway and the Diasporic Habitus: Space, Time and Power Geometries,” in Un/Settled Multiculturalism, ed. Hesse, 87. 20 Of course, döner kebab is also directed at other, non-Turkish migrant groups, complicating an all too simple opposition between ‘the mainstream’ und ‘ethnic others’. On this aspect, see Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food,” Social Identities 1.1 (1995): 79. 21 Çağlar, “ ‘ McDoner’,” 217.



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

157

and [consumer] cannibalism practiced on the home front,” as Laurier Turgeon and Madeleine Pastinelli wondered in their study on ethnic restaurants?22 Without downplaying the racism inherent in consumerist multiculturalism, I think one should not underestimate the agency of the people working in the döner business. They play an active role in the construction of the image of the döner kebab – and of themselves. In the 1990s, many German-Turkish Döner producers launched an image renewal campaign by redecorating and renaming their snack-bars. For instance, the McKebap and Mister Kebap chains refer to the image of (post) modern American fast food, employing a strategy of ‘americanization’ rather than of ‘authentication’ of their products.23 Çağlar interprets this change as an attempt by Turkish migrants to “redefine their image and place” in society24 by presenting themselves as postmodern entrepreneurs in a global market and at the same time producing a new form of German-Turkish identity. Hence, the production and distribution, but also the consumption of döner kebab imply powerful “identity and place-making practices,”25 thereby taking into consideration both local and translocal conditions and drawing on local as well as globally circulating knowledges. The reconfiguration of images can partly be explained by the displacement of first-generation migrants by second- and third-generation GermanTurks. Instead of referring to any sort of ‘authentic’ national or ethnic Turkish or Kurdish tradition, today most döner snack-bars are undergoing a process of ‘McDonaldization’. It is by no means a full adaptation of the American model, but more often than not an ironic imitation.26 Furthermore, names like ‘Mister Kebab’ or slogans like ‘Döner macht schöner’ (döner makes you more beautiful) make the döner kebab business partake in what is

Madeleine Pastinelli & Laurier Turgeon, “ ‘ Eat the World’: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants,” Journal of American Folklore 115/456 (2002): 261. 23 Of course, there are still a lot of snack-bars with oriental decorations of various kinds. See Andreas Baum, “30 Jahre Döner,” Zitty 5 (2001): 20. 24 Çağlar, “ ‘ McDoner’,” 221. 25 Jean Duruz, “The Streets of Clovelly: Food, Difference and Place-Making,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13.3 (1999): 308. 26 Besides this, McDonald’s and doner snack-bars compete with each other in the fastfood sector. In Kreuzberg, for example, the planned opening of a McDonald’s restaurant has stirred up strong emotions. See Marcel Rosenbach, “Frittenalarm im Falafelkiez,” Spiegel Online (18 May 2007): 2. 22

158

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

frequently referred to as today’s ‘trash culture’ in Germany.27 Furthermore, the so-called ‘Kanaksta’ style, a trans-ethnic “diasporean aesthetics,”28 has entered the mainstream and has been appropriated not only by Turkish or Italian (etc.) Germans, but also by Germans without a (recognizable) migrant background. The best known example is the comedians Erkan & Stefan, who draw on clichés of German-Turkish youth culture and who, besides releasing C D s with titles such as Planet Döner, promote their famous ‘Dönertier’ (doner animal): i.e. a soft toy in the form of a döner kebab spit.29 Another outcome of this recent development is a Quartett (a card-game similar to Top Trumps) featuring döner snack-bars in Berlin.30 As we have seen, ‘the döner’ circulates within popular culture in various ways, taking on a variety of meanings, depending on the context and the social actors involved. Whereas it functions as a positive symbol in discourses on multiculturalism31 (as demonstrated by, for example, Özdemir’s book), it is also used to debase Turkish and German-Turkish cultures.

‘Bockwurst statt Döner’ A slogan like ‘Bockwurst statt Döner’ (Bockwurst instead of döner) printed on sweatshirts worn by neo-Nazis exemplifies the paranoid discussions of a supposed incommensurability of German and Turkish cultures. Whereas 27 See Uwe Spiekermann, “Das Andere verdauen: Begegnungen von Ernährungskulturen,” in Ernährung in Grenzsituationen, ed. Gesa U. Schönberger & Uwe Spiekermann (Berlin: Springer, 2002): 98. 28 Parminder Bhachu, “It’s hip to be Asian: The Local and Global Networks of Asian Fashion Entrepreneurs in London,” in Transnational Spaces, ed. Philip Crang, Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 40. The trans-ethnic character of ‘Kanaksta’ culture is emphasized in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005, ed. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling & Anton Kaes (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 2007): 427. ‘Kanaksta’ is, similar to ‘nigga’ in the U S hip-hop scene, a good example of ‘redeemed’ derogatory slang. 29 On the commodification of cultural differences, see Ruth Mayer, “Schmutzige Fakten: Wie sich Differenz verkauft,” in Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft, ed. Tom Holert & Mark Terkessidis (Berlin & Amsterdam: Edition I D -Archiv, 1996): 153–68; Kien Nghi Ha, Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). 30 Analogous to the cylinder capacity and horsepower of a car, it is the founding year and the distance to the centre of Istanbul that are the important issues here. 31 Çağlar, “ ‘ McDoner’,” 209.



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

159

McDonald’s hamburgers – when they were first introduced in Germany – were refused by some groups on the grounds of a (sometimes ecologically motivated) form of anti-Americanism,32 the rejection of Döner is the expression of anti-Turkish or anti-German-Turkish resentment. Above all, the slogan emphatically states a refusal not only of ‘the Turkish’ but, in fact, of any hybridization of ‘the German’ resulting from ongoing transnational migration.33 According to the slogan’s logic, the allegedly ‘original’ Bockwurst should replace the ‘foreign’ döner kebab. Whether it can be labelled a form of “nostalgia politics”34 or not, it represents an ‘either–or’ alternative, since both food items stand for strongly defined ‘we’ and ‘they’ images. They do not, however, refer to pre-existent social groups, but in fact construct them. Within the everyday arena of culinary culture, these identities are produced by acts of differentiation,35 and these identities are practised, inter alia, by participating in certain foodways that express an individual’s group affiliation. Thus, culinary preferences and ‘personal’ tastes may be endowed with a deeply political dimension. This does not mean that neo-Nazis do not eat döner kebab; they certainly do,36 but not without problematizing this practice, as Uwe Spiekermann has

Stefan Reisner, “Kneipen, Destillen, Currybuden und Döner Kebab,” in Stadtfront: Berlin West Berlin, ed. Irene Lusk & Christiane Zieseke (Berlin: Elefanten, 1982): 147. By contrast, frequenting snack-bars run by foreigners can function as an “Ausländerfreundlichkeitsdemonstration” (demonstration of one’s xenophilia); Gabriel Kuhn, “9 Spotlights auf die Würstelbude: Ein perspektivischer Beitrag zu einer Soziologie des Essens,” in Die Äpfel der Erkenntnis: zur historischen Soziologie des Essens, ed. Jutta Anna Klaber (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995): 94. 33 In a similar way, the French Front National considers migrant cuisines as a “threat to authentic French gastronomy”; Joëlle Bahloul, “ ‘ On Cabbages and Kings’: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Post-Colonial French Society and Cuisine,” in Food in Global History, ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder C O : Westview, 1999): 105, note 6. 34 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995): 62. 35 See Ian Cook, Philip Crang & Mark Thorpe, “Eating into Britishness: Multicultural Imaginaries and the Identity Politics of Food,” in Practising Identities: Power and Resistance, ed. Sasha Roseneil & Julie Seymour (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1999): 226. 36 For a similar situation, see Richard Rodriguez, “Mexican Food: Filling Loneliness of American Life,” Los Angeles Times (24 July 1994): M1 – “A skinhead I know hates Mexi32

160

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

demonstrated. In July and August 2000, there was a lively discussion on the Internet about whether a nationalist (‘Nationaler Deutscher’) was allowed to eat Döner. The final conclusion of the debate was that it would be better to frequent ‘German’ eateries serving ‘German’ food, but that one should not exaggerate this point. Hitler, so the argument goes, had not been opposed to Coca-Cola being sold at the Olympic games in 1936, and one should not try to be more rigorous than ‘the Führer’ himself.37 Whereas one could argue that this is an extreme example of reacting to ‘foreign’ food, I think that, when studying ethnic food and transcultural transfers, we should also take into account refused transfers.38 According to Alan Warde, analyzing the rejection of, or the aversion to, unknown foods is the best way not only to study traditional popular tastes but also to explore the connections between food and racism.39 So, let us take a closer look at the neo-Nazi slogan ‘Bockwurst statt Döner’. Without historical narratives, without the biographies of these food items, the slogan is incomprehensible – one has to be aware that Bockwurst was there before Döner. Furthermore, the word ‘statt’ (instead of) evokes the question of placing and re-placing, referring to the spatial politics involved, and addressing the issue of the appropriation of real as well as imaginary geographies,40 thereby pointing to their inseparability. However, in this case, the slogan is not about appropriating Döner, but about substituting for it.41 cans – but loves tacos” (quoted in Rodolfo D. Torres & Victor M. Valle, Latino Metropolis [Minneapolis & London: Minneapolis U P , 2000]: 90). 37 See Spiekermann, “Das Andere verdauen,” 98. 38 See Hartmut Kaelble, “Herausforderungen an die Transfergeschichte,” Comparativ 16.3 (2006): 10. 39 Warde distinguishes four types of reaction to ‘foreign’ food: 1) rejection, 2) naturalization, 3) improvisation, and 4) ‘authentic’ replication; “Eating Globally: Cultural Flows and the Spread of Ethnic Restaurants,” in The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In, ed. Don Kalb (Lanham M D et al: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 299–316. 40 ‘Statt’, however, also refers to ‘standing in for something else’ and thus involves the object in a process of potentially endless substitution, rendering any attempt to fix places once and for all deeply problematic. 41 The appropriation of a specific food can also be a highly controversial topic, as the example of falafel demonstrates. In Israel, falafel is considered a ‘national icon’ and its Arab origin is often obscured; Palestinians, on the other hand, blame Israelis for appropriating Arab falafel, thereby downplaying its hybrid origins. See Yael Raviv, “Falafel: A National Icon,” Gastronomica 3.3 (2003): 20–25. Boycotts are another example of the explicit politicization of food items: in August 2007, several cooks in Budapest announ-



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

161

There is no space for it in Germany: “We are not in Turkishland [sic] here, they must not sell [döner kebab] here,” says seventeen-year-old Ron, after being arrested for burning down a döner kebab snack-bar in Rheinsberg, eastern Germany, in 2005.42 The attacks on Turkish food-stalls in Germany, which started in the late 1980s,43 or, similarly, those that were launched against Asian food stores in the U K , are the more violent outcome of racist attempts at replacement. These struggles indicate, on the one hand, the strong identification of a migrant group with the food ascribed to it and, on the other, the importance of restaurants or snack-bars as the most (or sometimes only) visible “embodiment of cultural difference”44 – making them preferred targets for racist attacks. Whereas the neo-Nazi reaction is extreme, the underlying imaginary of spatial invasion45 is not uncommon in the context of (food) migration. Since the mid-1980s, the German press has frequently written about ‘snack-bar wars’, describing ‘Döner’ as competing hard with Currywurst or ‘thrusting aside’ Bockwurst.46 Having said that, it is rarely mentioned that döner kebab also competed with Greek gyros, which had established itself alongside the döner in the late-1970s and 1980s. Little by little, however, the döner displaced gyros, just as Turkish snack-bars displaced Greek food-stalls.47 Compared with ced that they would remove Viennese Schnitzel from their menus because the Austrian industry pollutes the cross-border river Raab (“Nie wieder Wiener Schnitzel!,” jungle world [16 August 2007]: 16). 42 “Wir sind hier nicht in Türkenland, die sollen das hier nicht verkaufen”; Fiona Ehlers, “Haxe mit Sauerkraut: Warum ein Türke in Brandenburg an seiner Döner-Bude verzweifelt,” Der Spiegel 17 (25 April 2005): 62, tr. mine. 43 That is, at a time when their omnipresence made it clear that “the old Germany of Bockwurst and Thuringian sausage had passed away” (“das alte Deutschland der Bockwurst und der Thüringer untergegangen war,” as Eberhard Seidel–Pielen points out in Aufgespiesst: Wie der Döner über die Deutschen kam [Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996]: 144–45, tr. mine). 44 Parker, “Chinese Takeaway,” 79. Christina Hardyment speaks of ethnic restaurants as “the most public face of the new communities”; Hardyment, Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating since 1945 (London: B B C , 1995): 139. 45 On the omnipresence of these imaginaries, see Pnina Werbner, “Metaphors of Spatiality and Networks in the Plural City: A Critique of the Ethnic Enclave Economy Debate,” Sociology 35.3 (2001): 671, 673. 46 Doreen Mahlow, “Imbiss-Krieg – Döner geht der Bockwurst an die Pelle,” Bild (Berlin) (21 January 1995), quoted in Seidel–Pielen, Aufgespiesst, 13. 47 See Seidel–Pielen, Aufgespiesst, 154–55. In the meantime, döner kebab has come under pressure, too, partly because of mad-cow disease, partly because of shifting consumer

162

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

döner, the disadvantage of gyros was that it is made of pork and thus did not appeal to the growing group of Muslim customers. Furthermore, it was sold with tzatziki, onions, and parsley, but not with larger quantities of lettuce leaves or red cabbage (as döner kebab was) and therefore lost ground when healthy eating became en vogue. The replacement of one kind of migrant food by another kind of migrant food, however, does not seem to worry the public. Whereas the German press describes the enormous success of ‘Döner’ by using metaphors of invasion, I would argue that the idea of a reversal of this development and a ‘nostalgic’ substitution of döner by ‘authentically German’ food as expressed in the neo-Nazi slogan is fostered mainly by the new and old Right. In a very different context, Anne McClintock analyzes fantasies of territorial displacement as part of a struggle among men, whereas women and things considered ‘female’ are not to be displaced but appropriated.48 I think the gender aspect of the neo-Nazi politics of substitution as well as the gendering of döner kebab, and above all its producers, is of the utmost importance here. An explicit, if not ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’, form of masculinity is ascribed to the dönercı, who roasts meat on an upright spit and slices it with a sharp, sword-like knife.49 Only very recently, and rarely, have women begun to appear in advertisements for döner kebabs. Thus, given the well-established symbolic connection between meat and masculinity, it is not surprising that döner ought to be replaced by Bockwurst and not by Sauerkraut or any other

appetites for other ‘foreign’ fast foods like falafel, which also appeals to vegetarians. It is perhaps worth noting that the word ‘Gyros’ was taken up into Germany’s ‘watchdog’ dictionary and language institute, the ‘Duden’, even earlier than ‘Dönerkebab’: i.e. in the 1980s, when gyros was already well-established as a fast food. 48 See McClintock’s discussion of Fanon who contrasts the black man’s “fantasy of territorial displacement” of the white master with his appropriation of the white woman; Anne McClintock, “ ‘ No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. A. McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 95. 49 “Rotierendes Kebap (Döner Kebap),” in Türkische Küche (in Deutsch) (Istanbul: Minyatür Yayınları): 75. Whereas the spit is considered a sign of the ‘wild’ nomadic life of men, the vessel and similar cooking devices are attributed to women; see Christoph Wagner, Fast schon Food: Die Geschichte des schnellen Essens (Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei–Lübbe, 2001): 254–55. On the barbecue as a male sphere of activity, see Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2003): 194.



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

163

‘effeminate’ vegetable. But compared to the compact, safely encased Bockwurst with its intact surface, the döner kebab, which is sliced into little pieces and served in a ‘bag’ of bread, does not possess particularly phallic traits. So, in this sense, the döner kebab becomes masculinized through its confrontation with Bockwurst. Underlying the neo-Nazi attempt of replacement is the idea that there is or should be a natural connection between a place and a culture. It is this territorial understanding of a homogeneous culture that has been increasingly questioned by processes of globalization respectively ‘glocalization’.50 Beside the transnational migration movements that are under attack here, it is at the same time – and that is the arguably specifically eastern German dimension of the slogan – a reaction to a “sense of dislocation”51 in the aftermath of German reunification and the accompanying devaluation of the former G D R . Bockwurst, maybe together with Goldbroiler (a roasted chicken), was the emblem of East German food culture.52 Although boiled sausages were brought to Germany by French Huguenots in the seventeenth century, Bockwurst probably got its name at the end of the nineteenth century when an innkeeper in Berlin served the boiled sausage with Bockbier, a brown ale.53 Despite the traces of travel and intercultural transfers in any national dish,54

See James Ferguson & Akhil Gupta, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 10. Pieterse, “Globalization,” 62, contrasts the concepts of territorial cultures and translocal cultures, of global mosaic and cultural flow in space, and of a clash of civilizations and the idea of ‘third cultures’. On the concept of glocalization, see Robert Robertson, “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Featherstone et al., 25–44. 51 Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray & Jim McGuigan (1993; London et al.: Arnold, 1997): 233. 52 See Seidel–Pielen, Aufgespiesst, 129. This, of course, does not mean that neo-Nazism or racist attacks on döner kebab food-stalls are exclusively an eastern German problem. See also the announcement of an open-air festival for (eastern) Germans and Czechs (“Bockwurst meets Knödel”) in Ebersbach at the German/Czech border in 2006 (www.tschechien-portal.info, accessed 22 January 2010). 53 www.berlinische-monatsschrift.de/lexikon/FrKr/s/Skalitzer_strasse.htm (accessed 22 January 2010). 54 See Allison James, “How British is British Food?,” in Food, Health, and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 72. In this sense, the history of food should concentrate on the “complicated network of threads” instead of “roots”; Massimo Montanari, “From the Geography of Taste to the Taste for Geography,” in Food and 50

164

M A R E N M Ö H R I N G 

the hybridity of Bockwurst is less apparent than that of Currywurst, which might explain why neo-Nazis stick to Bockwurst whereas Özdemir juxtaposes Döner and Currywurst. Except for the type of sausage chosen, the neo-Nazi slogan and Özdemir’s book title differ only in terms of the copula between the two food items. It is the ‘and’ and the ‘instead’ that make all the difference; they point to very different geographies of consumption and multicultural imaginaries. The neo-Nazi slogan is based on the idea that every national dish belongs to a distinct, territorialized culture and that these (allegedly authentic) cultures should be kept apart, otherwise they will clash. In contrast, the ‘and’ in Özdemir’s book-title suggests the coexistence of different foods within Germany, implying a very different “mapping of otherness onto space.”55 It is not clear, however, whether the ‘and’ just signals an addition, firmly integrating Döner in the well-known “cultural contribution narrative”56 or whether it suggests a more provocative intermingling of the two food items. In the end, the concepts of culture and cultural difference underlying these various forms of cultural(ist) racism and multiculturalism need to be explored. The focus of German immigration policy in recent years has been on integration, and ‘the Döner’ has been read as a sign of successful integration – whereas the headscarf, as the other select signifier of Turkish or Muslim culture, is discussed far less benevolently.57 Moreover, it is not by accident that ‘the Döner’ (rather than pizza) is chosen for book-titles as well as racist slogans: it is ‘the’ Turks, hence their food, that serve as the prime signifier of difference in Germany today. At the beginning of the ‘guest worker’ migration to West Germany, Italians were the main target of racist exclusion and Environment: Geographies of Taste, ed. Armando Montanari (Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 2002): 32. 55 Ferguson & Gupta, “Beyond ‘Culture’,” 20. 56 Parker, “Chinese Takeaway,” 80. In Germany, the most frequently used concept in this context is Bereicherung (enrichment) through immigrants and their cultures. There are countless examples; see, for example, Mustafa Demir & Ergün Sökmez, Die anderen Deutschen: 40 Jahre Arbeitsmigration – Von Gastarbeitern zur nationalen Minderheit (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2001): 84. Even opponents of a more liberal immigration policy in Germany use the phrase Bereicherung: “Ich sehe Ausländer als Bereicherung an” (Günther Beckstein, “Annäherung an die Leitkultur,” KulturAustausch 3 [1999]: 44). 57 See Mark Terkessidis, “Zwischen Hysterie und Utopie: Orte der Verstrickung,” KulturAustausch Online 3 (1999), http://cms.ifa.de/ro/pub/kulturaustausch/archiv/zfk1999/zwischen-hysterie-und-utopie/terkessidis/ (accessed 20 January 2010).



Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

165

stereotypical characterizations as ‘uncivilized’ Spaghettifresser (spaghetti gobblers) lacking modern attitudes and behaviour.58 In less than two decades, the image of Italians – not least because of their status as E U foreigners – has improved significantly, and the growing group of Turkish migrants and their descendants has become the new target of racism. Turks in Germany “figure prominently in both numerical and symbolic terms”; they have become “Ikonen des Fremden” (‘icons of the foreign/the strange’), as the weekly magazine Der Spiegel headlined in 1993 after the Solingen arson attack.59 This focus on (potentially) Muslim immigrants is not specifically German. Indeed, it holds true for the U K and other Western countries as well. Thus, an analysis of the way cultural difference is conceptualized and practised calls not only for an historical but also a transnational and/or comparative perspective. Contrasting the German debates on integration as they are conducted in the field of culinary culture with the British approach to multiculturalism and (ethnic) food cultures should help one to distinguish between different forms of multiculturalism and to analyze the ways in which the national food cultures of Germany and Britain are re-defined by the advent of ethnic foods from all over the world. Changing culinary cultures and, more generally, consumer cultures are certainly not an insignificant terrain for studying today’s ongoing re-configurations of ‘Germany’ and ‘Britain’.



58 Similarly, Italian Americans were pejoratively nicknamed ‘spaghetti benders’; see Sabina Magliocci, “Playing with Food: The Negotiation of Identity in the Ethnic Display Event by Italian Americans in Clinton, Indiana,” in Studies in Italian American Folklore, ed. Luisa Del Giudice (Logan: Utah State U P , 1993): 149. 59 In May 1993, four neo-Nazi skinheads set fire to the house of a large Turkish family in Solingen. Five tenants died. Leslie A. Adelson, “Opposing Oppositions: Turkish-German Questions in Contemporary German Studies,” German Studies Review 17.2 (1994): 305. See also Kevin Robins, “Interrupting Identities: Turkey/Europe,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (London, Thousand Oaks C A & New York: Sage, 1996): 61–86.

A Cultural Politics of Curry The Transnational Spaces of Contemporary Commodity Culture

P ETER J ACKSON

Introduction

T

H I S C H A P T E R F O C U S E S on the transnational spaces of contemporary commodity culture via a case study of one particular type of food (curry) and one specific dish (chicken tikka masala). It argues that commodity culture, in general, and food, in particular, is a powerful lens through which to examine the dynamics of contemporary transnationality.1 In this case, we focus on the transnational links between Britain and South Asia, extending backwards in time from the uneasy postcolonial present through several centuries of colonial rule and imperial trade.2

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the “Food and Globalization” workshop at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, May 2005. The chapter draws on a recently completed project, funded via the E S R C ’s Transnational Communities programme (award no. L214252031), which explored the transnational commodity cultures associated with British-Asian food and fashion. The project was undertaken in collaboration with Philip Crang (Royal Holloway) and Claire Dwyer (U C L ) and with research assistance from Suman Prinjha and Nicola Thomas. The chapter also draws on research conducted as part of the A H R C –E S R C Cultures of Consumption programme, conducted in collaboration with Neil Ward, Rob Perks, and Polly Russell (award no. R E S -143-25-0026). 2 While British rule in India officially lasted from 1858 to 1947, Britain’s economic and political influence extends back to the seventeenth century through the role of the British East India Company, established in December 1600. 1

168

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

According to Steven Vertovec, ‘transnationalism’ refers to the multiple ties and interactions that link people or institutions across the borders of nationstates.3 Rather than seeing transnationalism as the unique preserve of migrant communities or ethnic minorities, this chapter approaches transnationality as a ‘social field’4 that encompasses much wider sections of society, extending well beyond the membership of specific migrant communities or ethnic groups. Similar ideas have been expressed by Roger Rouse in the context of Mexican-American transmigration, by Avtar Brah in her work on British-Asian “diaspora space,” and in our own recent work on the “transnational spaces” of British-South Asian food and fashion cultures.5 Our approach to commodity culture acknowledges a debt to the long tradition of work on ‘public culture’ in India. As employed by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, public culture refers to “the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state, where differentiated social groups (classes, ethnic groups, genders) constitute their identities by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life.”6 Within this tradition, Frank F. Conlan’s historical survey of “Dining out in Bombay” serves as a model. Conlan argues that there is a long history of public dining in Bombay (Mumbai) dating back to the early-nineteenth century, with a recent expansion of the sector following the growth of the educated middle class and the emergence of a new urban-centred public culture. With its dominance of the commercial, film, and advertising industries, Mumbai is arguably the most cosmopolitan city of India: “at once [its] New

3 Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999): 447–62. 4 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch & Christina Blanc–Szanton, “Transnationalism: A New Analytical Framework for Understanding Migration,” in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, ed. Schiller, Basch & Blanc–Szanton (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992): 1–24. 5 Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 8–23; Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996); Philip Crang, Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson, “Transnationalism and the Spaces of Commodity Culture,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (2003): 438–56; Transnational Space, ed. Crang, Dwyer & Jackson (London: Routledge, 2004). 6 Arun Appadurai & Carol A. Breckenridge, “Public Modernity in India,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 4–5.



A Cultural Politics of Curry

169

York and its Hollywood.”7 Conlan argues that Mumbai absorbs foreign elements, transforming them in a process of domestication or digestion. The relevance of this argument to our understanding of British-Asian culinary culture will shortly become clear. We take a similar approach to understanding recent changes in British culinary culture where the consumption of ‘globalized’ foods like curry or pizza is subject to distinct local variations. Marie Gillespie’s work on the consumption culture of young Punjabi Londoners in Southall provides a specific example of this trend, demonstrating that a taste for McDonald’s or CocaCola has particular cultural connotations for these young people, defined in relation to specific religious prohibitions and parental restrictions rather than being representative of some broader notion of ‘americanization’.8 Gillespie’s work confirms the wider argument that consumption practices are deeply embedded in distinctive local cultures and are remarkably resilient to the forces of ‘globalization’.9 In the later parts of this chapter, we attempt to extend these ideas to encompass the consumption practices of (white) British consumers who have little or no direct connection to Britain’s South Asian communities and to the wider transnational ‘social field’ including India itself. We begin, though, with the specific example of curry, tracing its colonial origins and charting its increasing popularity among British consumers.

A Brief History of Curry The precise etymology of ‘curry’ is unclear. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is taken from the Tamil word கறி ( ‘kari’) and, in its anglicized form, now serves as a generalized signifier for a range of local masalas (a mixture of spices), converted into material form by the British invention of curry powder.10 A similar root/route is identified in Hobson-Jobson, the glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases edited by Sir Henry Yule in 1886, where he notes that ‘curry’ serves as a savoury preparation Conlan, “Dining out in Bombay,” in Consuming Modernity, ed. Breckenridge, 91. Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). 9 Peter Jackson, “Local Consumption Cultures in a Globalizing World,” Transactions (Institute of British Geographers) 29 (2004): 165–78. 10 Philip Crang & Peter Jackson, “Geographies of Consumption,” in British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity, ed. David Morley & Kevin Robins (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 333. 7 8

170

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

consisting of meat, fish, fruit or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, whose “proper office” is to add flavour to “a large mess of rice.” He adds authoritatively that “the word is Tam. kari, i.e. ‘sauce’; [kari, v. ‘to eat by biting’],” admitting that “it is possible, however, that the kind of curry used by Europeans and Mahommedans is not of purely Indian origin, but has come down from the spiced cookery of medieval Europe and Western Asia.”11 The uncertain origins of the word seem peculiarly apt for current postcolonial ambivalence surrounding curry. In her work on Indian culinary culture, Uma Narayan describes “the perfect post-colonial moment” when she discovered that ‘curry’ was one of handful of words, like ‘catamaran’ and ‘mulligatawny’, that have entered the English language from her mother tongue, Tamil.12 As Narayan argues, when curry was incorporated into British cuisine, the British were incorporating the Other into the self but on the self’s own terms: They were incorporating not Indian food, but their own ‘invention’ of curry powder; a pattern not too different from the way in which India itself was ingested into Empire – for India as a contemporary political entity was fabricated through British rule, which replaced the masala of the Moghul empire and assorted princely states with the unitary signifier ‘India’, much as British curry powder replaced local masalas.13

Just as the ‘Indian’ origins of curry can be contested, so, too, can the ‘Indianness’ of Indian restaurants in Britain be questioned. As many commentators have pointed out, most ‘Indian’ restaurants in Britain have Bangladeshi rather than Indian proprietors. The author of The 1999 Good Curry Guide, Pat Chapman, estimated that there were some 70,000 Bangladeshi waiters and cooks at work in Britain’s 7,500 curry houses, while Shrabani Basu claims

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson (accessed 18 December 2009). U. Narayan, “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food,” Social Identities 1 (1995): 65. 13 Narayan, “Eating Cultures,” 65. References to ‘Indian’ food also fail to acknowledge the regional and ethnic diversity of foods that are available throughout the Indian subcontinent. On the absence of a unitary national cuisine in contemporary India, see Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies 30 (1988): 13–24. 11 12



A Cultural Politics of Curry

171

that eighty percent of British curry houses are owned by Bangladeshis.14 Similarly, the range of curries available in most British restaurants and supermarkets, emphasizing a range of culinary styles and regional dishes, would be quite baffling to most Indian consumers on the subcontinent. A taste for curried food has a long history in the U K . The first recipe for curry in a British cookbook dates from the mid-eighteenth century.15 By the mid-nineteenth century, such recipes were commonplace. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management16 contained a recipe for curry powder which contained coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne, mustard, ginger, allspice, and fenugreek, though she also noted that ready-made curry powder could be bought at any respectable shop. The first curry house in Britain dates from well before the period of large-scale immigration from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. Veeraswamy’s restaurant in London’s West End has remained in business since 1926 and claims to be the U K ’s oldest Indian restaurant. Established by the great-grandson of an English general and an Indian princess, the restaurant recently became part of the upmarket Chutney Mary group.17 If the history of curry is obscure, the origins of chicken tikka masala (C T M ) are even more uncertain. Some claim that the dish originated in New Delhi in 1947 (probably as a variant of the long-established murgh makhani or ‘butter chicken’). Others claim that it was invented in Glasgow in the 1960s when a customer complained that his curry was too dry and needed gravy. The chef is alleged to have improvised a sauce of tomato soup, yoghurt, and spices. The story is re-told in many guises and has become something of an ‘urban myth’.18 The ingredients of C T M vary widely but the dish usually contains chicken pieces (tikka), marinated in spices and yoghurt. According The 1999 Good Curry Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998): 15; Basu, Curry in the Crown (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 1999): 181. Bangladesh was established as a separate state in 1971 following the war of independence from Pakistan and is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Bangladesh has been beset by a series of famines and floods which, together with the country’s history of political turmoil since the partition of India in 1947, has encouraged large-scale migration to the U K . 15 The book in question is Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London, 1747). 16 Isabella Mary Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861). 17 www.veeraswamy.com (accessed 21 December 2009). 18 John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance (London: Faber & Faber, 2006). 14

172

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

to the Real Curry Restaurant Guide, a survey of forty-eight different C T M s in 1998 found that the only common ingredient was chicken.19 The inclusion of the food-colouring tartrazine gives C T M its characteristic fluorescent glow. C T M is now the most popular dish in British curry houses, ordered by sixty-five percent of diners.20 It is also sold in virtually every British supermarket both as a frozen food and as an oven-ready convenience meal.21 Britain’s taste for curry extends to C T M -flavoured pizza-toppings, pasta sauces, and crisps, and, in a final irony, B B C news on-line reports that C T M is now being exported to India and Bangladesh, aimed principally at British tourists in Bombay and Dhaka.22 The cultural significance of curry’s increasing popularity among the British public since the 1950s can be gleaned from various oral history sources. Here, for example, is Steve Rogers (b. 1957) talking about his first encounters with curry when he was growing up in Birmingham in the late 1960s: I had a friend called Kalik, and I remember going home one day with Kalik and they were having their communal bowl of curry – in the middle of the room, one huge bowl and a lot of chapattis [unleavened bread]. And it was the first time I’d even seen it, and, you know, the smell sort of nearly knocked me out. And there weren’t very many coloured children [sic] at the school in those days. And I remember when I met Kalik’s parents they were eating a bowl of curry, and I was asked whether I wanted some, so I copied them and they were basically breaking bread from a big chapatti and dunking it in this curry and eating it. And I rather, sort of, acquired a taste for curry at that age, you know. But my parents, my father in particular, he can’t abide the smell of curry and I used to go in and he’d say ‘you’ve been round that Kalik’s house again’ and

Reported in the B B C e-cyclopedia (accessed 23 December 2009). Chapman, The 1999 Good Curry Guide, 43. The wider claim that C T M is the most popular dish in the U K apparently comes from a report by Food Service Intelligence, reported in the B B C e-cyclopedia (20 April 2001), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special _report/1999/02/00/e-cyclopedia/1285804.stm (accessed 23 December 2009). The same source reports that the U K supermarket chain Sainsbury’s sells 1.6 million C T M meals every year. 21 Shrabani Basu, Curry: The Story of the Nation’s Favourite Dish (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), reports that Marks & Spencer sell eighteen tonnes of chicken tikka masala every week. 22 “India Gets a Taste of U K Tikka,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/503680.stm (accessed 21 January 2010). The same phenomenon: i.e. the re-importation of a dish into the alleged country of origin, can be observed in the case of the döner kebab (see the contribution of Maren Möhring in this volume). 19 20



A Cultural Politics of Curry

173

whack straight across the back of my head, you know. ‘No dad’, ‘you have, I can smell it on your breath’ [laughs] – quite funny looking back, you know. But even today I have a great taste for curries now – I love them.23

Many other British people developed a taste for curry and other ‘exotic’ food without the direct connection with British-Asian people that characterized Steve Rogers’s childhood in Birmingham. Here, for example, is Frances Soar (b. 1952 in Sheffield), describing the way she experienced foreign foods as a result of family holidays abroad: And the other thing that has changed a lot is the foreign food that we learnt about on holidays I suppose, as a nation. I mean spaghetti when I was a child came in tins and was soggy and coated in tomato sauce, and I still buy it and still eat it on toast and enjoy it. But we also have Italian-type spaghetti which isn’t quite as soggy, usually, and certainly isn’t eaten on toast. And we’ve got used to eating pizzas and Indian food and Chinese food, which none of us knew about. My grandmother used to like curry. I remember once coming back from Bridlington and we stopped somewhere like Market Wheaton for a meal on the way home and my grandmother ordered a curry which must have been extraordinarily hot, and we all watched her getting redder and redder and redder, dripping [laughs] – but she enjoyed it.

This anecdote is interesting for several reasons. First, it indicates that ‘foreign’ food, like curry, wasn’t always introduced by a younger generation and regarded sceptically by members of the older generation (as in the example of Steve Rogers’s father, above). In this case, Frances Soar’s grandmother clearly had a passion for curry which she passed on to her granddaughter. But the story is also interesting because it reveals the pervasiveness of curry in Britain over several generations, not just in cosmopolitan urban areas but also in smaller towns and villages like Bridlington and Market Wheaton. A third interview extract, from Neil Sachdev (born in 1958 to an Indian family in Uganda who migrated to England in the early 1960s), reveals some of the differences between ‘real’ Indian food, cooked and eaten at home by Indian families in Britain and the food that is served in ‘Indian’ restaurants: This life-history extract, and the ones that follow, form part of the National Life Stories’ collection Food: From Source to Salespoint, a selection of which is available from the ‘Food Stories’ website at the British Library, www.bl.uk/learning/resources/foodstories (accessed 21 January 2010), and as a free C D , available from the author. 23

174

P E T E R J A C K S O N  Dinner time was always, it was generally one course – we sat down once and had the whole thing. But it followed, it always started off with maybe two, maybe three vegetable curries. Rice was something that I think Indian restaurants have said you have with your main course – we never did. We used to have chapattis with the curries, there would be three sort of vegetable curries or whatever it was, and there would always be some pickles, after which you would always have dhal [lentils] and rice and maybe whatever vegetable curries you had left over – and that was the order we did it in. I can’t remember on a regular evening meal to have a sweet afterwards – there would always be natural yoghurt but that was part of the meal, but there wouldn’t be a sweet at the end of it and that was it. And, we used to eat with our hands rather than use any forks, knives and spoons or anything like that, and it was always that way. And I do remember, my grandmother must have either brought them over – had them shipped over – or brought them with her – there was always copper plates with a rim on them, and I do remember the rim because I used to find it really sharp […] there were never china plates.

The speaker’s vivid memories confirm how Indian food was assimilated to British tastes. Not only did the food itself change (as with the introduction of new dishes like C T M ) but the manner of eating also changed – including the number of courses, the combination of curry and rice, the introduction of a sweet or dessert at the end of the meal, the use of cutlery and china plates etc. The widespread consumption of curry by British consumers has also been facilitated by the ready availability of curry sauces, manufactured by firms like Patak’s and Sharwood’s. These companies have interesting and contrasting histories. Patak’s was established by Kirit and Meena Pathak, who migrated to Britain from Kenya in 1956. They began by selling sweets and savoury snacks from a shop on Drummond Street in London and have grown to be one of the richest ‘Asian’ companies in Britain, with pre-tax profits of £5.5 million in 1999, exporting to forty-four countries worldwide and supplying a substantial share of Britain’s ‘Indian’ restaurant trade. Their recent advertising campaign invited consumers to “Share Patak’s passion for India.”24 By contrast, Sharwood’s is a British company, established in the City of London in 1889, with products that literally span the globe (“It’s half the world, it’s Despite their close family ties to India, Patak’s source their ingredients from around the world, including mustard from Canada, garlic from Italy, mangoes, limes, and ginger from Brazil, chillies from Peru, tamarind and coconut from Thailand, coriander from Iran, and chick peas from Morocco (Basu, Curry in the Crown, 74). 24



A Cultural Politics of Curry

175

Sharwood’s”).25 Sharwood’s now sell Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, and Thai food alongside ‘Indian’ curry sauces. Their advertising reflects this more diffuse geography, inviting British consumers to “Stir up some passion.”26 With this historical background in mind, we go on to discuss the cultural politics of curry in contemporary Britain.

A Cultural Politics of Curry In August 1998, the Guardian newspaper asked: “What does this dish say about Britain?” (see Figure 1). The dish in question was chicken tikka masala and the article, by Yasmin Alibhai–Brown, went on to discuss the generally low status of ‘Indian’ food in Britain, the lack of celebrity chefs, and the apparent contradiction between the popularity of curry and the persistence of racism in Britain. While some have argued that the consumption of foreign foods is a form of cultural racism – literally “eating the Other”27 – others have described a more complex cultural politics including the wide range of ‘geographical knowledges’ that different consumers bring to the table.28 The argument that is encapsulated in this headline took a particular turn in April 2001, when then-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, used C T M as a rhetorical symbol of New Labour’s political commitment to multiculturalism. In a speech to the Social Market Foundation on 19 April, he deployed the popularity of C T M among British consumers to “celebrate Britishness” and to challenge those who felt that British identity was under siege,

25 The company was founded in 1889 by James Allen Sharwood, “a culinary explorer who devoted his life to scouring the world for exotic specialities”; www.sharwoods.com /brand-history.htm (accessed 4 January 2010). The company imported Indian chutneys, pickles, and curry powders from Bombay and Madras and opened a factory in 1899 close to the Oval Cricket Ground in London to manufacture chutneys from ingredients imported from the British Empire. Sharwood’s received a Royal Warrant in 1947 as “Manufacturers of Chutney & Purveyors of Indian Curry Powders.” They became part of the Rank Hovis McDougall Group in 1963. 26 For further discussion of these company histories and contrasting advertising strategies, see Peter Jackson, “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic,” Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002): 3–18. 27 bell hooks, “Eating the Other,” in hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston M A : South End, 1992): 21–39. 28 Ian Cook & Philip Crang, “The World on a Plate: Culture, Displacement and Geographical Knowledges,” Journal of Material Culture 1 (1996): 131–53.

176

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

“perhaps even in a state of terminal decline.”29 In the context of debates about immigration and asylum seekers, Britain’s membership of the E U and the devolution of political power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland,

Figure 1: “What does this dish say about Britain?” Source: The Guardian (25 August 1998)

Robin Cook concluded that it was the pluralism of its ancestry that made Britain unique, not its purity. London, he declared, was home to over thirty 29 Extracts from Cook’s speech are available online at www.guardian.co.uk/racism /Story/0,,477023,00.html (accessed 16 December 2009).



A Cultural Politics of Curry

177

ethnic communities, with more than three hundred languages spoken by families over their evening meal. The culinary theme was continued in Cook’s enthusiastic endorsement of C T M : “now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is the perfect illustration of the way that Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.” Oversimplifying somewhat, he concluded: “chicken tikka is an Indian dish. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy.” Robin Cook’s speech is part of a long history in which food and fashion (‘saris and samosas’) have served as the symbols of liberal multiculturalism.30 Its shallowness is easily critiqued, as happened within a few days of Cook’s speech, when the Indian restaurateur and founding editor of Tandoori magazine, Iqbal Wahhab, repudiated the Home Secretary’s vision of Britain as a chicken tikka masala society.31 In an article in the Independent newspaper (24 April 2001), entitled “The Truth about Tikka Masala,” Mr Wahhab described C T M as a made-up dish, concocted to soothe the sensitive British palate.32 It was, he said, the perfect metaphor for that other concoction, multiculturalism. Referring to “this tiresomely common dish” which has “no genuine provenance,” Mr Wahhab expressed his amusement that such an innocuous and fabricated dish had come to symbolize British national identity. Mr Wahhab applied the same logic to the ‘Indian’ curry house, designed to reflect how the British imagine India: “Minarets for the exotic touch, pubstyle velour seats for recognisable comfort. Who are we kidding? Genuine multiculturalism this isn’t.” Warming to his theme, Mr Wahhab contrasted Robin Cook’s cosy multiculturalism with the behaviour of abusive customers, burping from too much lager, staggering into Indian restaurants late at night, and mimicking the waiters’ accents. While Mr Wahhab clearly had his own agenda – moving the curry house upmarket through commercial ventures such as the Cinnamon Club in Westminster where C T M is not on

30

See Peter Jackson, “Geographies of Diversity and Difference,” Geography 87 (2002):

316–23.

Mr Wahhab is no stranger to controversy. In February 1998, he published an article in Tandoori magazine, the journal of the Indian restaurant trade, describing Indian waiters as “miserable gits” (quoted in Chapman, The 1999 Good Curry Guide, 17). The article caused great offence and led to his resignation as editor-in-chief of the magazine. 32 www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/the-truth-about-tikkamasala-682356.html (accessed 25 January 2010). 31

178

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

the menu – he reached the inevitable conclusion: “Eating curry and breaking down racial barriers are two entirely different things.”33 The example of Robin Cook’s speech and its critical reception by Iqbal Wahhab provides clear evidence of this book’s central contention: that contemporary nation-states are anxious about the hybrid cultures that proliferate in our (post)colonial world. Given its centrality to our everyday lives and the passions that food arouses, we argue that culinary culture is a particularly powerful lens through which to observe these issues unfolding.

Tracing Transnationalities In the remaining part of this chapter we seek to move beyond these rhetorical engagements with Britain’s contested culinary culture, drawing on focusgroup research in London and Mumbai to trace the wider transnational spaces within which these debates are located.34 In particular, we wish to argue that the popularity of curry cannot be understood as simply a British appropriation of Indian culture. More complex transnational connections are at work, encompassing (white) British consumers who have little or no direct connection with India or with South Asian migrant communities in Britain. These transnational connections spread in both directions, also affecting consumers in India itself. Our evidence suggests that India is not ‘westernizing’ in any simple inter-generational sense, just as Britain is not ‘assimilating’ Indian culture in any straightforward manner. In both cases, more complex models of hybridity are required.35 Support for Mr Wahhab’s argument is readily available. At the European Championships in 1998, for example, England football fans adopted as their unofficial anthem a song called “Vindaloo,” by Fat Les, which some took as evidence of the multicultural nature of contemporary Britain and others took as exactly the opposite. – We find very similar ambivalences concerning the (consumption of) döner kebab in Germany (see the contribution of Maren Möhring in this volume). 34 The official re-naming of Bombay as Mumbai took effect in January 1996 and has been highly contested. For some, the change represents an indigenization of a colonial name. For others, it is associated with the rise of militant Hindu nationalism. See Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002), and Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, ed. Jim Masselos & Sujata Patel (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003). 35 We recognize that ‘hybridity’ is a complex and contested term, with deeply colonial resonances (see Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race [London & New York: Routledge, 1995]). For some authors, the term signals a welcome 33



A Cultural Politics of Curry

179

We begin with Appadurai’s argument about the indigenization of foreign cultural influences where he argues that, “as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another.”36 Many of our Indian focus-group participants stressed the ease with which Mumbai absorbs and adapts a variety of global influences.37 Some older respondents lamented this fact, including the comment that “Fast foods, like McDonald’s, have taken over Mumbai.” More usually, however, it was a source of pride: “In Bombay we can get anything”; “Actually Bombay is the place where you can get everything and you get a blend of all the cultures”; “We eat everything” [including Thai, Chinese and Mexican food]; “Indians are basically adapted to any kind of food”; “Bombay absorbs everything.” Several groups referred to the ‘indianization’ of pizza, including one group who talked about ‘Punjabi pizza’ with the addition of Indian toppings and ready-made masalas. Others referred to the addition of garlic and chilli sauces to McDonald’s burgers, while Chinese food was commonly regarded as Indian or Indian–Chinese, with one person insisting that “Indian people do Chinese food much better than Chinese people.” Several of our focus groups referred to the popularity of ‘junk food’ in Mumbai. Significantly, though, this did not refer to global brands such as McDonald’s or Pizza Hut but to local ‘street’ food such as Bel Phuri. For younger professionals, junk food often formed part of their lunchtime meal, eaten in the street or at a hotel near their workplace. In London, our focus-group participants discussed the place of ‘Indian’ food within a hierarchy of culinary cultures. Several respondents told us that break from binary thinking (e.g., Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces [Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2002]). For others, such as Katharyne Mitchell, the term represents a dubious form of ‘hype’, signalling a superficial engagement with multiculturalism; Mitchell, “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (1997): 101–14. 36 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 32. 37 Six focus groups were recorded in London by Nicola Thomas, Claire Dwyer, and the author, with a further nine groups recorded in Mumbai by Nicola Thomas and an Indian market-research company (Mudra Communications Ltd). All the groups were conducted in English and were taped and transcribed in full. We have reported more fully on the methodology elsewhere (Dwyer, Jackson & Thomas, “Consuming Transnational Fashion in London and Mumbai,” Geoforum 38 [2007]: 908–24) in the context of our work on transnational fashion.

180

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

they would not regard an Indian restaurant as a suitable venue for a special occasion such as a wedding anniversary or birthday meal when French, Italian or Thai cuisine would be more appropriate. A group of professional people in West London expressed their disdain for the more pretentious Indian restaurants like Chutney Mary, describing them as “mutton dressed as lamb.” One member of this group had recently enjoyed a meal at another high-end Indian restaurant (The Bombay Brasserie), while other members of the group expressed their surprise at its cost (£90 for two persons). Members of the British-Asian professionals group also described restaurants such as the Cinnamon Club and Chutney Mary as “quite pretentious” and “not that Indian anymore.” Culinary cultures clearly vary in terms of what people consider appropriate for different occasions and how much they are prepared to pay. It is also clear that culinary taste and skill are socially acquired. As one young British-Asian woman argued, “I don’t think it’s because I’m Asian that I can cook, I think it’s because my Mum’s brought me and my brother up in a certain way that we’re sort of self sufficient.” Members of the British-Asian student group also maintained that British supermarkets (and, by implication, most British consumers) “haven’t even touched the surface” of Indian food in all its diversity: They haven’t tasted like our home-made food properly and also the restaurant food and the stuff they eat is just one section of Asian food. There’s so much more variety that I don’t think most people have tasted. Even people from India or whatever, they haven’t even tasted, because each region has so many dishes.

Indian restaurants in London and other British cities have begun to reflect this diversity as a means of market differentiation, offering South Asian cuisine, for example, or specializing in regional dishes from Kerala or elsewhere. Issues of cultural change and continuity are also reflected in a new generation of cookery books. Written for the British-Asian market, these books acknowledge the fact that young British-Asian women may no longer have acquired the cooking skills from their mothers that might once have been expected of them. A particularly good example is Vicky Bhogal’s Cooking Like Mummyji (2003), in which she recalls a conversation with her mother, who spoke wistfully about the declining culinary skills of her daughter’s generation:



A Cultural Politics of Curry

181

It is such a shame that so many Indian girls of your age don’t know how to cook or share your enthusiasm [for Indian food]. Nowadays, girls are either so busy studying or they just have no interest. Gone are the days when they used to stay in the kitchen by their mother’s side and were able to cook for the whole family by the age of ten…. Soon, no one will be able to cook roti [the evening meal] anymore and we elders will be fed chilled supermarket chicken biryanis, a twinpack of frozen naan [bread] and a jar of mango chutney.38

The author positions her book as a response to these changes, arguing that the old methods are no longer practical. She describes the book as a “fun guide,” designed to provide the necessary advice “so that Indian girls get to keep their lives and their grades [educational success] but also manage to dazzle their families with their culinary skills.”39 Significantly, though, in the context of our argument about transnationality, this new generation of cookery books is also designed “to let the western world in on the secret of real Indian home cooking.”40 Our argument about the ‘social field’ of contemporary transnationality can also be used to challenge the arrogant assumption that modernity is located exclusively in the ‘West’ (Britain, London…) while the ‘East’ (India, Mumbai…) is characterized by an unchanging sense of tradition. Not unexpectedly, members of several of the British focus groups celebrated the diversity and modernity of London: “I think London is a really great place to live because you can get anything, all types of food from all countries and that’s what I really like about London, because of the variety you can get here.”41 Less expectedly, perhaps, similar arguments were made about India and especially about Mumbai. One of our respondents suggested that “India is an open country, with a lot of variety,” including the diverse forms of public culture referred to above, enjoyed in a range of spaces such as the beach, the gym, and the restaurant. Many of our Indian respondents were keen to em38

Bhogal, Cooking Like Mummyji: Real British Asian Cooking (London: Simon & Schuster,

2003): 12.

Bhogal, Cooking Like Mummyji, 16 Cooking Like Mummyji, 16. 41 This argument is a familiar one and can be read in many food guides to cosmopolitan cities like London. Ian Cook and Philip Crang quote a typical example from the London listings magazine Time Out (16 August 1995): “The world on a plate. From Afghan ashak to Zimbabwean zaza, London offers an unrivalled selection of foreign flavours and cuisines. Give your tongue a holiday and treat yourself to the best meals in the world – all without setting foot outside our fair capital” (Cook & Crang, “The World on a Plate,” 131). 39 40

182

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

phasize the modernity of Mumbai, whether in terms of the fast pace of life, the city’s ability to absorb a wide range of international influences, or the increased freedom and choice of contemporary consumer culture. Modern-day Mumbai’s culinary culture is at least as globalized as that of contemporary London. Like India, in general, various culinary trends can be observed. Ashis Nandy identifies four recent changes – changing notions of ‘authenticity’, the emergence of fast food, the crystallization of new status hierarchies, and the re-visioning of ‘ethnic’ food. Taking the examples of chilli, capsicum, and cashews, among other ingredients, Nandy notes how “the story of Indian food is […] the story of the blatantly exogenous becoming prototypically authentic.”42 Nandy charts the recent expansion of the fast-food market, though he notes that Indian fast food has a long history, particularly in the so-called ‘presidency towns’ of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, where earlier versions of fast food were already widely available in the latter half of the nineteenth century, referred to colloquially as ‘tiffin’. Nandy suggests that new status hierarchies are also being defined, with Punjabi cuisine “gatecrashing into the big league,” formerly dominated by Mughal cuisine,43 while Indian–Chinese food has become one of the fastest growing ‘ethnic’ cuisines in cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai. All of these trends can be seen at work in the restaurant scene in contemporary Mumbai where there is a frequent exchange of staff, ideas, and knowledge with similar restaurants in London and other globalized cities. Mumbai’s restaurants now have their own ‘celebrity chefs’ such as Rahul Akerkar at Indigo. Upmarket restaurants like Tiffin in the Oberoi Hotel feature an ‘international’ cuisine including food from China, Mexico, Japan, and Australia, while the Taj group of hotels offers hybrid innovations such as ‘nazza’ (a naan-based pizza). Chefs in these upmarket restaurants are receiving professional training in India’s catering colleges or are being recruited from abroad. Listings magazines and restaurant reviews such as Upper Crust have emerged to serve the burgeoning Indian middle class as well as catering to the tastes of international tourists and business people. Rather than contrasting ‘Western modernity’ with ‘Eastern tradition’, our evidence suggests that it may be more profitable to think in terms of multiple modernities arising in different places and shaped by the specific connections 42 Ashis Nandy, “The Changing Popular Culture of Indian Food: Preliminary Notes,” South Asia Research 24 (2004): 11. 43 Nandy, “The Changing Popular Culture,” 14.



A Cultural Politics of Curry

183

between places.44 For example, a group of university students in Mumbai insisted that their cousins living overseas were more traditional than they were because, nowadays, “you can get everything in Mumbai.”45 In our Indian focus groups, the modernity of Mumbai was frequently signalled by use of the phrase “Nowadays...,” which we interpret as referencing both intergenerational change and the changes that have taken place as a result of India’s recent liberalization.46 While some of our Indian respondents had ‘traditional’ attitudes about who should cook, including members of one group of young men who expected their sisters to learn to cook but who did not expect that their own limited cooking skills would need to improve, this was by no means universal. For example, one retired man who had lived abroad for many years indicated that he could cook Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food. Similarly, for another respondent’s son, living abroad had forced him to learn to cook: “My son is staying abroad. He says he misses Indian food very much. He has learnt to cook dhal and rice now.” Others in this group felt that cooking skills should be taught to children when they were at college and that “husbands too should know cooking as nowadays husband and wife See Miles Ogborn’s argument that it is not enough to think of different modernities in different places but that modernities are made “in the relationships between places and across spaces”; Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (London & New York: Guilford, 1998): 19. Geraldine Pratt and Margaret Walton–Roberts make a similar argument in their work on the mobile and contradictory modernities that characterize the lives of South Asian families in Canada and the Punjab; “Mobile Modernities: A South Asian Family Negotiates Immigration, Gender and Class in Canada,” Gender, Place and Culture 12 (2005): 173–95. 45 This kind of reverse logic has become a staple feature of British-Asian popular culture. It is found, for example, in films like Bhaji on the Beach, dir. Gurinder Chadha (Channel 4 & Umbi, 1993), where the fashion-sense of British-born Indians is compared unfavourably with that of their relatives ‘back home’ in India. Another variant can be found in the satirical British-Asian T V show Goodness Gracious Me where a group of Indian people go out for an English meal in Mumbai and ask the waiter for ‘something really bland’ (series 1, episode 1, B B C , 1998; D V D , Fremantle 2002). 46 Examples include: “Nowadays, so many restaurants [sell] international food”; “People nowadays are more aware…”; “Nowadays working women are well aware”; “Nowadays, Chinese food is becoming popular. Canned food and pre-packed foods [are] also very popular”; “Nowadays, people are health conscious […] soup and salads are very common.” For an account of India’s recent liberalization, see Stuart Corbridge & John C. Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 44

184

P E T E R J A C K S O N 

both are working.” If anything, British-Asian households were more ‘traditional’ in their culinary habits, with fathers often portrayed as patriarchal figures, continuing to eat ‘Indian’ food while other family members ate pasta or salad. Transnational households are, however, changing rapidly, leading Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan to advocate further research on “how patriarchies are recast in diasporic conditions of postmodernity.”47 Walton– Roberts and Pratt’s work on South Asian transnational households in Canada would certainly support this argument, with women often acting as the key agents of change within migrant households.48 In this case, it was the mother who took the initiative to migrate and who used her professional skills in the feminized realm of fashion and beauty to establish a transnational business. Here, too, the ‘antiquated patriarchal relations’ of South Asian communities in Vancouver are contrasted unfavourably with those ‘back home’ in India, supporting the general argument about multiple modernities.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to unravel the complex cultural politics of curry through a transnational reading of what is now allegedly Britain’s most popular dish: chicken tikka masala (C T M ). We have seen that C T M is, in effect, a ‘made up’ dish – a fictional creation of decidedly hybrid origins. Like the word ‘curry’ itself, C T M is a fabrication that was produced through decades of British colonialism in South Asia. According to Uma Narayan, “when the British incorporated curry into British cuisine [...] they were incorporating the Other into the self, but on the self’s terms.”49 Significantly, however, in terms of the argument advanced in this chapter, Narayan argues that the influence of the colonies on colonizing powers is as complicated a matter as the impact of the colonizers on their colonies. Such is the complex nature of transnational space. This chapter has drawn on archival sources and on focus-group research with consumers in London and Mumbai to try and characterize the ‘social field’ of contemporary transnational relations between Britain and India. We 47 Inderpal Grewal & Caren Kaplan, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan & Minoo Moallem (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1999): 358. 48 Pratt & Walton–Roberts, “Mobile Modernities.” 49 Narayan, “Eating Cultures,” 68.



185

A Cultural Politics of Curry

have argued that culinary culture is a particularly powerful lens through which to examine the cultural politics of these transnational connections.50 While the popularity of curry among British consumers could be read as evidence of the assimilation of Indian culture in Britain, we have sought to trace a more complex argument about the transnational spaces of contemporary commodity culture. It is clear, for example, that C T M is not a traditional Indian dish that has been imported to Britain following large-scale immigration from the New Commonwealth. Its origins are far more complex. We have also seen that the consumption of ‘Indian’ food has spread to white British consumers who have little or no direct connection to India or to British-Asian migrant communities (signalled by the ubiquitous presence of C T M in high-street supermarkets and restaurants in all parts of the country). The complex and far-reaching nature of this particular transnational field is also indicated by our research in London and Mumbai. In both places, ‘global’ influences are rapidly indigenized within local consumption cultures where a variety of foods are reproduced with a distinctive local twist (chicken tikka served with a masala ‘gravy’, McDonald’s hamburgers served with chilli and garlic, etc.). Our focus-group evidence serves to highlight the permeability of cultural boundaries with consumer culture in London and Mumbai, where hybridity is the norm rather than the exception. Consumers in both places had difficulty identifying what is distinctively ‘British’ or ‘Indian’ about their consumption practices. Future research might profitably abandon the search for ‘authentic’ cultural difference and concentrate instead on the way in which particular aspects of material culture (food, fashion, music etc.) are appropriated and used, not where they are thought to come from or how they may have originated.



50 Reflecting on the interconnectedness of the contemporary world, the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz concludes that there is now “an increasing interconnectedness of varied local cultures, as well as a development of cultures without a clear anchorage in any one territory.” The range of actors at work in this transnational arena, Hannerz argues, includes individuals, groups, movements and business enterprises whose diversity and organization lie at the heart of contemporary transnationality (Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places [London: Routledge, 1996]: 102, 6).

S ECTION III: ——————————————————————————————————

M ULTICULTURALISM F AILED ? C ULTURAL D IFFERENCE AND D EBATES ON N ATIONAL B ELONGING

Knowledges of (Un)Belonging Epistemic Change as a Defining Mode for Black Women’s Activism in Germany

M AUREEN M AISHA E GGERS

B

LACK WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

has been fundamental to the formation and existence of the black movement in Germany.1 The context of black women’s activism is regarded as a motor for the defining moments in the constitution of the organized black community. The struggle for public, political, and academic recognition is largely fuelled by contestations led and organized within the black women’s movement. Black women’s scholarship and the communication of their analyses and findings at black community events and meetings have intimately informed how blackness is conceptualized in Germany. The main focus of this chapter is to explore this engagement with critical thought and to determine how dominant patterns of belonging are contested and transformed not only by social-movement work, but by focusing on the production of knowledge. Scholarship is then of strategic importance, because the focus shifts from social mobilization alone towards epistemic production and consequently towards epistemic change. The focus shifts from merely contesting racist representations towards dismantling legitimized and historicized racialized knowledges. I draw on the work of postcolonial, diasporan, and African

Ekpenyong Ani, Jasmin Eding, Maisha M. Eggers, Katja Kinder & Peggy Piesche, “Transformationspotentiale, kreative Macht und Auseinandersetzungen mit einer kritischen Differenzpositionierung,” in In Bewegung bleiben: 100 Jahre Politik, Kultur und Geschichte von Lesben, ed. Gabriele Dennert, Christiane Leidinger & Franziska Rauchhut (Berlin: Querverlag, 2007): 164–67. 1

190

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

feminist scholars to explore the relationships between intellectual work and social-movement work,2 between social mobilization and epistemic production, between the state and social-movement contexts, as well as between alternative education, narration, and knowledge-sharing. In order to outline changing understandings and objectives associated with belonging, this chapter highlights three periods which at the same time represent three paradigm shifts in the (self-)perception of the black movement in Germany, particularly with respect to knowledge production about blackness in Germany. These are an outward movement, an inward movement, and a movement which I characterize as towards transformative action. Each of these periods is determined by different perceptions of socialmovement work and at the same time by a specific definition of the relationship of this organizational work to the (hegemonic) mainstream. My focus on the context of the black women’s movement is based on its significance as a driving force during key moments in the constitution of the organized black community in Germany. The black women’s movement is the site on which issues of scholarship concerning black Germany, belonging, and the relationship to the state are mainly situated. Black women activists have acted as catalysts in the actual naming of the movement – afrodeutsch (Afro-German), later schwarze Deutsche (black Germans). Black women activists were pivotal in defining the content of the movement (knowledge production with regard to black German history, developing concepts of alternative education). They were also at the forefront in politicizing the black movement in Germany (linking it to wider critical social movements). This chapter is divided into three parts: the first section focuses on the constitutive moments of the black (women’s) movement in Germany. It informs about a period of exploration and experimentation. Critical scholarship is theorized here as an initial orientation. Epistemic production in this phase is directed outward. The scholarly work of black women activists at this time is mainly addressed to the (white) German public. The second section focuses on the effects of scholarship for the movement itself. The creation of autonomous spaces3 for epistemic production on blackness becomes a Gayatri Spivak, interview conducted by Tani E. Barlow entitled “Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12.1 (2004): 141–43. 3 Charmaine Pereira, “Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminism in Scholarship on Africa?” Feminist Africa 1 (2002), Intellectual Politics, www.feministafrica.org /index.php/between-knowing-and-imagining (accessed 4 March 2010). 2



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

191

pressing concern. Attention shifts from educating the public to transformational (inner) social-movement education. The third section is concerned with the time-period from the 1990s and beyond. The focus is not on the content of knowledge production itself, or on the relationship to the state in itself, but much more on actively using epistemic production to change the position of the movement within German society and thus transform society as a whole. The role of epistemic change as a form of symbolic revolution4 becomes increasingly evident. The most recent orientation of the movement is characterized by a venture not only to increase epistemic production but to actually effect epistemic change as a long-term solution.

Emerging into Existence: The Role of Narration Moving outward: The (first half of the) 1980s The beginning of the organized black (women’s) movement in Germany is located in the 1980s. Black women activists were at the core of the actions that led to the constitution of the initiatives and discussion groups on blackness in Germany and eventually to the definition of black Germanness. This initiatory movement can be specified as a move towards claiming symbolic space. With the emergence of black women activists, first individually and then collectively, belonging became a factual interest that required attention. As activists entered spaces of political articulation, it became increasingly important to discuss understandings of blackness, as well as the contradictions and intentions involved in organization. The spaces in question were mainly within the broader context of the (dominantly white) women’s movement. The scenes were national feminist conferences, the Annual Lesbian Spring Meetings, and the women’s cultural and club scenes in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and Munich. Black women activists who were interested in feminist theories and politics met and opened discussions on blackness and feminism.5 The term Afro-deutsch (Afro-German) was coined in 1984 by Audre Lorde (1934–92) together with a group of black women activists in Berlin. This is considered the moment at which the black movement in Germany was

4 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, tr. Richard Nice (La Domination Masculine; 1998; Cambridge: Polity, 2001): 134. 5 Ani et al., “Transformationspotentiale,” 165.

192

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

born.6 The naming project set out to embrace and acknowledge the position of subjects of African ancestry/heritage and German lineage/situatedness/ identity. At the same time, it symbolized a conscious endeavour to discard derogatory (German) terms connoting blackness. Political self-definition as Afro-Germans, later black Germans, initiated a new sense of collective identity and self-appreciation. This movement can be characterized as an advance towards shattering the complacency of symbolic non-existence. A series of actions began whose goal it was to contest dominant myths such as the claim that ‘there are no black people in Germany, and if there are any, they have nothing specific to say’. Black women activists now actively sought contact with each other. This was followed by efforts towards creating spaces for exchange and experimentation (weekend workshops, exchange programmes with other black activists from the Netherlands, etc.). Finally, racism was collectively placed on the agenda of emancipatory discourses in Germany. Addressing feminist and leftist emancipation discourses, black women activists pushed for the recognition of the struggles of black people in daily interactions and spaces. Crucial to this was the challenge of making the realities of black female subjects visible, and therefore open to contestation and transformation. Translation as an act of resistance The movement outward was linked to the project of weaving black presence (critically) into daily realities in Germany. Blackness was identified as already intimately intertwined with daily consumer cultures, cultures of representation, cultures of (white) charity, etc. The goal was to subvert those oppressive and paternalistic connotations of blackness and to open up a field for creative critical positionings. Three levels of action can be determined as significant to this project. The first level concerns the role of political self-definition: i.e. the role of naming blackness in the German language (see above). The second level is the role of autobiographical texts in asserting belonging. The third level is the role of counterdiscursivity and transformative impulses (appropriating key themes and local/regional/national discourses) and reinterpreting them from the vantage point of critical black perspectives. The (historicized) presence of prominent black activists, such as the trade unionist Fasia Jansen (1929–97), who survived the Third Reich in the Neuengamme concentration camp, preceded the organized movement and is to a certain extent acknowledged in various histories of resistance in Germany. 6



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

193

The role of autobiographical texts and literary productions This move was characterized by the emergence of texts and poetry which inscribed black and female realities and perspectives in the German language. May Ayim (1960–96, formerly May Opitz) – renowned for the force and grace with which she appropriated the German Standard/imperial language – initiated a substantial push towards opening the German language to improvisation, contestation, and subversion. In a sense, she made a meaningful contribution to transforming the German language itself, pushing it to accommodate and adapt to subverted meanings and to hybrid definitions and articulations. Guy Nzingha St Louis published Gedichte einer schönen Frau (‘Poems of a beautiful woman’),7 opening up a substantial field in which intense discussions ensued about the challenges and possibilities of antiheteronormative self-definitions, self-concepts, and self-designs. The book Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (translated as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), published by the women’s publishing house Orlanda in 1986,8 is acknowledged as a tangible, very real manifestation of the critical presence of black (women activist) Germans in Germany. The black community in Germany received a huge boost through this publication. The book earned international acclaim and contributed to changing the face of German literary and cultural studies in the U S A . Theorizing black Germanness and teaching black German history has created interdisciplinary and transnational links between German studies, cultural studies, black studies, and diaspora studies. The role of counterdiscursivity and transformative impulses Understanding Germanness in many contexts now also entails understanding the presence of people of colour in general and of black Germans in particular. Furthermore, this implies understanding how colonialism, naturalization policies, post-World War II occupation politics and migration have contributed to cultural, national, and racialized hybridity in Germany. Theorizing the causes, forms, and effects of this hybridity is very closely bound up with a transdisciplinary project based on the documentation of black GerGuy St Louis, Gedichte einer schönen Frau (Berlin: Gudula Lorez, 1983). Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz (later May Ayim) & Dagmar Schultz, ed. Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda, 1986; tr. Anne V. Adams, with Tina Campt, May Opitz & Dagmar Schultz as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst M A : U of Massachusetts P , 1992). 7 8

194

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

man histories, a key part of which is a quasi-archaeological process of sifting through footnotes and records in search of the documentation of black presence in Germany.9 Black women activist–historians such as Katharina Oguntoye, Fatima El Tayeb, and Paulette Reed–Anderson are at the centre of this movement. Major aspects of their results relate to German colonial history as well as the history of battles for citizenship fought by mixed-parentage Afro-Germans in the colonies and by African colonial citizens who migrated to Germany. Another field covered by this type of research concerns the occupation of the Rhine area by (black) French soldiers after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, and the Afro-German children that resulted from unions between these black French soldiers and white German women. Historians have also studied black (German) experiences in the Third Reich and Hitler’s campaigns for new German colonies in Africa. Significant aspects of post-World War II black German history include the role of Afro-Germans in East Germany, such as the black children of the contract workers, as well as black students from the young postcolonial communist states (Cuba, Angola, Mozambique) or from freedom movements such as S W A P O (Namibia). Post-World War II West German black history again includes the consequences of military occupation, this time with regard to American, British, and French troops, and the generation of AfroGerman children (the so-called ‘occupation children’) born to black soldiers and white German women. Later factors include the migration of African students to (West) Germany from the 1960s onwards, the migration of African refugees to Germany and the children born to African migrants and their white German partners. Cultural studies as an analytical context gained importance in situating the autobiographical accounts and life-stories of black German subjects (black subjects in Germany) in the various and specific periods. Black activist cultural studies scholars like Peggy Piesche – whose biography is black-EastGerman – contributed complex perspectives on the intersections between population policies, national political alliances, personal negotiations of contact prohibitions, and black East-Germanness.10 Paulette Reed–Anderson, Rewriting the Footnotes: Berlin and the African Diaspora, ed. & publ. by Berlin’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs (Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats Berlin), 2000. 10 Peggy Piesche, “Black and German? East German Adolescents before 1989: A Retrospective View of a ‘Non-Existent Issue’ in the G D R ,” in The Cultural After-Life of East 9



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

195

Communicating these findings became a project for alternative education concepts which brought black (women activist) educationists to the fore. Belonging became a concern which was discussed and debated at virtually every meeting-place. The annual meetings of Adefra (formerly ‘Afro-German Women’, now ‘Black Women in Germany’) and I S D (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland / ‘Initiative of Black People in Germany’) became a forum at which workshops were carried out on black German histories, on black feminism, etc. All three levels – the acts of self-naming, the acts of translation through autobiographical writing, and the acts of initiating counter-discourse – spurred a move towards transforming the consciousness of black activists/collectives in Germany, who were now virtually being written into the German language. Emerging scholarship on Black Germany The extensive work of black women activists from this constitutional period consists of cultural commentaries and critiques which have had a profound impact on German society. Epistemic production (verbal, visual, and social texts) in this phase is intimately linked to narration. Narrating is understood by Linda Tuhiwai Smith – quite literally – as emerging into visibility and therefore as “opposition being made visible.”11 The effects and implications of narrating have been widely discussed. In the context of social-movement work, the impact of political, cultural, and literary interventions, cultural analysis as well as critical (re-)interpretations of culture, and how these aspects determine belonging, is of great relevance. Narration is considered central to changing perceptions of normalcy.12 Since narration creates and conserves normalcy, dismantling legitimized and historicized dominant knowledges requires counter-narration. The power of normalcy in upholding the symbolic order has been thoroughly analyzed in the critical work of Pierre Bourdieu. His term “gentle violence” (soft violence, soft power) points to

Germany: New Transnational Perspectives, ed. Leslie Adelson (Washington D C : American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (A I C G S ), 2002): 37–59. 11 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999): 6, 33. The use of the term ‘Black Australia’ is an example of a powerful signifier of oppositional identity applied by Aboriginal activists. 12 Gayatri Spivak, interview conducted by Kerry Chance & Yates McKee (24 April 2001), http://hrp.bard.edu/resource_pdfs/chanceandmckee.spivak.pdf

196

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

compliancy with knowledge systems.13 At the same time, it equally signals oppositional possibilities of disrupting and dismantling dominant and repressive systems and symbolic orders through critical scholarship – which is not surprising, as Bourdieu links intellectual work strongly to social-movement work. With regard to the transformation of language as a cultural symbol, German has become a vessel within which articulations of subordinated ‘hyphenated Germans’ – such as Afro-Deutsche (Afro-Germans/black Germans), Asio-Deutsche (Asian-Germans), Türkisch-Deutsche (Turkish-Germans), or Sinti/Roma-Deutsche (German-Sinti/Roma) – have found or, more precisely, made spaces. In this vein, a variety of German created as a ‘trademark’ and therefore associated with people of colour from migrant backgrounds (Kanaksprak) has become very popular with young Germans from all kinds of different backgrounds. The various levels of translation constitute acts of appropriation, subversion, and resistance – as exemplified in the work of May Ayim, Guy Nzingha St Louis, Raya Lubinetzki, and numerous other activists.

Epistemic Production and Social-Movement Work Moving ‘inward’: The second half of the 1980s Through intensive engagement with the specific history of blackness in Germany, the focus had gradually shifted from communicating outward to the (white) German public to communication inward within the black movement itself. The symbolic manifestation of the movement and the project of claiming visibility continued – but lost urgency in comparison with determining the actual content and thus the envisioned orientation of the black movement in Germany. The founding of the nationwide organizations Adefra and I S D in 1985–86 facilitated a change of focus towards a more intense discussion among black activists themselves. Defining and clarifying collective positions on issues that affected the quality of the daily lives of black subjects in Germany took centre-stage. Fired by the desire to imagine and create definitions outside the hegemony of white and (symbolically) male-dominated German society, debates on the Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 21, 133. The term “gentle violence” refers to processes which allow violence to be internalized so that the direct application of violence is replaced by the self-activating (self-infliction) of violence. Bourdieu therefore speaks of a complex agreement with the system of violence in question. 13



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

197

necessity of positioning ensued. This led to an orientation towards a critical difference positioning. The impetus behind that move was a conscious decision not to be compared to, or merely compounded into, a structure already diagnosed as highly oppressive and intensely myopic. A temporary answer was found to the age-old dispute of ‘difference vs. sameness’ or ‘separation and/or equality’ as it periodically reappears in any social movement that takes a critical stance towards existing power structures. This effort was fuelled by an intense investment in a perspective which would allow and nurture spaces for closeness and intimate interchange, promote affirmations of black female creative expression, and affirm the struggles and survival knowledge of black female activists. The need for intense exchange in order to enable experimentation with reconstructing the meaning of blackness from self-perspectives and to facilitate the re-evaluation of experiences of blackness by nurturing Black Consciousness led to the creation of separate spaces. Black women activists began to organize their own meeting-spaces within the broader women’s movement, and within the wider black movement that also involved black men. This period also intensified the search for, and initiation of, spaces where black women activists from Germany could meet and network with other black women activists from the Netherlands, the U K , other parts of Europe as well as the U S A . This period was characterized by regular weekend seminars on topics such as health, sexuality, relationships, meaningful employment, political strategies, and alternative knowledge production. This phase of ‘inward’ movement was one in which the links between the experiences of activism, scholarship, and teaching became the focal point of attention. Conceptual meetings saw debates on the role of social movements in epistemic production and alternative education. Adefra’s programmes were now geared towards understanding the implications of being socialized within a society whose dominant code standardized whiteness. This resulted in a period of intense self-exploration. The aim was to analyze the ways in which black activists themselves contribute to upholding the dominant logic and the symbolic order through their perceptions and actions. The objective was to explore how (self-)knowledges could create new spaces for action. Gayatri Spivak observes that social mobilization without epistemic change leads for the most part to mere short-term solutions.14 It became increasingly clear that the experiences of the activists involved would be fundamental to 14

Spivak, interview conducted by Barlow, 152.

198

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

the movement. Action could lead to short-term results while in the long run leaving much of the overall structure of dominance unchanged and in place. The connections between oppositional action, scholarship, and education (teaching) eventually led to the realization that the movement needed to gain access to feasible methods of influencing and changing the symbolic order. It was also necessary to assess what kind of content(s) would have the impact that was needed to disrupt racialized dominance. This in turn led to critical debates about the envisioned relationship of the movement to the German state and the range of possibilities of influencing the latter.

Decolonization: Striking at the Foundations of Dominant Projections Transforming movement into creative power: From the 1990s onwards Black women activists – including the founders and other long-term activists of Adefra – were by now in public service, working in (educational) institutions and (national) projects. In the 1990s, the orientation of the movement indicated a shift towards influencing mainstream contexts through critical thought and positioning. The epistemic work done by black historians in Germany had laid the groundwork for a collective project of contextualizing black presence in Germany. The movement of black activists had become a site for critical knowledge production, not only for cultural critique but, more significantly, for academic critique. Black women activists had begun to nurture topics which had been identified as being of key relevance to the black community in Germany. Afrodiasporic perspectives and realities of migration were at the centre of scholarship on black Germany at this stage. Interventions in discourses of nationhood and Europeanness had followed. Pushing forward the engagement with postcolonial perspectives in theorizing German history and contemporary debates had become a fundamental concern.15 The emergence of a new collective sense of self was, for instance, reflected in the twentieth-anniversary celebrations of Adefra and the I S D (2005/ 2006), both of which were marked by exhibitions: namely, “Generation Adefra: 20 Jahre Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland” (‘Generation The transnational project “B E S T : Black European Studies” (at the universities of Mainz and Massachusetts) has assembled and systematized a large body of work in this emerging field (www.best.uni-mainz.de/modules/Informationen/index.php?id=13, accessed 4 March 2010). 15



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

199

Adefra: Twenty years of the black women’s movement in Germany’) and “Homestory Deutschland: Schwarze Biographien in Geschichte und Gegenwart” (‘Home story Germany: black biographies – historical and contemporary perspectives’).16 Innumerable literary and media productions have come from the context of the black communities in Germany. Even the latest winner (time of writing: early 2009) of the T V casting show Deutschland sucht den Superstar (the German equivalent of the British programme Pop Idol) is a black German – who, in addition to being a brilliant artist, is also making substantial waves in his openly gay self-positioning. Again, a cultural statement has sparked a wide-ranging discussion of anti-heteronormativity, this time not only in the black community, but, thanks to the mass media, nationwide.17 Charmaine Pereira’s text “Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminist Scholarship on Africa?,” published in the inaugural issue of the e-journal Feminist Africa,18 can be linked to the programmatic ambitions associated with the social-movement orientation of black women activists in Germany today: in both contexts, the black women’s movement, as a critical collective, is facing the question ‘What spaces are imaginable?’ in order to effect change and ensure transformative impulses to society as a whole. In envisioning the spaces needed to effect long-term change, two objectives have proved to be of key importance: first, the objective of determining reflexive courses of action when interacting with the state; and secondly, the objective of determining the content, and therefore the direction and envisioned quality, of epistemic change. It is not sufficient to determine that epistemic change is of vital importance. It is crucial to determine the conditions for that change and the actual content of the change required. Considering the long-term impact of social-movement work requires a clarification of the links between the sites of social mobilization on the one hand and wider societal contexts on the other. This is specified as the inevitability of develThe exhibition “Generation Adefra” was shown at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Museum for European Cultures) in Berlin-Dahlem from September 2006 to October 2006. The exhibition “Homestory Deutschland” is a joint project by the I S D and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Centre for Political Education) and has been a mobile exhibition since 2006. 17 The artist in question is Mark Medlock. See, for example, “Mark Medlock gewinnt D S D S 2007,” www.dsds-superstar.de/2007/05/05/mark-medlock-gewinnt-dsds-2007/ (accessed 4 March 2010). 18 Pereira, “Between Knowing and Imagining.” 16

200

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

oping a positive and at the same time critical relationship to the state (Spivak) and to the mainstream (Pereira).19 This actually contextualizes epistemic change as facilitated by the influence applied to the structure of mainstream contexts. This happens from both within and outside mainstream contexts, and is powerfully shaped by a mode of interaction which is both positive and deeply critical. The movement’s increased orientation toward content can be illustrated on several levels. One of the more recent and promising analytical perspectives is the attempt to employ the symbolic potency of decolonization strategies across disciplines to effect new epistemic developments. Decolonization is becoming an increasingly debated approach. There are diverse understandings of what the target of decolonization should be. Two of these seem especially relevant to the situation of epistemic productions by black women activists which revolve around the contested themes of blackness and belonging: first, understanding decolonization as the interruption of an (exclusive and canonized) focus on texts authored and authorized by the West;20 and secondly, understanding it as a substantial shift of focus away from the imperial centre.21 Since whiteness in the symbolic order is seen to constitute the centre of knowledge, this centre, according to Linda Smith, needs to be reconfigured. Using these perspectives on decolonization with the aim of facilitating epistemic change, the specific perspective of the black women’s movement has developed alongside the orientation towards breaking out of dominant projections. Hegemonic knowledge systems around blackness (as well as around gender and sexuality as intricately linked to blackness) have tended to be deeply implicated in a form of projection in which blackness is marked and scrutinized to actually produce constructions of whiteness. These constructions tend to standardize whiteness (knowledgeable whiteness, democratic whiteness, progressive whiteness, charitable whiteness, aestheticized whiteness, cultured whiteness, nationalized whiteness). The impetus of the decolonization project in this case entails, as Smith puts it, Spivak, interview conducted by Barlow, 141; Pereira, “Between Knowing and Imagining,” 12. 20 Edward Namisiko Waswa Kisiang’ani, “Decolonizing Gender Studies in Africa,” paper presented at the conference “African Gender in the New Millennium,” organized by C O D E S R I A (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and the Arab Research Centre, Cairo, 7–10 April 2002, www.codesria.org/Links/conferences /gender/K I S I A N G A N I .pdf 21 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 34, 39. 19



Knowledges of (Un)Belonging

201

“breaking (free of) the penetration and surveillance” of the (white) Western gaze. With regard to epistemic production, confronting the violent hegemonic order means – to my understanding – quite literally shifting analytical energy away from arguing against racialized constructions, which in any case say more about the white self through marking and marketing the black subject. Rather, decolonization entails focusing on the logic behind these dominant projections. Furthermore, it entails laying open the processes that facilitate the projection – in the same way as Bourdieu proposes that one should lay open the subtle processes by which male dominance is constructed and reconstructed daily. Smith makes it clear that she is not calling for a boycott of Western texts. Rather, she suggests that new standards need to be discussed and agreed on which would ensure that epistemic production engages with its implication in oppressive orders and knowledge systems. Epistemic production therefore requires accountability for balance. Acknowledging the non-neutrality of epistemic production, as well as practising and applying critique to our own academic production, is crucial to the building of this balance. Breaking the dominant patterns of projection also implies attentiveness to intersectional analyses. In the context of the black women’s movement it requires a commitment to break out of a mode of social-movement history that trivializes the movement work of women activists. Social-movement history often attributed the ‘notable deeds’ to male subjects. The perspective followed by black women activists in Germany resolutely discards the standardization of male activity and takes the agency of women very seriously. This perspective therefore ‘gives back’ symbolic weight to the agency of women.

Sharing Knowledge vs. Sharing Information: Changing Experiences In search of inspiration, black women activists in Germany are looking more intensively at the context of African feminist thought.22 The critical knowledge produced in the context of African gender studies by African feminist and gender activists is gaining relevance, as transnational perspectives and globalized knowledge distribution facilitate access to their debates and perspectives. Referencing knowledges that are being produced away from (and 22 For instance, by drawing on online resources such as the e-journal Feminist Africa and the website of C O D E S R I A .

202

M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S 

outside of) the hegemonic centre of the West is a further advance in the project of decolonization. Using African social thought as an analytical tool is regarded as a form of symbolic action that changes the way in which knowledges from African contexts have been reduced to the status of ‘native informants/information’ within hegemonic knowledge orders. This supports Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s proposal to share knowledge versus sharing information.23 Sharing knowledge is perceived to entail a deeper commitment than merely consuming information. It involves engaging deeply with the powercritical analyses produced in everyday contexts. Within a critical pedagogy of decolonization, access to alternative knowledges can deeply influence action and the direction of social-movement work. Epistemic change is not an empty term, as this project of the movement illustrates. Epistemic change is deeply committed to changing (black) people’s outlooks and perspectives, and – most importantly – consequently changing the quality of our experiences.



23

Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 16.

“I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”1 Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today

D EIRDRE O SBORNE

F

B R I T A I N , the divisions engendered by racial politics have produced long-standing contortions of positive status and identity, and a legacy of disenfranchisement, which is hardly favourable to either creativity or progress. Until the late-twentieth century, black people in Britain served as a representational presence rather than experiencing opportunities for authentic creative agency in white-dominated cultural arenas. Even now, black people’s contributions to contemporary Britain’s multicultures still chafe against monocultural experiential expectations and the filtering of work through the white–male hegemony of Britain’s creative institutions.2 Drama in particular literally brings to life, and theatricalizes, debates about black people’s social, cultural, and national senses of belonging in a whitemajority context. Its live dimension directly confronts ideologically entrenched antipathies and socially enacted xenographies, producing a perOR BLACK ARTISTS IN

Kofi Agyemang & Patricia Elcock, “Urban Afro-Saxons” (MS, 2003, courtesy of Talawa Theatre Company. 2 This was not uncontested. Naseem Khan’s The Arts Britain Ignores (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1976) marks a watershed in articulating the institutional racism that operated in every aspect of British theatre – from actor training to employment opportunities, to programming and board membership – in excluding British black and Asian practitioners. 1

204

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

formativity of black cultural identities. Michael Eldridge has referred to Frantz Fanon’s claim that nations have “a fundamentally recitative or performative quality to them” and applied this to cultural conceptions of blackness in Britain. Eldridge concludes that “black Britain was performed into being, deliberately conjured by artists and intellectuals” to imply that a conscious aesthetic process has been crucial in rendering this distinctive British manifestation of African diasporic inheritance.3 Most obviously, the performativity of the socially inscribed body and the body in performance is also a visual experience creating simultaneity of receptive possibilities, where “the physical is very present but the historical, social and political may also be articulated.”4 This can be registered explicitly through themes and content of the production, the semiotics of its performance systems, or implicitly, in challenging or reinforcing anticipated audience expectations. The historical marginalization or omission of black-centred dramatizations renders the British theatrescape an incomplete and flawed enterprise. A swathe of neo-millennial playwrights have set out to redress this with work that challenges the canonicity established by the white-dominated critical apparatus, such as the constituency of Aleks Sierz’s “In-YerFace” theatre. What could be more visible and indeed ‘in-yer-face’ for British theatre history than staging black British people’s experiences, with black British actors?5 Michael Eldridge, “The Rise and Fall of Black Britain,” Transition 74 (1997): 34. Anita Naoko–Pilgrim, in Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance, ed. Maya Chowdhry & Nina Rapi (New York & London: Harrington Park, 1998): 71. 5 By coining the concept of ‘In-Yer-Face theatre’, Aleks Sierz attempted to account for the often sensational, taboo-staging plays in London in the 1990s written by Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, and Martin Crimp, among others. Although he went on to publish a book of the same title, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), it is devoid of any British black or Asian playwrights. He is not alone in his omissions. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, by the former Royal National Theatre director Richard Eyre and his co-author Nicholas Wright (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), similarly excludes any notion of British black and Asian theatre, drama or performance. Duncan Wu’s Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Dramatists and their Directors (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) and Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte & Pilar Zozaya’s British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) go even further and do not feature a single woman, either. The distortions enacted by these studies perpetuate a status quo that privileges white males without indicating or interrogating key shifts in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century British theatre. As Alan Sinfield 3 4



Black British Drama Today

205

This chapter considers the distinctive dimensions staged drama brings to debates concerning the visibility of black people’s experiences in contemporary British cultural representation and the cul-de-sac into which the work has arguably been channelled. Although there has been an increased mainstream presence for black playwrights’ work, it is apparent that certain themes and topics tend to be rewarded with mainstream development and programming, to the detriment of the possible scope and aesthetic experimentation desirable for developing innovative work.6 In addition, discourses relating to black identity in Britain have primarily foregrounded male subjectivity; not only in the scarce historical documentation that exists, but also in the context of theatre, where, as May Joseph argues, “the absence of Black women as subjects with agency” is marked until the late-twentieth century.7 Although exceeding the compass of this discussion, the issue of male-preferential treatment remains central in contemporary theatre histories – despite the ongoing work by women drama practitioners and academics operating at the forefront of the directing, writing, performing, archiving, and critical processes.8 Two neomillennial plays by male black British dramatists will be briefly discussed – the novelist and playwright Courttia Newland’s A Question of notes in exploring the historical connections between theatre and homosexuality in Britain, “theatre has been a powerful institution. It has afforded the legitimacy that accompanies presentation in public” and, by implication, is crucial to anchoring the work of under-represented or marginalized voices and experiences. However, when he states further that “changes in theatre as an institution interact with shifts in ideologies of gender and sexuality,” race is clearly marginal to the parameters of his retrievals and theorization; Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1999): 1. 6 See the critique formulated by Courttia Newland in an interview with Geoffrey V. Davis in Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice, ed. G.V. Davis & Anne Fuchs (Brussels & New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Newland questions the types of plays that mainstream venues select. 7 May Joseph, “Bodies outside the State: Black British Women Playwrights and the Limits of Citizenship” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Jill Lane & Peggy Phelan (New York & London: New York U P , 1998): 98. 8 For two indications of the scope of these, see also Gabriele Griffin, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003): 1, 26–7, and Deirdre Osborne, “Not ‘in-yer-face’ but what Lies beneath: Experiential and Aesthetic Inroads in the Drama of debbie tucker green and Dona Daley,” in ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007): 240.

206

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

Courage (2006) and the actor and writer Lennie James’s international commission The Sons of Charlie Paora (2004) – with reference to Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (2002) and Joe Guy (2007), by the most prolific black playwright in Britain today, Roy Williams.9 Each play foregrounds social negotiations through the prism of race, centralizing black characters – or brown characters, in the case of James’s play – to dramatize their interactions with members of the white-majority contexts they inhabit. They attend to traditional spaces of social exclusion (urban ghettoization), problematic geographical and demographic spaces (the English countryside, ex-colonies), and the specific kind of visibility for black people in cultural institutions (sport). The plays have emerged at the forefront of new writing initiatives which were put in place by a number of state-subsidized theatre organizations at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In response to charges of gerontocracy and a lack of contemporary relevance, such new writing initiatives were part of an objective to generate new and younger audiences from social groups for whom theatre-going was an experience of white cultural autocracy. The plays named above grew out of collaborations between provincial and middle-scale touring companies (Pentabus Theatre, New Wolsey Theatre, Tiata Fahotzi) and London venues with a reputation for fostering work from a diversity of ethnicities: namely, the Royal Court Theatre and Soho Theatre. James’s play, uniquely, was an international commission by Massive Theatre Company, New Zealand.

Backdrop Any analysis of neomillennial black British dramatists should take into account the surrounding factors which filter access to their work and its staging. Blackness in Britain has been caught unrelentingly in a maelstrom of political and racial-cultural processes of identification. On the one hand, indigenousness is recognized through birth or naturalization (carrying a British passport), on the other, the visual marker of skin colour has customarily undermined this, producing an outsider and marginalized status. 9 C. Newland, A Question of Courage, in Francesca Beard, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Ian Marchant, Kara Miller, C. Newland, Richard Rai O’Neill & Rommi Smith, White Open Spaces: Seven Plays about Race and Belonging in the Countryside (London: Oberon, 2006); L. James, The Sons of Charlie Paora, in Hidden Gems, ed. Deirdre Osborne (London: Oberon, 2008); R. Williams, Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads (London: Methuen, 2002) & Joe Guy (London: Methuen, 2007).



Black British Drama Today

207

Indeed, blackness in British and English contexts is exposed as Julia Kristeva’s sujet en procès, a continuous work-in-progress, rather than a fixed category of definition.10 Understanding of the term ‘black’ in the post-1945 period is protean. For example, when it signifies the shared marginality of Commonwealth immigrants from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and West Indian/Caribbean and African countries (such as Lennie James’s Trinidadian mother, who “never was a black woman until she got off the boat in England”11), it indicates the indiscriminateness of 1980s social policies where black and Asian people were housed under the same (discriminatory) multicultural umbrella. Mike Phillips recalls: A couple of decades ago labelling someone in the black community “black British” would have been viewed as a deliberate insult or as a slighting reference to mixed parentage, and the term black British or black Britain has only recently become acceptable in popular usage […] if only because it has become a useful shorthand for any and every category of “ethnic” entrepreneur.12

In reaction to this indiscriminateness, ever more nuanced distinctions between indigenous Britons of African descent and British Asians have become apparent in both sociological and cultural discourses. As Stephen and Hilary Rose argue in their case for “biogeographical ancestry,” this phenomenon can function as a means of problematizing the future utility of the term ‘race’ in identifying human populations. They note: “identity is fluid [….] Today, complex identifiers such as ‘black English’ or ‘Brummie Punjabi British’ or ‘British Sikh’ speak both of a new ease and pleasure in difference, and of a political demand that racism become history.”13 Yasmin Alibhai–Brown argues that British identity “gathers under it a large number of bi-racial and combined ethnicity people, as well as all kinds of ethnic and religious groups including the English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Polish, Turkish, Jewish, Chinese, and a host of other people.”14 The demand for postrace thinking problematizes the usefulness of racial categories as classifica10 See Runnymede Trust, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report (London: Profile, 2000) for findings about racial encoding for Britishness and Englishness. 11 Lennie James, “ ‘ Who do you think you are?’,” The Guardian (11 February 2004): 12. 12 Mike Phillips, “Re-writing Black Britain,” Wasafiri 36 (2002): 62. 13 H. & S. Rose, “Why We Should Give Up on Race,” The Guardian (9 April 2005): 21. 14 Alibhai–Brown, Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001): viii.

208

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

tions which historically maintained imperial superiority at home and colonial power bases abroad.15 Drama can highlight how the traps of the past affect the outlook for the future. Contemporary plays by indigenous black dramatists address presentday concerns of staking a claim in the country and culture of their birth that was not possible for previous generations. They demand the right to inherit legacies and not to be excluded by a racial identity that has been interchangeable with cultural identity. This demand accords with R. Victoria Arana’s description of the neo-millennial black British poets. While many identify strongly with the specific regions of Britain where they grew up, these local allegiances connote no provincialism […] the neo-millennial black British avant-garde poets do not at all see themselves as migrants, exiles, or nomads, but as British citizens with certain inalienable rights in their birthlands, the various (now ‘devolving’) but still United ‘States’ (rather than Kingdom) of a Britain no longer Great.16

Playwrights such as James, Newland, and Williams clearly do identify themselves as black British writers and plant their work in a theatre heritage to which they claim rightful inclusion.

Sightlines For over forty years, Britain has been officially considered a multicultural nation, but this politically engendered conception has not always been ratified by socio-cultural realities. In 2004, the Commission for Racial Equality found that ninety percent of white people have few or no friends from amongst their fellow black, Asian and/or Muslim Britons whilst “three in 10 of ethnic minority people surveyed said all or most of their friends were Asian or black.”17 The lack of sustained interaction is most noticeable in rural demography where the British countryside and its agricultural system Joseph Conrad, a fixture in the canon of English literature, is not considered to have written from an immigrant sensibility. Indeed, his work is accommodated in terms of its subject-matter, narrative innovation, and representations of late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century imperial politics. 16 Arana, “Black American Bodies in the Neo-Millennial Avant-Garde Black British Poetry,” Literature and Psychology 48.4 (2002): 49–50. 17 Vikram Dodd, “90% Whites Have Few or No Black Friends,” The Guardian (19 July 2004): 1. 15



Black British Drama Today

209

remains almost wholly the province of white people.18 Newland’s monologic play A Question of Courage is one of seven in White Open Spaces produced by Pentabus Theatre, Shropshire, in association with B B C Radio Drama, and directed by Theresa Heskins. The collection was a response to a claim made by the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, that British rural spaces were guilty of a passive apartheid: there is no law and I doubt if anyone in the countryside wants to keep people out. But I think what we are seeing is a gradual drift towards a difficult situation in which people from ethnic minorities feel uncomfortable.19

Antipathy or even hostility towards black people by white rural dwellers could be compounded by what Ian Jack has identified as “patterns of original settlement and kinship and occupation” and “that historic English dream of ‘living in the country’ which is probably more potent among the white middle class (who have the money to achieve it),” or by the age-old fear of the unknown. Jack argues: Rarity always commands attention. A man of Nigerian ancestry is bound to attract more curiosity in Devon than in Dalston Junction. But will there be more hostility towards him? Or anymore now than before?20

While Jack might draw distinctions between rarity and hostility, the few accounts available of black people’s experiences of Britain’s rural spaces often Terming himself Britain’s only black farmer, Wilfred Emmanuel–Jones (who is on the A-list of the Conservative party leader David Cameron’s Tory candidates) trades upon his novelty value with his own-brand commercial agricultural products. Taking part in the Channel 4 T V series “Young Black Farmers” (2005), Emmanuel–Jones explained: “I wanted to get kids who had been failed by the cities to see that rural Britain could offer something the cities couldn’t.” He sees the urban ghetto as a beachhead against racism faced by the immigrant generation where “it’s the responsibility of the second and third generations to break out” (quoted in Sholto Byrnes, “Meet Britain’s Only Black Farmer,” The Independent on Sunday [6 November 2005], www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/thisbritain/meet-britains-only-black-farmer-514156.html; accessed 18 January 2010). However, Emmanuel–Jones resides mainly in London and “the hard work is done by his farm manager and neighbour”; Jane Hutcheon, “England – Black Farmer,” www.abc.net.au /foreign/content/2006/s1701388 .htm (accessed 18 January 2010). 19 Trevor Phillips, quoted by Ian Jack in “Global Villagers,” The Guardian (30 October 2004): 7. 20 Jack, “Global Villagers,” 7. 18

210

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

identify controversial and even deeply unpleasant receptions. A survey of interviews of black Devon residents confirms this. Sonia Francis–Mills, who works for the Race Equality Council in the region, describes being slapped and spat on, and comments that “two out of three black or ethnic rural residents suffer serious discrimination.” In contrast to farmer Wilfred Emmanuel–Jones’s claim that “when you’re successful, and when you’ve got money, people don’t see colour,” there are other black farmers in Britain whose experience of rural life is not racism-free.21 As a project, White Open Spaces was impelled to uncover the “complex layers of fear and misconception that cause prejudice, and also the similarities and shared beliefs that can bond.”22 Heskins invited seven writers to work at The Hurst (the former country home of the playwright John Osborne – not noted for registering any sense of ethnic diversity in his work), in partnership with the Arvon Foundation. She recalls: During a week in residence in this quiet, out-of-the-way part of the world, each writer would get to know Shropshire and create a ten-minute single-person drama in response to Trevor Phillips’ comment. […] The writers and directors went out in small groups; blanketed in thick fog.23

The ironic symbolism of the white fog encircling the black writers cannot be missed, evoking, as it does, a powerful parallel to the white-dominated theatre complex into which the dramas will be inserted in performance. As with the black person in the countryside, a host of associations, expectations, and influences surround the black actor, creating a pre-order of perceptions, which staged drama can destabilize. The solo voice has long been a compelling vehicle for fusing dramatizations of the personal and the social in theatre. Newland’s contribution to the collection in particular addresses not 21 See, for example, Hutcheon, “England – Black Farmer.” Laura Smith describes David Mwanaka’s defiance of farming experts to produce the only white maize in Britain in “Meet Britain’s Other Black Farmer,” The Guardian (26 June 2006): 10. Andy Dolan reports how Mwanaka was questioned three times by police in 2008, accused of stealing his own crops, and “reported by people ‘who are not used to seeing a black man working in a farmer’s field’,” and that the police desisted only when his white landlord assured them that he leased the fields to Mwanaka (“Black Farmer Quizzed by Police T H R E E Times on Suspicion of Stealing from his Own Field,” The Daily Mail [23 September 2008], www .dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1059780; accessed 18 January 2010). 22 Soho Theatre, White Open Spaces: A Passive Apartheid in the U K ?, publicity flyer (2004). 23 Theresa Heskins, “Introduction” to Beard et al., White Open Spaces, 7.



Black British Drama Today

211

only the project’s remit of socio-political exploration and response but also taps into aesthetic elements of rural gothic, thriller, and confessional genres. His monologue evokes Erika Fisher–Lichte’s “perceptional multistability” as he plaits various strands of innocence–guilt, perpetrator–victim, real–recalled, and the extracted confession vs. unwitting self-disclosure. These juxtaposed states are viewed in an already association-laden context for black citizens, the criminal justice system, that reveals the dangers of misread signs, in a situation where shared social references are mistakenly assumed.24 The sole performer plays Courage Ashton, who is in a police station “in this tiny village in the middle of nowhere” reporting his girlfriend as missing on Long Mynd moor after their geo-caching excursion has ended in an argument and separation.25 Remote rural settings have historically served as locations for gothic horror in literature, film, and television, ranging from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man, and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs,26 and the work of the horror-comedy group ‘The League of Gentlemen’. In particular, moors remain a fraught site in British public consciousness because of the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the 1960s. Throughout the published text, the stage directions indicate an unseen police presence, questioning Courage, which shapes the actor’s responses, although, in performance, the audience experiences only one side of the conversation. Indicators of race become apparent and interpretable through disclosure. The initial stage direction runs: “A man sits before a table in a police interview room […] He is speaking to an audience, who are unwittingly cast in the role of two unseen P O L I C E M E N who have just entered the room.”27 Into this setting Newland introduces layers of ambiguity and clues to how his protagonist is perceived by the play’s imputed, imaginary, stage-world context, by the viewing audience, and by the reader, crafting a web of references to various literary genres, media stereotypes, and power relations drawn from traces of race and sex–gender ideologies that still prevail. The audience/reader is re24 Fischer–Lichte, “Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre,” Theatre Research International 33.1 (2008): 87. 25 Newland, A Question of Courage, 47. 26 The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (British Lion, U K 1973, 88 min.), Straw Dogs, dir. Sam Peckinpah (A B C , U K / U S A 1971; 118 min.). 27 Newland, A Question of Courage, 46.

212

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

quired to take the position of sleuth – not only in discerning between textual truth and red herrings, but also in confronting their own assumptions in relation to the subject-matter. Newland activates opportunities for resisting a familiar racial reading (or, indeed, alignment with the unseen policemen), just as his ultimate coup-de-théâtre undermines application of a hetero-normative one. The play, from the outset, toys with such notions of complicity and witness. Maria Shevtsova has explained that while the theatre space can temporarily unite spectators through this shared experience of the performance, they are anything but a homogenous mass. They are anything but united. Their differences, by whatever criteria are brought into play (gender, ethnic origin, ethnic self-definition, class background, aspirations to class ascent, and more again), help explain why certain processes of performance have a special resonance, special spring and bounce for some members of the audience.28

Through juggling the recognition of longstanding institutional racism in the police force with the justifiable deduction that a murder might have occurred (a crime passionnel), Newland fulfils what Shevtsova has identified as the audience’s actual lack of absolute liberty for interpretation: “a very subtle, moderately discreet or sometimes blatant guide is right there in the aesthetic vision mediating the performance’s content of substance.” Newland’s text enables collective purpose, in its appeal “to the cultural predilections of its real or imputed spectators,”29 and also facilitates a possibility for individual empathy for the increasingly isolated Courage that complicates the familiar view of the black person as perennial victim at the hands of the white-dominant criminal justice system. As his frequent use of “you know” indicates, Newland’s city-dweller Courage assumes common ground in talking to the country policemen, yet increasingly realizes that this is not the case. His dawning awareness of this elicits his double consciousness, where he becomes increasingly aware of how he is being macro-socially processed via racial stereotypes and, at the same time, can scarcely believe that this can be happening. When it is clear that the policemen do not conceive of Myrna as being white, he retorts: 28 Shevtsova, “Minority/ Dominant Culture in the Theatre (with Special Reference to Bakhtin and Bourdieu),” in Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993, Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 2006): 10–11. 29 Shevtsova, “Minority/ Dominant Culture,” 11–12.



Black British Drama Today

213

“How many strawberry blonde black girls have you come across in your life then? Of course she’s white. What difference could that possibly make?”30 After the policeman’s words “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get on with finding her Mr Ashton. Now tell us something. How did you get separated?” a stage direction reads: “(Silence. This is the part of the conversation C O U R A G E has been dreading.)”31 Here Newland conveys Courage’s awareness of the racist myth of the violent black man and the white female victim that has underpinned racism and segregation on both sides of the Atlantic and by which he will now be misperceived. The dynamic of the perpetrator’s desire to confess offset against the misreading of him leads to a denouement with an ambiguous outcome. Courage attests to the heartbreak caused him by Myrna’s infidelity, which happens to be lesbian. The disorientation of his emotional compass is exacerbated by his recalling of the increasingly precarious physical conditions of heavy fog and encroaching darkness. The closing sense of finality in his actions complicates sympathy for his earlier uncertainty. Has he ended the relationship and accepted that his girlfriend prefers another woman to him – or has he ended her life? We were out on the moor, lost doing this fucking G P S thing, supposedly trying to save our relationship and in the middle of all that…this third party calls…Or texts, whatever…But she makes contact. And that’s when I had to let go, do you understand? […] I left her out there on the moor by herself and there’s nothing I can do about that now. […] She’s gone and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it…32

Ultimately, not only are Courage Ashton and his missing girlfriend Myrna Burgess unable to survive in a rural landscape but they are defeated by its accompanying ideological association, which identifies cross-race relationships and black people in the countryside as lying outside the norm. Newland truncates the viability of a cross-race relationship, but by centering on universal factors of fidelity anxieties and sexual jealousy rather than on racecentred incompatibility. He implicitly challenges the audience to decide whether or not to privilege the aesthetic dimension, the suspenseful mystery-

30 31 32

Newland, A Question of Courage, 47. A Question of Courage, 49. A Question of Courage, 53–54.

214

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

element in the plot, over the social issues of the negative reception of black people in the countryside and unease regarding cross-race relationships.

Upstage(d) Whereas Newland’s play enters the ‘foreign’ heartland of rural Britain in order to dramatize the complexities of indigenous black bodies in whiteassociative geographical spaces, the view from abroad can involve a sense of socio-cultural inclusion that black British writers do not experience in the land of their birth. What happens when an international standpoint constructs a position of belonging in ways not experienced on home soil? While working in New Zealand in 2001 on his play The Sons of Charlie Paora (2004), Lennie James recalls his amazement at being included as part of the British theatre heritage. In New Zealand I became an Englishman […] in New Zealand, all the history of England was my history. When people interviewing me spoke of the long history of British theatre, it was all mine. I was allowed to own it, all the way back to Shakespeare and further. I can’t tell you how strange that sensation was.33

When viewed from the ex-colonial context of New Zealand, James’s immediate geographical origins in the former imperial metropole sufficed to mark him as a beneficiary – and, indeed, contemporary agent – of its history and culture. Outside the U K , James was paradoxically granted a degree of inclusion that he has not to date experienced within it – an irony that did not escape him.34 Furthermore, as a result of this placement within the long33 James, “ ‘ Who do you think you are?’.” Another writer, Valerie Mason–John, has recounted a similar international reception: As soon as we step out of England, we become English […]. Last year I toured Brown Girl in the Ring to Canada […] and it was considered so quintessentially English. Even if we go back home to Africa or the Caribbean, we are English. — Mojisola Adebayo & V. Mason–John in conversation with D. Osborne, “ ‘ No Straight Answers’: Writing in the Margins, Finding Lost Heroes,” New Theatre Quarterly (February 2009): 16. 34 In the same article, he notes: “I am a black man from south London of Trinidadian parentage. I am included in the history of my own country from roughly the 1950s onwards.” Moreover, like many black British actors before him, James has found greater opportunities for work in the U S A and now divides his time between both countries.



Black British Drama Today

215

standing traditions of Britain’s foremost cultural institution (the theatre), he experienced a charge of imperial accountability for cultural appropriation. James recalls how a Samoan actor challenged him with “‘I mean, what is your deal, Lennie James? Are you going to travel the world stealing people’s culture?’” and comments: “He was so angry at my Englishness he almost made me white.”35 The Samoan actor’s reading of James reveals how he, as a British citizen and Englishman, was held accountable for the long-term misdeeds of imperial Britain towards the indigenous people of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. This demand for decolonizing accountability supplanted any shared experiences of oppression that might have been forged between a Samoan and a black Briton. However, unlike the majority of his white cultural-imperialist predecessors, James – as someone who has faced cultural marginalization in the land of his birth – reflected upon the implications of his actions (writing a play about another race and culture) from the standpoint of the recipient whose culture is being written about, or for: I, the big first world playwright, had come over to show the natives of the second world how to tell their own stories […] “Like it only has worth if it’s told by an Englishman.” […] No one said “cultural appropriation” out loud, but somewhere in the ether around me, there was the question: “Who do you think you are?” I had travelled halfway around the world to a country I was previously ignorant of. I spent three weeks there, and then I had the gall to believe I knew enough about the place to write a play about its brown population. Who do I think I am?

James’s double consciousness of oppressor and oppressed positions illustrates the uneasy sense of belonging-yet-unbelonging experienced by many indigenous black British people and a dynamic that frequently emerges in their creative works. Methodologically, James explains his project in terms of the aesthetic and themes he delivers through the vehicle of dramatic writing. It is not a sociological insight into how he perceives another culture might function. He found himself operating as an empathic everyman, providing a structure that held the company’s stories and, as an actor himself, involving the actors in its construction. Common ground regarding rituals and identities was created and realized in the play. James explains it as encapsulating “the moment when a boy becomes a man […]. I’m always staggered by how 35

James, “ ‘ Who do you think you are?’.”

216

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

far some of them can delay it. Some men look like men and walk like men, smell like men. But they don’t act like men. As one of the characters in my play says: ‘You’re too frightened to be men’.”36 However, in its season at the Royal Court Theatre, a familiar rift opens up between theatre critics and their reception of what is culturally unfamiliar, revealing assumptions about what constitutes worthwhile theatre subjectmatter and the ways in which this should be articulated and dramatized. Benedict Nightingale disdainfully referred to the play as “an unfocused, none too clear and, frankly, pretty dull evening” where “James’ story is actually rather familiar. We’ve heard rather a lot about neglectful fathers and jealous sons, haven’t we?”37 Implicitly, then, does Nightingale require a play by a black writer, acted by a Mori and Samoan company, to deliver him something out of the ordinary, beyond his own cultural frame of reference? If that is his expectation, he certainly brushes aside what Kaneko Lucas has described as follows: Actors were costumed in batik shirts, jeans, hoodies and casual summer wear. However, this realism was cleverly contrasted with the use of song and choreography, which often served as subtexts for the strong emotions which these young men would not, or even could not, articulate in daily life. In one particularly compelling sequence, Miro’s sexually-charged dancing degenerates into the jitters and twitches of a drug addict.38

For Nightingale, the relevance or meaning of rituals such as the faatoeseaga39 and their tenuous survival and interpretation in a society which has left Mori and Samoan people unmoored from spiritual traditions is tedious: “Maori traditions, it seems, vestigially survive on the urban margins. And I guess that’s worth knowing.”40 Alastair Macaulay wilfully imposes a literal sports context and not only derides one of the arenas in which dispossessed indige36

James, in Rachel Cooke, “Oh What it Is to Be a Man,” The Observer (15 February

2004): 5. 37 38

Nightingale, “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” The Times (28 February 2004): 27. Valerie Kaneko Lucas, “ ‘ The World in Our Hearts’,” in Hidden Gems, ed. Osborne,

194.

A faatoeseaga is a Samoan forgiveness ritual in which contrite persons covers themselves with a mat and, prostrating themselves before the person from whom they seek forgiveness, offer their whole body to the other’s will (James, in Hidden Gems, ed. Osborne, 267). 40 Nightingale, “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” 27. 39



Black British Drama Today

217

nous New Zealanders have achieved international renown but also implies a stepping beyond one’s place in marrying this with theatre: “I’ve no notion what The Sons of Charlie Paora is doing at the Royal Court […]. Even in the utterly unlikely event that New Zealand rugby fans turned it into a sell-out hit, it’s just not artistically good enough for any of our most distinguished theatres.”41 Charles Spencer makes claims for a unified audience reception that betray his own limitations rather than those of the performance (recall Shevtsova’s opposite point that the audience are “anything but a homogenous mass”42) when he asserts: The problem for the audience is that the Kiwi-Maori accents of New Zealand’s Massive Company are often hard to penetrate, there is a great deal of back-story to grasp, and it takes time to pick up the names and concerns of individual characters.43

Unlike Nightingale, he does actually concede that “gradually […] the ear acclimatizes, and one begins to appreciate the play’s skill and depth,” disingenuously concluding that “this is a drama that demands a lot from its audience, but there are rich rewards for those who persevere.” So, despite the misreadings and cultural laziness of the majority of the white, male, fiftyplus-year-old critical coterie who dominate Britain’s theatre scene, the sense that parameters of viewing and reception are being tested and extended by work such as James’s play is discernible. Paul Taylor notes: “What you are given is a drama that is felt in the bones, not some slab of anthropology or cultural tourism.”44 And Susannah Clapp recognizes that “the play has an alternative language that transmits its meanings forcefully and effortlessly […] it’s generous and strange and resounding and rare.”45 Working from this broader international context meant that James was able to transcend the artistic pigeonholing of him in the U K as a black writer and a black actor and its attendant stifling limitations and contortions. Once the work was brought back to the U K , its critical reception re-imposed these. Macaulay, “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” Financial Times (2 March 2004): 15. Shevtsova, “Minority/ Dominant Culture,” 10. 43 Spencer, “Powerful Rites of Passage Drama Emerges from the Scrum,” Daily Telegraph (28 February 2004): 20. 44 Taylor, “Review of The Sons of Charlie Paora,” The Independent (3 March 2004): 17. 45 Clapp, “Scrum Dancing,” Observer (29 February 2004), Review: 12. 41 42

218

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

This experience uncovers the contrasting distinctions of At Home and Abroad perspectives and reception of artistic opportunities for black British dramatists. Such a dynamic clearly requires far greater recognition and responsible scrutiny in critical engagement with the work, within popular culture, media, and academic circles, than has been offered to date.

Downplayed The overwhelming majority of critical works published before the new millennium work on the assumption that English literature is the domain of white people – not black British writers negotiating Englishness or Britishness, with all that entails. As the development of black British drama has not been granted proper historiographical attention and has accordingly suffered from a lack of sustained, informed critical attention – the formal processes by which drama can be systematically archived – its contribution to British theatre heritage has been problematic. Roy Williams, one of the most prolific dramatists in British theatre today – let alone occupying the position as a key black British dramatist – constitutes a successfully mainstream presence whose established status was recognized by the awarding of an O B E in 2008. Williams’s motivation has been to fill a perceived cultural vacuum in British theatre, and he feels optimistic about the future of black theatre in Britain: “There are acres of stories from a multicultural perspective that can be told in contemporary drama. We are not seeing nearly enough of these. It is up to us writers to do something about it.”46 In 1993, Shevtsova explored the positioning of the minority voice within the embrace of multiculturalism: Multiculturalism, as it is known today, may be said to be the expression, by ethnic minorities, of their desire and right to develop their languages, arts, crafts, values and particular way of life (the latter giving us “culture” in the broadest anthropological sense of the word). Since it is inseparable from the economic conditions that splinter ethnic minorities, multiculturalism may also be said to be a popular phenomenon, that is, not generated by the middle classes of those minorities.47

46 Roy Williams, Spread the Word Talk “Twilight Zone,” Morley College, London (22 May 2005). 47 Shevtsova, “Minority/ Dominant Culture,” 16.



Black British Drama Today

219

Connecting the popular to the multicultural in this way creates a viable sense of agency which retrieves the notion of popular cultural work from associations of a debasement of artistic excellence.48 Caryl Phillips praised Williams as an inspirational presence in contemporary British theatre: The voice of Roy Williams, and his contemporaries, […] remain committed to creating the special kind of electricity that passes between an audience and the stage when important and urgent issues are laid bare. […] While the stage may have failed my generation, or we it, this newly emerging group of black British writers seems to be revelling in the directness and immediacy of the form, and they appear ready to take it to places that we only dreamed of, including the West End.49

His comment goes a long way towards suggesting the light in which Williams is regarded by some reviewers and some (especially black male) creative writers in Britain. Yet Phillips gives a highly contentious signal by omitting the work of women writers and directors, thus adding his own distortion to theatre history of the late-twentieth century. He occludes the female influence on Williams’s evolution. Lift Off (1999) was the first of a series of Royal Court Theatre commissions which initiated his artistic relationship with the director Indhu Rubasingham, who subsequently directed four of his plays. Their work together exemplifies the collaborative partnerships that Phillips names as essential to the development of the British playwright – a dynamic in which white (male) theatre practitioners are well-versed – examples being the influential artistic partnerships between Harold Pinter and Peter Hall, Edward Bond and Bill Gaskill, David Edgar and Trevor Nunn, David Hare and Richard Eyre that have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century British theatre. Phillips continues the tradition of male hegemony in his historicizing by not extending his pairing to non-white or non-male director–writer collaborations such as those between Indhu Rubasingham and Williams,

48 A lack of distinction-drawing between genre and subject-matter is found in C.L. Innes’s recently reprinted A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (2002; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2nd ed. 2008). Its updated epilogue, in referring to writing produced since 2002, inaccurately classes Courttia Newland’s and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s work as depicting “yardie culture” (244) with its popular (low-brow) associations and fails to recognize that Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (2003) was the first play by an indigenous black playwright ever to be staged in the West End. 49 Caryl Phillips, “Lost Generation,” The Guardian (23 April 2005): 16.

220

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

Rubasingham and Tanika Gupta, Paulette Randall and August Wilson, or Sacha Wares and debbie tucker green. As his contemporary Kwame Kwei-Armah has underscored, the revival of one’s work is essential to maintaining its longevity.50 Like Kwei-Armah, Williams has had some experience of seeing his work revived and toured nationally. In Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads – where football fans gather in a south-west London pub for the England vs. Germany play-off in October 2000 – Williams stages the debate of narrow white-centred nationalism vs. the new claimants, indigenous black citizens. His characteristic duologues as a form of exchange between speakers tread a fine line between conversation and didactic argument. His dramatis personae for nearly all of his plays is age- and race-specific, and this is no exception: Alan (white mid-fifties), a racist rhetorician, is set against Mark (black, early thirties). M A R K I’m English. A L A N No you’re not. M A R K I served in Northern Ireland. I swore an oath of allegiance to the flag.

[…] How English are you? Where do you draw the line as to who’s English. I was born in this country. And my brother. You’re white, your culture comes from northern Europe, Scandinavia, Denmark […] A L A N The fact is, Mark, that the white British are a majority racial group in this

country, therefore it belongs to the white British.51

The exchange typifies Kumar’s observation of “one of the most enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate ‘English’ from ‘British’?”52 The grass-roots racism Williams dramatizes with Alan’s obvious sway over his white counterparts is, however, problematized by Alan’s semimentoring of Mark’s younger brother (Barry: black, early twenties) as a footballer. The play reveals the complexities of disenfranchisement by virtue of class and fading English sovereignty (symbolized by the demise of English football on the international stage) and apparently outdated xenophobic projections of racialized identities. On both sides of the Atlantic, sport has long been a traditional point of access for black people’s cultural participation. In Deirdre Osborne, personal interview with Kwame Kwei-Armah (15 October 2004). Williams, Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads, 90–91. 52 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003): 1. 50 51



Black British Drama Today

221

the 2004 revival, Ashley Walters as Barry was made-up with the Union Jack painted across his face and, in true stereotypical terms, was the most raucous England supporter, chanting “E N G E R L A N D ! E N G E R L A N D ! E N G E R L A N D ! ... Stand up if you won the war!”53 Barry gleefully recalls how he was part of the thuggery for which white English fans are notorious: “I backed you and Lee up when those bunch of Dutch fans tried to have a pop, we kicked every bit of shit out of them. Then we roared, right into their faces, England!”54 Barry’s face-paint – not permanent, easily removed – literally reinforces the arguments of a faux or carnivalesque admission to Englishness and national affiliation, one premissed on his usefulness as a player in Alan’s team but as a person understood as not necessarily accepted away from the football context. It is temporary; an allowable overturn of expected status where, implicitly, Barry’s inclusion in the social circle of sports can be reversed at any time through racial identification and derogation. Williams returns to militarism and sport in his two later plays Days of Significance and Joe Guy, which, notably, were both staged in 2007, the year that marked the commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807), as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s commemoration of Shakespeare by staging all his works as well as commissions inspired by them. In Days of Significance, Williams takes up global issues and explosive current affairs to explore contemporary morality by adapting Much Ado About Nothing. As Shakespeare filtered critiques of his political context through geographical and historical displacement to investigate contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean English society, so, too, does Williams engage with familiar recent issues that have obsessed the British media – youth culture, binge-drinking, social alienation in a globalized world – and how these impinge upon identity. War is an age-old arena in which masculinity is tested, a public display of state-enacted violence that becomes glorified and enshrined in the national consciousness. In Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, Mark’s nationalist credentials are starkly emphasized through his past military career. The paradox becomes clear that Mark will (potentially) give his life for his country, a country with racist citizens such as Alan who deride and deny black people’s right to belong to it. While the militarism of Shakespeare’s times may now be overcast by national uneasiness at waging war, its residual associations as a route to manhood remain in place. 53 54

Williams, Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads, 80. Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads, 81.

222

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

With Joe Guy, Williams combines preoccupations visited in Sing Yer Heart Out for The Lads (and the earlier Clubland and Fallout) – the intra-racial tensions between people claiming an African or a Caribbean antecedence. In dramatizing the fortunes of Joe, a successful Ghanaian-born, English-domiciled professional footballer, sport becomes the equivalent of military service as the route to defining one’s manhood. In both Days of Significance and Joe Guy, similarly disturbing depictions of misogyny and violence (fuelled by alcohol and drug-taking) stage a world where women feature as a convenient commodity. At the height of his fame, Joe states: “Bitch wanted a taste of me, she got it, she wanted to make some money out of it, so she chat some shit about rape.”55 While Williams is at pains to track Joe’s African origin as having produced an excluded outsider painfully yet covetously aware of what he sees as privileged Caribbean socio-cultural identifications, this is reduced to a one-dimensional aping of stereotypes. Joe’s conversion from Ghanaian accent to Jamaican patois fails to indicate incisively the deep-seated psychosocial trauma his protagonist would have suffered. Joe may ventriloquize street patois (“See how he reach for me, nuff times, you hear what I’m saying, you get me, seen! Kiss me neck back! His once strong Ghanaian accent is now fading”), but the jostling for primacy between characters claiming African or Caribbean-derived superiority on British soil merely reproduces a détente between the very stereotypes Williams aims to debunk.56 A delicate line is trodden between recognizing a community, warts and all, and articulating a cogent and revelatory self-critical standpoint by dramatizing its experiences. Furthermore, the issues staged are overwhelmingly clashes of masculinities across race and generations – women characters are sidelined, under-realized, or ultimately compliant with oppressive sex–gender codes – despite displays of feistiness or temporary resistance to these. They are drawn only in relation to the dilemmas of the male characters. While the staging of all voices is to be applauded, the loudest ones seem frequently to be those that present the dynamic of Britain’s black communities as oppressive or coercive.57

Roy Williams, Joe Guy, 68. Williams, Joe Guy, 33. 57 The novelist and cultural pundit Bidisha has also noted: “Vindicating my long-held notion that misogyny is the strongest passion on earth, theatres, producers and editors (of both sexes) are still mysteriously unwilling to go anywhere near talented non-white women writers, except in the most tokenistic and belittling way”; “The Arts Column,” The Observer (4 November 2007): 13. 55 56



Black British Drama Today

223

Williams’s plays are, in the majority, firmly situated in the experiences of U K -born black people and their interactions with their white contempo-

raries. However, if his aim is to demonstrate his cultural activism, in flexing the narrow expectations of what a black writer should produce – the pigeonhole into which black writers were forced and that tended to hamper all but the most innovative black playwrights of the previous decade – his recent body of work has begun to follow an inevitable route. He is inclined to perpetuate negative and sociologically based depictions of black people’s lives which (primarily white) theatre programmers tend to stage. Although Barry and Boles have identified Williams’s foregrounding of black characters as agents in their own lives rather than as victims, this liberating representation appears to be diminishing.58 Alibhai–Brown has pointed out the tendency for the misguided praise of the culturally unfamiliar – lauding and rewarding stereotyping rather than encouraging artistic experimentation.59 While (white) broadsheet critics have resoundingly praised Williams, lately they have begun insinuating that his prolific production may not be best serving his artistry and its development. While he has been applauded as “one of our best black dramatists tout court,” “writing cracking dialogue” with a “mantle of earnest social concern” and a prodigious output,60 in their reviews of Angel House (2008) critics have also begun to point out a hastiness, leading to a lack of depth, that has begun to characterize his latest writing. This perhaps exemplifies the ongoing pressure still facing prominent black artists in Britain – what Kobena Mercer identifies as “an impossible burden of representation.”61 In needing to build upon creative momentum in order to sustain a mainstream presence (due to the historical experience of 58 Elizabeth Barry & William Boles, “Beyond Victimhood: Agency and Identity in the Theatre of Roy Williams,” in Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres, ed. Dimple Godiwala (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006). 59 Yasmin Alibhai–Brown, “Black Art Can Be Bad, just as Art by Whites,” The Independent (2 May 2005), www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhaibrown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-black-art-can-be-bad-just-like-art-by-whites-489793.html (accessed 18 January 2010). 60 Influential broadsheet critics perform a balancing act between acknowledging Williams’s much-needed presence in British theatre and his previous successes, yet critically identifying the shortcomings of his current work. Cf. reviews of Williams’s Angel House by Michael Billington, Rhoda Koenig, Benedict Nightingale & Charles Spencer in Theatre Record (28 January – 10 February 2008): 134. 61 Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 234.

224

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

black drama’s disappearance from British stages), one concurrently shoulders a representational, figurehead role imposed by mainstream critical and staging contexts out to prove that they have diversified their appeal. The disturbing tendency of black dramatists’ work to be fixed as a reflection of social problems facing the black community persists.62 Daily media reports of young black men as gang members and victims of gang-related fatal stabbings have created a popular awareness of a social problem without the concomitant acknowledgement that association with this kind of tragedy is not the foremost experience or expectation of black families living in Britain. The complex inheritance of racist educational and political systems of the past, as well as the impediments to personal and social self-worth that this has spawned in post-Windrush generations, is a trail of causes and consequences absent from most press representations. Although the legacy of Caribbean-heritage acknowledgment characterizes Williams’s first plays, paradoxically, as for many fin-de-siècle black writers, the Caribbean location becomes symbolic of the Old World and black British identity, with the New World as inspiration and motif. Williams’s indigenes have created their own realm of codes – many of which the traditional audience (white theatre-goers and critics) might not directly recognize and with which they have to gain familiarity, and to which black audience members may or may not relate, depending on their class or generational allegiance. Howard Barker has written of “the dramatist’s responsibility to a higher truth than mere authenticity” that creates collaboration between actor/writer and actor/writer/audience, and this holds true for viewing a play about black experience. According to Barker’s thesis, the audience “is invited to discard its normal assumptions about the manner in which reality is reproduced. What is signalled is the appearance of different dramatic values and what is witnessed is not the reiteration of common knowledge but a dislocation of perceptions.”63 Barker attests to the reformulating process involved: Here you have the moment of the purest, most radical elitism – the actor’s skill, the writer’s invention, together release the mind of the observer from the blockage of unfreedom which is characterised in the feeling “I don’t know what

62 See the thematic centrality of young black men as victims of stabbing in Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far (Royal Court Theatre), Che Walker’s The Frontline (The Globe Theatre), and the film version of Williams’s 2003 play Fallout (all 2008). 63 Barker, Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2nd ed. 1993): 29.



Black British Drama Today

225

this is about, therefore I reject it”. Instead the writer and the actor conspire to lure the mind into the unknown, the territory of possible changed perception.64

This charting of the contact and contract between performance, text performed, and audience reception of it, to open up a fluidity of perception, interaction, and responsiveness, can undo the fixed viewing to which plays by black dramatists have been habitually subjected. As the African-American playwright Suzan–Lori Parks asserts, “there is no single ‘Black Experience’, there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted.”65 Yet, ‘what spaces are imaginable?’ – a question also asked by Maisha Eggers in relation to black German creative potential – that will loosen established expectations and conditions of commissioning and staging of contemporary black British dramatists’ work? The preservation of white-led cultural production in Britain still clearly thrives in the new millennium. For black dramatists, the familiar problem of representationalism versus artistic individualism is a constraint that their white counterparts simply did (and do) not have to face. Furthermore, the theorization and recognition of a black British aesthetic – which have developed in relation to music and, increasingly, to popular culture, film, visual arts, television, and various genres of literature – have not prompted concomitant research and application to the circumstances of black British theatre and performance.66

Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, 36–37. Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” in Parks, The America Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995): 21. 66 Only two collections of critical essays dedicated to black British and Asian British theatre and performance have emerged to date: Alternatives Within the Mainstream; ed. Godiwala, and Staging New Britain, ed. Davis & Fuchs. In addition, the first anthology of new plays by black dramatists also includes critical introductions by academics (Hidden Gems, ed. Osborne). Other neomillennial texts either privilege sex–gender – Griffin, Contemporary Black British and Asian Women Playwrights; Lynette Goddard, Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) – or constitute a single chapter in a larger volume – The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, ed. Elaine Aston & Janelle Reinelt (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000); Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003); Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, ed. Elaine Aston & Geraldine Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, ed. Nadine Holdsworth & Mary Luckhurst (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 64 65

226

D E I R D R E O S B O R N E 

With an unprecedented presence on Britain’s neo-millennial mainstream and provincial stages, Newland’s, James’s, and Williams’s works mount a resistance to the all-white-on-the-night assumptions that have customarily accompanied theatre-going in the U K .67 As black playwrights born in Britain, they have carved out a space in the mainstream which was previously only sporadically possible. In many ways, their work has brought black experience into a position of cultural centrality, flexing rigid parameters of music, sport, and carnival as traditionally the most visible areas of black cultural citizenship. Their subject-matter enters debates on indigenous identity and destabilizes the demarcations and certainties once associated with ‘British’ (utilitarian, political affiliation) and ‘English’ (emotional, patriotic, white). Far from existing as alternatives to the mainstream, these dramatists create a vital part of national culture constructed from black people’s experiences and The following London theatres staged plays (2005–2008) by black dramatists that centralize black people’s experience. Notably, there are revivals: T H E T R I C Y C L E , One Under by Winsome Pinnock (February–March 2005), Let There Be Love by Kwame KweiArmah (January–February, revived August 2008), Days of Significance by Roy Williams (transfer of R S C production, March 2008); S O H O T H E A T R E , trade by debbie tucker green (March 2006), White Open Spaces by Francesca Beard et al. (September–October 2006), The Christ of Coldharbour Lane by Oladipo Agboluaje (May–June 2007), Pure Gold by Michael Bhim (September–October, 2007), Joe Guy by Roy Williams (January–February 2008); T H E A T R E R O Y A L S T R A T F O R D E A S T , High Heel Parrotfish by Christopher Rodriguez (April–May 2005), Bashment by Rikki Beadle–Blair (May–October 2005), The Harder They Come by Perry Henzell (May–June 2006, revived February–March 2007, and for the Barbican Theatre March 2008), Marilyn and Ella by Bonnie Greer (February– March 2008), FaddaMuddaSistaBrudda by Rikki Beadle–Blair (May 2008); R O Y A L C O U R T T H E A T R E , stoning mary by debbie tucker green (April 2005), 93.2 FM by Levi David Addai (August 2005), 11 Josephine House by Alfred Fagon (revival, 29 November 2006), random by debbie tucker green (March–April 2008), Oxford Street by Levi David Addai (May 2008), Gone Too Far by Bola Agbaje (Upstairs February, revived in main theatre August 2008); T H E Y O U N G V I C , generations (February 2007) and dirty butterfly (revival February 2008) by debbie tucker green, Mules by Winsome Pinnock (revival, March 2008); R O Y A L N A T I O N A L T H E A T R E , Statement of Regret by Kwame KweiArmah (January–April 2008); L Y R I C T H E A T R E , H A M M E R S M I T H , Sweet Yam Kisses by Pat Cumper & Courttia Newland (February–March 2006), Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes, adapted by Roy Williams (April–May 2007), Rough Crossings by Simon Schama, adapted by Caryl Phillips (September–October 2007), H A C K N E Y E M P I R E , De Botty Business by Benjamin Zephaniah (5 March 2008), Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman, adapted by Dominic Cooke (March–April 2008), Revenge of a Black Woman, Blue Mountain Theatre Company (April 2008). 67



227

Black British Drama Today

expose mainstream (predominantly white and positioned as English) theatregoers to aspects of a black British cultural input that is as indigenous to contemporary British and English cultural identity as that provided by white playwrights.



Muslims, the Discourse on (Failed) Integration in Britain, and Kenneth Glenaan’s Film Yasmin S ILKE S TROH

I

W E S T E R N S O C I E T I E S , including the U K and Germany, recent years have seen lively and controversial public debates about increasingly visible aspects of multiculture in social life – and about the possibility or impossibility of coexistence, dialogue, and/or integration;1 about cultural conflicts, immigration policy, as well as the potential threats that multiculture might pose to the nation-state and to the identity and cohesiveness of national communities. Muslim diasporic communities2 are often N MANY

1 The social sciences and certain left-wing public discourses on multiculturalism often distinguish between integration and assimilation by associating integration with only partial adaptation, a degree of mutual acceptance and coexistence between minorities and mainstream as well as equal rights, while assimilation connotes a much higher degree of adaptation which can even go so far as the complete disappearance of cultural differences. The filmmaker Kenneth Glenaan seems to reject the latter while seeing potential in the former (at least as an ideal, if not in actual current practice). In other public discourses, however (and not only popular right-wing ones), integration and assimilation are often (problematically) equated. The present chapter attempts to maintain the distinction wherever possible, thus reflecting the discursive practices it describes, though the distinction is in itself potentially problematic (e.g., concerning the question at which degree of adaptation the boundary between integration and assimilation is to be drawn). 2 This should not be understood here in the sense of “diaspora as extended ethnicity” (S. Sayyid, “Beyond Westphalia: Nations and Diasporas – the Case of the Muslim Umma,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. Barnor Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 41), since the latter often presumes a clearly definable geographical homeland (e.g., in the Jewish case), which Islam does not possess (as highlighted by Sayyid, 48). Nonetheless, most Muslims in today’s Western Europe also happen

230

S I L K E S T R O H 

a central theme of such discussions – and subject to stigmatization. All this has further intensified since September 11, 2001 and the start of the ‘war on terror’. Generalized suspicions of religious extremism and terrorist leanings are not the only factors that are often cited by those who consider the Muslim presence a threat to Western secular and liberal polities. Another factor that frequently features in such discourses is the issue of gender roles. For instance, Western critiques of Islam and of Muslim diasporic communities often centre on arranged and enforced marriages (frequently conflating the two), and various aspects of real or perceived female disempowerment. Here, as in many other contexts, women’s bodies (and often also their clothing, such as the veil) function as a battleground upon which the struggle over cultural and representational hegemony, and over the definition of group identities and borders, takes place.3 The fact that gender roles and clothing are often instrumentalized as criteria for establishing a culture’s place in a hierarchical ranking of civilizations and their achievements, and/or an axis of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, also links such contemporary ideological practices with the heritage of colonial discourse. In Western discourses about Islam, the most salient aspect of this colonial discursive tradition is that of Orientalism: here, continuities in Western representations of Muslims from colonial times to the post/neocolonial present can be observed not only with regard to gender and veiling but also with regard to assumptions about ‘Eastern’ people’s supposed untrustworthiness, propensity for violence, and incapacity to espouse secularism and liberalism.4 Traditional elements of colonial discourses and simplistic (mis)conceptions about clearly definable, homogeto be part of a geographically/culturally definable diaspora, e.g., the South Asian diaspora in Britain. It is in this sense that the concept of ‘Muslim diasporas’ is – somewhat loosely – used here. 3 In the context of postcolonial criticism, this has, for instance, been noted by Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 20.3 (1991), repr. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 376–84, 388, and Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 80–92, 97. 4 The key study of Orientalism in general is, of course, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). For specific comments on Orientalism in more recent British discourses about Muslims, see, for example, Elizabeth Poole, Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002): 16, 18, 28–33, 40–41, 45, 99, 108, 142, 165, 180–81, 248, 251, 254, 256.



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

231

neous cultural communities thus often continue to inform contemporary debates and anxieties about national identity in post-colonial states like Britain. I would like to provide a close reading of the way in which some of these issues are reflected in Simon Beaufoy’s (sceenplay) and Kenneth Glenaan’s (director) feature film Yasmin,5 set in an Asian British Muslim community in Yorkshire. This film is particularly pertinent to this volume’s project of bridge-building between literary and cultural studies approaches, on the one hand, and a wider social perspective (e.g., pertaining to history and the social sciences), on the other. Indeed, Yasmin exemplifies very clearly how cultural production interacts with the wider social sphere. By adopting a quasi-documentary approach to their research and scriptwriting, by intertextually linking their fictional story to political and media discourses of the time,6 and by attempting to offer a corrective to certain perceptions propagated in those dominant discourses, the filmmakers expressly aimed to intervene in contemporary social debates. However, before discussing the precise nature of this film’s intervention in debates about multiculture, Muslims, and the cohesion of the British national community, it may be useful to briefly sketch these debates in their wider context.

Muslims, Multiculture, and British National Identity Discourses – a Brief Contextualization There have been Muslims in the U K for over three hundred years, but the majority of the current British Muslim population goes back to post-World War II immigration from formerly colonial countries in South Asia (which also means that – with regard to discrimination and discourses on difference – race and religion are often intertwined here).7 Statistics estimate that c. 2.7 Yasmin (Parallax, Germany/U K 2004, 87 min.; D V D : inD D V D , 2005). Benedict Anderson has famously demonstrated the central role played by the media (in this case, print media) in establishing modern national identities in the first place – see Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. London & New York: Verso, 2006): esp. 24–26, 33–36). When these ‘imagined communities’ are faced with the need to redefine themselves in the face of multiculture and other challenges, the media are likewise bound to play a central part. The central role of the media in the production of shared social perspectives as well as the negotiation of ethnic difference and social power (e.g., in justifying hegemonic politics) has also been discussed by Poole, Reporting Islam, 3, 14–16, 21, 100, 142, 154, 241. 7 White Muslims (e.g., British converts and their descendants) are often neglected in 5 6

232

S I L K E S T R O H 

percent of the British population are Muslims, about half of whom were born in the U K . Recent decades have seen a marked increase in the general confidence and social visibility of British Muslims, as well as campaigns against discrimination and for the recognition of Muslim needs in government policies, education, and the workplace. British media interest in Muslims has also increased since about the mid-1990s, and even further after 9/11.8 Endorsements of multiculture (for instance, by the New Labour government), and even such icons of traditional Britishness as the Royal Family, have also partly extended to British Muslims.9 However, the mainstream’s readiness to embrace multiculture often seems even more limited with regard to Muslim minorities than with regard to other aspects of cultural difference, and has often been criticized for not going beyond mere tokenism.10 Despite its growing importance in the U K , Islam is often viewed as something that public debate, apparently because they are less visibly different or seen as less threatening. See also: Poole, Reporting Islam, 19–20, 22, 179, 252, 269–70, 279; Office for National Statistics, “Ethnicity: Nine in Ten Sikhs Are from the Indian Group,” 11 October 2004, & “Country of Birth & National Identity: Majority Identify as British,” 21 February 2006, both based on the 2001 census and publ. on www.statistics.gov.uk (accessed 21 May 2008); Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 151, 160–61; Nasar Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’: Print Media, Public Intellectuals and Muslims in Britain,” Journalism Studies 7.1 (2006): 46. 8 Office for National Statistics, “Religion In Britain: Census Shows 72% Identify as Christians” (13 February 2003, based on 2001 census) www.statistics.gov.uk (accessed 21 May 2008), and “Country of Birth”; Poole, Reporting Islam, 5, 59, 66–68, 84, 98–99, 116– 17, 124–25, 128, 187, 253, 271; Modood, Multicultural Politics, 161, 166–67; Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’,” 39, 55. 9 Examples can be found in the Queen’s jubilee address to Parliament in April 2002 (quoted from Ian Bradley, “Queen of Diversity: Face to Faith,” The Guardian [3 June 2002], www.guardian.co.uk – accessed 16 December 2009) and Tony Blair, “The Duty to Integrate: Shared British Values” (8 December 2006, Part 5 of the 8-part lecture series “Our Nation’s Future”), transcript on www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page10563.asp (accessed 14 December 2009); as well as Prince Charles’s long-standing advocacy of better understanding between Christians, Muslims, and adherents of other world religions, or his oft-quoted statement from 1994 that, as sovereign, he would like to be seen as a “Defender of Faith,” whereas traditionally the English monarch was called ‘Defender of the Faith’, referring to the Anglican church, whose head s/he is (interview in Jonathan Dimbleby’s T V documentary Charles, the Private Man, the Public Role, broadcast 29 June 1994, quoted from Dimbleby, The Prince of Wales: A Biography [London: Little, Brown, 1994]: 528; see also Dimbleby, 526–28, 532, 542, and Bradley, “Queen”). 10 See, for example, Poole’s critique of New Labour in Reporting Islam, 253–54.



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

233

remains fundamentally un-British and thus poses a threat to national unity, traditions, and values.11 Such discourses already existed before 9/11, but have intensified since then. Islam has almost come to be conceptualized as a test-case for the general viability of multiculturalism as a political programme and social reality. Important themes include a polarization of perceived cultural oppositions, non-integration/non-assimilation, ghetto culture, and ‘parallel societies’ (e.g., through the congruence of ethnic segregation in different aspects of life, such as housing, religion, education, work, and social networks) as well as the aforementioned gender issues. There are also worries that diasporic individuals or communities might pose a ‘threat within’ the national community because transnational affiliations might be more important to them than national ones. For instance, this is seen as the case when British-born Muslim terrorists prioritize their particular concept of umma loyalties and duties over loyalty to Britain in bombings which violate both the British state’s monopoly on force and the body/bodies of the national community whose (fellow) members they harm.12 Consequently, trans11 This has been noted by, for example, Poole, Reporting Islam, 22, 38–39, 66, 78–80, 85, 95–96, 98–99, 104–105, 109, 113–14, 116, 118–26, 129–32, 135, 137–39, 141, 143, 148–49, 153–55, 157, 159, 164–65, 169, 171, 179–80, 182–87, 247, 249–251, 257, 274, and Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’,” 35–36, 39–40, 43–48, 50, 53. For a slightly more diffe-

rentiated viewpoint which condemns only a special (and “distorted”) kind of Islam as unBritish, see Blair, “Duty to Integrate.” 12 For examples of such discourses, see: Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (The Cantle Report), Home Office (December 2001): 9, http://image .guardian .co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2001/12/11/communitycohesionreport .pdf (accessed 14 December 2009); Polly Toynbee, “Why Trevor is Right,” The Guardian (7 April 2004), www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/apr/07/society.immigration/(accessed 16 December 2009); Ted Cantle, “Parallel Lives” (3 November 2006): 4, www .eurozine.com (accessed 16 December 2009); Our Shared Future (final report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, advisory body under the U K Secretary of State for Community and Local Government, 14 June 2007): 28, 45, 67, http://collections .europarchive.org /tna /20080726153624/http://www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/~ /media/assets/www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/our_shared_future%20pdf.ashx (accessed 14 December 2009). For scholarly commentary, see Arun Kundnani, “The Death of Multiculturalism” (1 April 2002), Institute of Race Relations website, www.irr.org.uk (accessed 14 December 2009); Poole, Reporting Islam, 15, 67–74, 82, 84, 92, 95, 104–105, 107–13, 116–17, 120, 124, 128, 141–43, 146–54, 165–66, 171, 179–81, 185, 240, 255–56, 274; Lorraine Sheridan, quoted in Dominic Casciani, “U K ‘Islamophobia’ Rises after 11 September” (29 August 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009); Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004; Abingdon & New York:

234

S I L K E S T R O H 

national minorities have been asked to take sides and either assimilate into the mainstream13 or at least share mainstream values of citizenship, such as “democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country” and a conviction that “being British […] carries duties [… which] have clear precedence over any cultural or religious practice.”14 Political and media discourses propagating a mainly negative image of Islam were accompanied by (and partly directly related to) increased islamophobia and harassment of British Asian Muslims by the authorities (e.g., the police) and by members of the public after 9/11.15 Many of these issues are also reflected in Glenaan’s film Yasmin.

Failed Integration and the Critique of Mainstream Discourses in Glenaan’s Film Aiming to “dispel […] Islamophobia”16 and making a plea for a more inclusive British society that will be able to accept internal cultural differences, Yasmin expresses a pro-Muslim stance which, interestingly, is articulated from a non-Muslim platform: the film’s principal characters are Muslims and the story is based on extensive research in Yorkshire’s Asian communities,17 Routledge, 2006): e.g., 1, 21, 27, 133, 156, and “Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘War on Terror’,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.4 (2005): 432–33; Modood, Multicultural Politics, 149, 160, 166–67, 186; Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’,” 36, 43–45, 51. 13 For comment on such demands, see, for example, Kundnani, “Death”; Modood, Multicultural Politics, 18–19, 132–35, 139–40, 145, 149, 160, 186–87, 206; Meer, “ ‘ Get off your knees’,” 44–45. 14 Both quotations from Blair, “Duty to Integrate.” See also Cantle, “Parallel Lives,” 4–5. 15 However, while negative media reporting and harassment peaked immediately after 9/11, some have argued that conditions subsequently improved somewhat. On all these issues, see: “Islamophobia ‘explosion’ in U K ” (24 May 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009); Casciani, “U K ‘Islamophobia’ Rises,” & “Islamophobia Pervades U K : Report” (2 June 2004), http://news.bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009); Kundnani, “Death,” and “The Rise and Fall of British Multiculturalism,” in Resituating Culture, ed. Gavan Titley (Strasbourg: Directorate of Youth and Sport, Council of Europe, 2004): 109. 16 Glenaan, interview (nd), website of inD D V D (publ. of the Yasmin D V D ), www .yasminthemovie.co.uk/interviews.php (accessed 16 December 2009). 17 The director went so far as to claim: “We researched very journalistically for about a year. […] It’s all true. The only poetic license was to put it all inside one family”; interview,



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

235

but the white British writer and director, as well as some of the Asian British actors, are non-Muslim. This in itself might be seen as testimony to the transcultural nature of British society in which old colonial-style binarisms and simplistic ideas of only ‘the margins/Other writing back’ no longer hold (if they ever did). Nonetheless, it might be asked whether the film’s attempts at critical intervention are entirely successful, not necessarily because of the ethnic and religious background of the filmmakers,18 but because the story ultimately still perpetuates certain reductive images of Muslims that also shape the colonial and contemporary anti-Muslim discourses it sets out to criticize. The following analysis will examine the strategies used by Glenaan OutNow (10 January 2006), http://outnow.ch/Specials/2006/Yasmin/InterviewGlenaan.E (accessed 16 December 2009); “None of it is made up. I used a mixture of people from the community and professional actors to play the main roles to deliberately blur the line between film and fiction” (interview, inD D V D website). See also Glenaan’s further comments in these two interviews, and in another by Jen Foley in “Edinburgh features: Yasmin” (c. August/September 2004), www.bbc.co.uk/films/festivals/edinburgh /yasmin.shtml (accessed 16 December 2009); Beaufoy’s comments in “ ‘ Diese Frauen führen ein Doppelleben’” (interview by Hanns–Georg Rodek), Berliner Morgenpost (26 May 2005), www.morgenpost.de (accessed 13 December 2009); and lead actress Archie Panjabi’s comments in the interview included in the D V D ’s bonus features. 18 Some might criticize the two white non-Muslim male filmmakers for attempting to “giv[e…] a voice” (“Edinburgh features”) to non-white (and partly female) Muslims as a potential repetition of traditional patronizing patriarchal and/or colonial/Orientalist mainstream assumptions of authority to speak ‘for’ an ‘Other’ (see, for example, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s brief review of Yasmin on the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television website, www.nmpft.org.uk [accessed 28 September 2006]). While this is a valid objection in some cases, it should not be automatically applied to any male/white filmmaker (or writer) wishing to speak about the concerns of women and/or non-white people, as such a generalized objection would risk perpetuating traditional social boundaries by denying the right to speak about certain subjects on grounds of gender or race. If similar objections were made, say, about non-white artists addressing traditionally ‘white’ subjects (e.g., questioning the legitimacy of Gurinder Chadha as a non-white filmmaker creating an indianized film version of a British literary classic by Jane Austen, as she did in Bride & Prejudice [Bride Productions, U K / U S A 2004; 107 min.]), these objections would most likely be (rightly) criticized by postcolonial and other critics as racist perpetuations of colonial patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, the basic legitimacy of addressing issues across racial and cultural boundaries should also be acknowledged in the reverse case, provided that the artist(s) in question remain aware of the potential complications of (mis)perception and authority inherent in their speaking position – but similar complexities also apply to representation within a given social community.

236

S I L K E S T R O H 

in pursuit of his anti-racist intentions, before outlining potential limitations inherent to his approach. Yasmin constantly problematizes clashes between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives on the British Asian Muslim community, not only in juxtapositions of and confrontations between characters from this community and white non-Muslim characters, but also through repeated reference to racism among the wider public – e.g., through a ‘Paki Go Home’ graffito shown in the very first shot, through intertextual links to actual political and media discourses of the time (e.g., via direct quotations), and by showing the effects which these mainstream views of Muslims have on the protagonists’ lives. At first sight, the plot seems to confirm many stereotypes: the protagonist, Yasmin Hussain, lives in a working-class neighbourhood dominated by South Asian diasporic inhabitants, her father Khalid and her brother Nasir are very religious (Nasir is a muezzin at the local mosque), Yasmin performs all the ‘female’ housework tasks in both her own and her widowed father’s home, and the family has emotionally pressured her into marrying her cousin Faysal from Pakistan in order to facilitate his immigration to Britain. The opening shots juxtapose images of a mainly non-white population in nonWestern clothing against images of ‘typical’ English working-class terraced houses and a panorama of the northern English landscape, overlaid by the sound of the muezzin’s call. The film seems to play on audience expectations: to some viewers, these different cultural icons might seem incongruous, thus apparently confirming stereotypes of an ‘alien’ ‘parallel society’ emerging right in the heart of England. At first, such impressions of ‘alienness’ also seem to be corroborated by the fact that some of the dialogue takes place in Punjabi (without subtitles, though it is relatively easy for nonPunjabi-speakers to infer the gist from visual clues such as accompanying gestures). However, at the same time that the film establishes suggestions of a ‘parallel society’, hermetically sealed and neatly bordered, it also establishes Yasmin as a border-crosser, as when she secretly swaps Pakistani clothes for Western ones (and vice versa) on her way between home and workplace. While she (grudgingly) accepts the gendered allocation of housework and even an unwanted marriage, she repeatedly undercuts conventional images of ‘submissive’ and ‘dependent’ Asian womanhood: she has a good job (as a social worker) and decides herself how to spend her earnings – for instance, on a car (which in itself functions as an additional symbol of mobility and freedom to leave her domestic surroundings). These associations of freedom



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

237

are reinforced by the fact that the car is a convertible: Yasmin drives with the roof open when out of town, but closer to home she has the roof down. Colour is also symbolic: both her car and much of her clothing are red, which can be regarded as a symbol of dynamism, personal boldness, and resistance to the limitations posed by her environment. In contrast to Yasmin’s red, her environment is mainly portrayed in drab colours, reflecting associations of both class (tristesse of the working-class milieu) and culture – first, the austerity that many non-Muslims might associate with orthodox Muslim life-styles; and, secondly, the hostility of British mainstream culture as represented by the police and their black uniforms. Yasmin tries to transcend these limitations of class and culture(s), negotiating her individuality by standing out.19 Moreover, she wants a divorce and has a budding romantic interest in her colleague John, who is white and non-Muslim. Yasmin’s role as a border-crosser was also emphasized in the film’s marketing.20 Thus, it might be argued that the film at least partly tries to undercut stereotypes of an East/West dichotomy and a neatly bounded ‘parallel society’. Nonetheless, one might also argue that the way in which border-crossing is depicted here eventually cements rather than destabilizes these borders, since the protagonists’ individual acts of border-crossing continue to appear exceptional (and are often performed in secret) while, in essence, the ‘two spheres’ (at least on the surface) remain separate. Moreover, Yasmin’s need for secrecy at first seems mainly triggered by family pressures, in line with Western stereotypical assumptions that Muslim families are invariably oppressive and that all Muslim women naturally aspire to Western life-styles as a guarantor of freedom. Such stereotypes also tend to imply that any problems suffered by these women as a result of cultural ‘doubleness’ are to be blamed on the non-Western side alone. However, 19 While her family is, at least to some extent, resigned to Yasmin’s border-crossing and partial emancipation, they also make regular attempts to restore the traditional balance of gender power – her father tells her: “Out there, you will do what you will do. But in here, you will show respect!” He also asks her to use her car to teach her husband to drive. She declines, however, arguing that it is her car, bought with her own money, thus reasserting her independence. 20 The film poster and D V D cover show the veiled protagonist and the slogan “one woman, two lives,” an image of doubleness reinforced by the layout of the film title (which shows Yasmin’s name twice: once in ‘ordinary’ layout and once as a mirror image), and by a second picture of the protagonist on the reverse side of the D V D cover, which shows her in Western clothes.

238

S I L K E S T R O H 

Glenaan only plays on this stereotype (and others) in order to undercut it and show the greater complexity that underlies individual and collective stories, and that often evades any simplistic, one-sided apportioning of blame. With regard to marriage, this deconstruction of stereotypes is effected not only through Yasmin’s divorce plans but also within her marriage. Apparently in line with conventional Western images of Islamic marriages, Yasmin was pressured into marrying a man who is (at least to some extent) depicted as an unattractive and ridiculous figure, and mere communication, let alone emotional rapprochement, seems impossible – Faysal speaks very little English and Yasmin refuses to speak Punjabi. Gradually, however, the picture gains in complexity: usually, she is the dominant party in this relationship, working and successfully navigating her way outside the home, while Faysal has only recently immigrated, has no job, struggles with the local language and customs, suffers from loneliness, and is often verbally abused by a wife who shows no empathy for his problems. Her refusal to teach him to drive helps to perpetuate his lack of independence. This is an ironic inversion of commonplace Western images of power structures in Muslim marriages between forcibly imported, housebound, downtrodden Eastern brides and more long-term diasporic men in the West who take care of all contacts with ‘the outside world’ beyond the home. Another non-stereotypical aspect of Yasmin’s marriage is her constant and successful refusal of sexual intercourse. Faysal is not a stereotypical ‘Muslim macho’. He accepts his wife’s rules – albeit grudgingly – and his single attempt at transgression is immediately punished.21 While conventional Western ‘Muslim marriage’ tales invite audiences to pity the wife, Glenaan invites us to (also) pity the husband. Other aspects of islamophobic discourse that Glenaan attempts to deconstruct pertain to the ‘failure of integration’ and of ‘peaceful multicultural coexistence’: he refuses to apportion all blame to the diasporic minority, instead devoting much attention to the part played by mainstream behaviour, e.g., a refusal to accept difference, as well as racism, discrimination, and 21 In one scene, Faysal enters Yasmin’s bed against her will, she struggles and insults him, and he hits her, apparently for the first time, judging from their mutual surprise. However, he then desists immediately and leaves the room, and she throws him out of the house the next morning. Khalid likewise turns out to be a more complex figure than stereotypes might suggest: although he has pressured his daughter into marriage and continues to oppose her divorce plans, he takes her part when he learns of the violent incident: he hits Faysal and (as a compromise between ‘saving face’ and his daughter’s wishes) takes him into in his own house instead of sending him back to Yasmin’s.



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

239

harassment. The film’s negotiation of these themes is again partly gendered (through the symbolic role of women’s clothes and make-up), while another leitmotif is the (non-)consumption of alcohol as a signifier of borders between mainstream British popular culture and the Muslim minority. At first, Yasmin goes to great lengths to show her ‘integration’ on the mainstream’s own terms: she identifies herself as English and even adopts a racist perspective on a member of her own family, calling her husband a “Paki” and a “bloody savage.” Nonetheless, she is not yet ready to reject her ethnic background completely, as becomes clear through her frequent changes between Western and Eastern dress, as well as her reactions in situations where she might be expected to drink alcohol. In the first of these scenes, in a pub, John has beer while Yasmin orders orange juice. However, the mere act of her entering a pub together with a white friend could signify attempted integration into the mainstream – an attempt met by stares from a white patron, probably on account of her colour. In two other drinking-scenes with nonMuslim companions, Yasmin accepts a beer, but then discards it behind their backs, thus seeking a compromise between their expectations and her faith. The events of 9/11 make her attempts at balancing identities even more difficult. All of the Muslim protagonists in Yasmin, at different locations, are shown staring at T V images of the burning World Trade Center, which already suggests that none of them will be able to escape the consequences of this distant act of terror. However, Yasmin is not yet aware of this: she feels unconcerned enough to switch off a George Bush speech on the radio about the incipient ‘war on terror’ in favour of a music programme and continues to pursue her integration ambitions, but mounting islamophobic paranoia increasingly catches up with her. Her workplace, previously a site of integration for her, becomes a site of rejection. Colleagues tease her by associating her with Osama bin Laden, though at first she neither knows who he is nor how to pronounce his name. It is John who fills her in – Glenaan’s nonMuslim characters seem far more preoccupied with Islamic terrorism than the Muslim protagonist, an incongruence which offers an ironic comment on the absurdity of Western paranoia and the general suspicion under which Muslims are placed. The importance of the media in this process is repeatedly underlined by further intertextual references to broadcasts of political speeches (by Bush and Blair), the anti-terrorism Act of 2001, and news reports on the ‘war on terror’. Moreover, the ironic fact that Yasmin’s father repairs T V sets for a living means that the film often shows not just one, but several T V s at the same time, thus subtly underlining the centrality and ubi-

240

S I L K E S T R O H 

quity of media representations even further. Irony can also be discerned when a sound-bite from George Bush (“We value every life. Our enemies value none, not even the innocent”) overlays images of Yasmin’s predominantly Asian neighbourhood under massive police surveillance, followed by a scene where an Asian Muslim woman is assaulted in the street by white, presumably non-Muslim children. Unlike in Bush’s comment, it is Muslims who feature as innocent victims here. Yasmin reacts by intensifying her efforts to integrate through assimilation: after another family quarrel about her divorce plans, she puts on heavy make-up and a low-cut top, probably both as a sign of defiance against her family (she openly displays her outfit in her street in front of Nasir) and as an attempt to make her body more desirable to the white British male (John especially) as a potential ‘ticket’ into the mainstream. She joins John and several acquaintances at the pub, further currying favour with them by drinking vodka, claiming that she has not been to a mosque for years and is thus as much (or little) of a Muslim as John is, and shouting insults at the T V image of a Muslim: “Get back to your own country, Paki!”. However, although in this situation she presents herself as completely assimilated into mainstream Britain through both clothing and actions, and even goes as far as appropriating a white xenophobic voice, she is still denied acceptance: her skin colour and other phenotypical features continue to mark her as ‘alien’ in mainstream eyes and prompt racist remarks. In addition to this racial otherness, she continues to be identified with the religious Other of Islam as well – in spite of her previous attempts to disengage herself from this faith. Even John fails to show her sufficient sympathy, defending the general suspicion against Muslims. Yasmin, hurt and affronted, leaves. The failure of her attempt at assimilation by completely denying her background is also symbolized by the following scene that shows her at home, vomiting the vodka she is not used to, in a symbolic bodily rejection of an attempt at ‘cultural ingestion’ which has not done her much good. Soon afterwards, the police suspect the Hussains of terrorist connections and raids their houses. Even John, who happens to be visiting, is subjected to suspicion and harsh treatment. John hardly looks like the stereotypical South Asian Muslim, nor does he look particularly violent in the brightyellow rubber gloves he put on to help Yasmin with the dishes; in fact, he offers no resistance and meekly follows police orders, but is still shouted at and threatened like a dangerous criminal. The grotesqueness of the scene underlines the arbitrariness and needless violence of these police actions –



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

241

not just with regard to John, but also with regard to the innocent Hussain family. There is further irony when Faysal comes home and finds the house devastated: he seems to think that his wife has fallen victim to a crime, and accordingly, when he sees policemen in the street, appeals to them for help – not knowing that it is actually the police (i.e. not criminals, but the forces of law and order) that have ravaged his home and abducted his wife (by arresting her). The situation is endowed with a downright kafkaesque sense of powerlessness, arbitrariness, and absurdity when the police subsequently also arrest the bewildered Faysal and detain him for a longer period without trial. The kafkaesque atmosphere is reinforced when Yasmin (quickly released after her first arrest) visits her husband in prison to get his signature on the divorce papers, only to be rearrested and interrogated on the basis of very vague and far-fetched suspicions. Yasmin’s disillusionment about integration options grows through these events, as well as through the final rupture with John: their relationship was already strained by the aforementioned islamophobia-related incidents and disagreements, and when John learns from the police that Yasmin is married, he distances himself from her entirely. The ‘failure of integration’ (or, more precisely in this case, the mainstream’s refusal to allow integration) is also symbolized by Yasmin’s suspension from her job against her will, and by the fact that she drives her car (formerly a symbol of her ‘westernization’) into a ditch. Yasmin has been unable to gain acceptance as a person with a culturally hybrid identity. Driven by the need to belong, and forced by society to take sides, she first tries to fully embrace the non-Muslim/mainstream British side, and when it rejects her, she turns to the other side, towards Islam and Asian culture.22 Again, culture is expressed through clothing: Yasmin still wears red clothes as a symbol of defiance, but now they are always tailored according to Asian style, combined with a black headscarf. This last aspect also highlights different symbolic functions of the veil: in Western discourses, it is often seen as a sign of female subordination to patriarchal authority. At the beginning of Glenaan’s film, this might also be the case: i.e. when Yasmin discards the veil once she is out of her father’s and the community’s sight. However, her not wearing the veil while in non-Muslim company is not automatically a sign of liberation: it can also be a sign of submission to another form of cultural and male authority, currying favour with the mainstream by submitting to its dress code, and trying to appear attrac22

Similar processes in social reality are discussed by Poole, Reporting Islam, 242.

242

S I L K E S T R O H 

tive in the eyes of non-Muslim men like John. By contrast, Yasmin’s decision in favour of the veil at the end of the film is clearly her own choice and can be seen as an emblem of self-determination – in terms of both culture and gender.23 Another aspect of Yasmin’s combination of her new embrace of Asian Muslim identity with a continuing pursuit of female self-determination is her changing relationship with Faysal. While becoming more sympathetic and supportive towards him, she continues to pursue her divorce plans (with ultimate success) but, significantly, now according to Islamic custom. Thus, in spite of its emphasis on ‘failed integration’, even the end of this film avoids certain clichés and clear dichotomies: Yasmin still pursues a life as an independent, emancipated woman, but in her own way, which is now a Muslim one. This can be seen to contribute to the creation of ‘new imaginings of the Asian woman’ (beyond traditional images of passivity, submission etc.) demanded by feminist critics like Parita Trivedi and Brinda Bose,24 and undercuts the widespread idea that the only path towards female emancipation is a Western one. A different response to problems of integration and to the difficulty of finding acceptance as a Muslim in an increasingly islamophobic society is developed by Yasmin’s brother Nasir. Although, at one point, he expressly calls Britain his home, he shows signs of social disaffection and after 9/11 – especially after the victimization of his family by the police – increasingly privileges transnational loyalty to a global ‘Muslim brotherhood’ over an identification with Britain, as well as adopting a pro-terrorism interpretation of Islam. Here, the film shows yet another facet of the role of media representations by juxtaposing the aforementioned quotations of Western discourses with the counter-propaganda distributed by jihad agitators through leaflets, speech, video, and photos of anti-Muslim atrocities in Palestine and Chechnya, with the explicit aim of establishing a counter-perspective to

23 Similar points about conflicting interpretations of the veil and clothing are, in a more general context, made by Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, 82–83, 88–91, and Irene Becci, “The Veil Debate: When the Religious Other and the Gendered Other Are One,” in Resituating Culture, ed. Titley, 145. 24 Trivedi, “To Deny our Fullness: Asian Women in the Making of History,” Feminist Review 17 (1984): 38; Bose, “Transgressions: Female Desire and Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Indian Women’s Cinema,” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, ed. Brinda Bose & Bishnupriky Ghosh (New York & London: Garland, 1997): 123.



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

243

Western claims. These processes among Glenaan’s fictional characters tie in with Poole’s comments on social reality: Processes of media globalization increase the religious identification as the inequalities Muslims suffer internationally are recognized […]. This “mediated consciousness” […] results in ‘imagined communities’ in which at specific moments global religious identifications override local national interests.25

Eventually, Nasir goes to Pakistan to train as a terrorist; and the last shot of the film shows his microphone at the mosque unmanned, while he is replaced by a tape – an absence that serves as another reminder of ‘failed integration’. Dominant media images have often dehumanized terrorists and even mere terror suspects while effecting maximum humanization of the victims through a strong personalization of their stories.26 Glenaan can be regarded as reversing this strategy by personalizing the story of a would-beterrorist, thus again offering a corrective to mainstream discourses. Moreover, while conventional media accounts often suggest intrinsically religious motivations for terrorism (as well as for other activities in which Muslims might take part), thus contributing to Orientalist generalizations on Islam27 as dangerous per se and on Muslims as non-secular/irrational, Glenaan resists such generalizations by stressing intra-Muslim differences as well as social rather than religious motivations for ‘failed integration’ and terrorism. Thus, unlike his son, Khalid expressly rejects jihad propaganda about fighting for a global Muslim brotherhood by telling the demagogue: “I am not your brother!” Insisting that terrorism is not in keeping with the faith, he feels ashamed of fellow Muslims who support terrorism, and even expresses understanding for the paranoia of the policemen who violently raided his home. For Nasir, by contrast, police harassment reflects the wider problem of non-acceptance by the Western mainstream that provides the non-religious motivation for his embrace of terrorism. This also points to a further aspect of Glenaan’s revision of dominant media discourses: the latter often suggested that the responsibility for ‘failed integration’ and extremism lay with the British Muslim communities themPoole, Reporting Islam, 242. Reporting Islam, 4, 8. 27 On the homogeneous picture sometimes painted by Western islamophobic discourses, also see Poole, Reporting Islam, 4, 8–9, 44–45, 57, 71, 82, 98, 136, 140, 149, 151, 153, 169, 178, 180, 187, 254, 258. 25 26

244

S I L K E S T R O H 

selves, neglecting the contribution of the Western mainstream to this problem.28 Glenaan avoids such one-sided apportioning of blame and, through Nasir and Yasmin’s story, paints a picture which ties in with the findings of social-science research, whereby many British Muslims have or desire a sense of belonging in Britain, which can, however, be hindered by non-acceptance and exclusion from the mainstream – a predicament that can lead to disaffection among minority individuals, especially young people.29 Lord Bhiku Parekh has emphasized that “being British must accommodate plurality and allow people to be British in their own different ways.”30 Arguably, this is just what the white non-Muslim British mainstream, as depicted in Yasmin, refuses to accept. Glenaan does not blame the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ on multiculture and plurality as such, but on the refusal of the mainstream to accommodate it. To some extent, this can be fruitfully related to Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the ‘parvenu’ and ‘pariah’ positions of diasporic individuals in their host societies:31 the parvenu position is based on a high degree of assimilation as a condition for acceptance into the host society, but such parvenus are only accepted as ‘exceptional’ representatives of their community of origin/religious community, as people who have shed many characteristics of ‘alienness’ and difference. This problematic position is occupied by Yasmin while she is still (to some extent) accepted by her white colleagues, and while she tries to ‘fit in’ by shedding signs of her Muslim/Pakistani-ness – and by feeling superior to less assimilated members of her diasporic commuPoole, Reporting Islam, 6, 12, 93. Casciani, “Islamophobia Pervades”; Office for National Statistics, “Country of Birth” (according to which, in 2004, seventy percent of the total number of Muslims in Britain, and ninety-one percent of British-born Muslims, identified their national identity as British). Glenaan’s, however, is not the only voice in the British ‘failed integration’ debate that aims for a balanced representation of responsibilities: unlike the media discourses discussed by Poole, government circles did not blame ethnic/racial minorities alone, but also criticized the lack of social cohesion on the part of mainstream white society – for instance, concerning xenophobes (Community Cohesion, 9, 19, 29; Blair, “Duty to Integrate”). 30 Parekh, “Two Ideas of Multiculturalism” (7 December 2006), http://number-10 .gov.uk/output/Page10558.asp (accessed 18 December 2009). 31 Although Arendt used these concepts with regard to the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Jewish diaspora (The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951; New York: Harcourt, c. 2005]: 56–58, 61, 64–66), in certain respects they are also applicable to the early twenty-firstcentury British-Pakistani Muslims in Yasmin. 28 29



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

245

nity. Thus, even limited acceptance seems only possible on the condition that she denies part of her background, part of herself – and remains exceptional, in that similar acceptance is not granted to other (less assimilated) members of the Muslim diasporic community, who are (out)cast as alien ‘pariahs’. And even when her attempts to achieve and display assimilation are at their most intense, Yasmin is never fully accepted as part of the English mainstream, since the latter continues to see her as ‘exotic’ and retains suspicions that she remains ‘alien’ at heart, and thus potentially threatening. The English nation thus seems unable to become a ‘home’ for ‘diasporic parvenus’ like her – and even less so for less assimilated ‘diasporic pariahs’. The failure of the mainstream to make true allowances for difference is also reflected in the fact that, in Yasmin, the everyday, mundane, and mutual transcultural encounters and exchanges which Gilroy advocates as key counter-strategies against xenophobia32 do not really take place – while the minority characters all adapt to the mainstream in some form, the white nonMuslim mainstream characters seem unprepared to make any such concessions in return. Yasmin and John, for instance, do have a friendship (with the option of a future love relationship) ‘across the cultural divide’, but John refuses to encounter her difference – he is only prepared to accept her so long as she seems fully adapted to non-Muslim mainstream British norms, e.g., when he supports her drinking alcohol. Similarly, when the two accidentally meet in one of the last scenes, he seems displeased with her veil. Nonetheless, after hearing of her divorce, he shows signs of rekindling interest in her and asks her out to the pub. She, however, is no longer willing to undergo unilateral assimilation and go all the way to meet him: she asks him to accompany her to the mosque instead. Such reciprocity is more than he can cope with: he declines, and when she hopefully says “See you, then,” he replies: “Probably not.” In 2006, Yasmin Alibhai–Brown demanded: “If we are going to achieve commonalities and an equal status […], then surely white Britain has got to be called upon to do its bit [… and] accept that th[e] country has changed.”33 Glenaan’s film can be regarded as an attempt to do

For example, in After Empire, 75. In Y. Alibhai–Brown, Candace Allen, Ted Cantle & Dreda Say Mitchell, “Multiculturalism: A Failed Experiment?” (3 November 2006) : 3, www.eurozine.com (accessed 14 December 2009). 32 33

246

S I L K E S T R O H 

just that, calling upon the rest of the mainstream to likewise ‘do its bit’ in coming to a more plural, truly “convivial”34 conception of Britishness.

Limitations of Glenaan’s Approach In spite of this film’s various critical interventions in mainstream discourses which can be deemed thought-provoking and successful, there are several limitations and problems with Glenaan’s approach. For instance, Yasmin shares the widespread thematic limitations of mainstream British discourses about non-white diasporas and Muslims: i.e. an almost exclusive focus on generational conflicts, religion, law-breaking, terror, and gender, while other aspects of Muslim community life and Muslim participation in the day-to-day life of the nation receive much less attention.35 Thus, widespread images of non-white diasporic family life as dominated by conflicts “between authoritarian parents […] and their British-born children who operate with a more permissive set of mores”36 are confirmed by the portrayal of the Hussain family in Yasmin. Another conventional trope echoed in Glenaan’s film is law-breaking. The law (and obedience to it) is widely perceived as central in the constitution of the national community. Mainstream suspicions that racial or religious minorities are especially liable to crime and/or political disloyalty reflect a reluctance to accept them as members of the national community. Forms of law-breaking on which such suspicions conventionally centre include street crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism.37 Yasmin features all three of these: at the beginning, Nasir is a drug-dealing petty criminal often seen hanging out on the street, and his later abandonment of these pursuits in favour of religious extremism and terrorism can again be seen to merely substitute one cliché for another. Although Glenaan attempts to give this terror-trainee a more humanized and personalized portrayal than is comThis term is Gilroy’s (see After Empire, e.g., xi, and partly also “Multiculture, Double Consciousness,” 433, 438–39). 35 For critiques of these preoccupations, see, for example, Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; repr. with new intro. London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 133, 139–41, and “Multiculture, Double Consciousness,” 433; Kundnani, “Death,” and “Rise and Fall,” 107–108; Poole, Reporting Islam, 11–15, 70–75, 81–82, 84, 95, 97, 104–105, 108, 114, 141–43, 146–54, 179, 255–56. 36 Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’, 133. 37 Also see Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’, 87–88, 91–92, 94, 133–36, After Empire, 21, and “Multiculture, Double Consciousness,” 433. 34



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

247

mon in Western mainstream discourses, he arguably does so in such a stereotypical way that his de-stereotyping intentions are undermined. The topic of illegal immigration is introduced through Faysal’s case, which in the minds of many Britons might at least border on illegality (or illegitimacy) because, though his immigration is rendered legal through marriage, this marriage is a sham only entered into for this purpose (at least as far as Yasmin is concerned) – and it ends when this purpose is fulfilled. And, although Yasmin manages to transcend certain limits of conventional representations of Asian/ Muslim women, it does not transcend all of them: Poole diagnoses a general underrepresentation of Muslim women in public discourse, and where they are represented, this is mainly in connection with relationships (e.g., marriage), family, and victimization by males.38 Although Yasmin does (with partial success) attempt to negotiate her own identity and transcend social limitations, even these attempts at self-definition and her interactions with the wider social sphere are largely described through her personal relations with men: as the only female protagonist, she is positioned between the other, male protagonists: i.e. her father, husband, brother, and would-beboyfriend; there is no detailed portrayal of relationships and interactions between women. Even in the workplace, which could be seen as a ‘classic’ site of ‘liberation’ from patriarchal limitations for women, the depiction of Yasmin’s actions is limited mainly to interactions with John, thus again reiterating traditional patterns of representing a marginalized Other mainly through its relations with the ‘dominant forces’, with few attempts to show it as a subject/agent in its own right. Another problem might lie in a tendency which Poole has warned against – that of “establishing a new stereotype, an acceptable Other, a liberal Muslim that can be manipulated and domesticated, and [...] defining any Muslim falling outside this framework as extreme.”39 Glenaan might be seen as falling into this very trap, constructing Yasmin (and partly also her father, with his sympathy for the police) as a likeable ‘good’ Muslim whose attempts at integration are commended, and who is to be pitied for a failure of integration that is largely due to rejection by a narrow-minded mainstream in spite of this ‘good’ Muslim’s best efforts. A conscious decision of Muslims against

Poole, Reporting Islam, 92, 112. Poole, Reporting Islam, 16. Again, this can be partly referred back to Arendt’s distinction between ‘parvenu’ and ‘pariah’. 38 39

248

S I L K E S T R O H 

this kind of integration seems posited as a less commendable (though understandable) option. A further potential problem is that the strong emphasis on ‘failed integration’ at the end of the film might be taken to confirm the assertion of antimulticultural discourses that multiculturalism is simply bound to fail. Although this is hardly what the film intends, and although Glenaan clearly identifies precise factors (such as mainstream refusal to accommodate difference) which, if tackled, might enable multiculture to work after all, some viewers might misunderstand the relatively bleak ending of Yasmin as a confirmation of a general non-viability of multiculture.

Conclusion Glenaan clearly attempts to provide a nuanced exploration of social and discursive phenomena related to islamophobia, multiculture, and the debate on (failed) integration in Britain. One of his main strategies is dialogic juxtaposition: first, he juxtaposes different political and journalistic discourses with images of individual realities that do not neatly fit these representations (e.g., paranoia and general suspicion vs. the victimization of innocent people). Secondly, he juxtaposes different media discourses against each other (e.g., Western vs. jihad propaganda – though the latter choice and the exclusion of other Muslim media may reinforce rather than dismantle stereotypical binarisms). Moreover, the quasi-journalistic research in the Muslim community which Glenaan and his team claim to have undertaken in preparation for making their film arguably positions Yasmin itself as a form of counterjournalism in opposition to British mainstream media discourses. Thirdly, there are juxtapositions between attempts at ethnic, religious, and/or racial polarization, on the one hand, and individual acts of resisting them, on the other – for instance, in the film scene where white children attack an Asian Muslim woman on the street and a white, presumably non-Muslim passer-by apologizes for this.40 Another example of individual resistance to polarization is the emphasis on the fact that there are different interpretations of Islam – for instance, concerning terrorism, which Khalid and Yasmin reject While this was unscripted – the lady had not noticed that this was a film shoot (see the comments from producer Sally Hibbin quoted in Stuart Jeffries, “Coming to a small screen near you,” The Guardian [13 January 2005], www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005 /jan/13/broadcasting.film [accessed 13 December 2009]) – the filmmakers’ decision to retain this scene ties in with other depolarizing moments in Yasmin. 40



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

249

and Nasir embraces. These and other strategies reflect the objective of offering a corrective to dominant discourses and of drawing a more complex picture of different facets of (and responses to) diasporic identity and hybridity, as well as differences of interest and conflictual situations in multicultural society – which entail the necessity of individual, complex, and dynamic processes of negotiation. However, several aspects of the filmic outcome of Glenaan’s well-intentioned labours raise the question of whether he has fully succeeded in avoiding the discursive pitfalls of patriarchal, Western islamophobic and Orientalist discourses. At least partly, Yasmin appears to re-confirm, though perhaps unwittingly, some of the very thought-patterns that it attempts to deconstruct, thus arguably also failing to offer a viable foundation for a more successfully multi- or transcultural, inclusive, and “convivial” conception of British national identity. Any discussion of Glenaan’s intended and actual intervention in the public debate naturally also ought to take into account the public reception of his film, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. While a fully-fledged empirical study would unfortunately exceed the scope of this chapter, it might nevertheless be helpful to discuss at least a few indicators. Yasmin was screened at festivals in the U K and abroad (and won several international awards), was released at foreign cinemas, but could not clinch a successful cinema distribution deal for Britain itself.41 Thus, larger British audiences only gained access to it when it was shown on T V (Channel 4, four showings between January and December 2005, but none since42) and released on D V D in 2005. Yasmin has also been shown to politicians in the House of Lords43 (though history has hitherto not ascertained whether this changed any of the members’ political positions on the subject of British Muslims). Another significant aspect is the film’s reception in the news media and general public – whose attitudes, after all, it had set out to criticize and modify. Such responses can be gleaned from newspapers as well as from viewers’ The filmmakers only obtained an offer for very limited and considerably delayed U K cinema distribution, which they accordingly refused in order to enable an earlier T V screening accessible to larger audiences (Hibbin, quoted by Jeffries, “Coming to a small screen”; Glenaan, interview, OutNow); see also “Awards for Yasmin,” International Movie Database (I M D b), www.imdb.com [accessed 18 December 2009]). 42 Information based on personal telephone enquiry at Channel 4 on 18 December 2009 (at time of writing). 43 Glenaan, interview, OutNow. 41

250

S I L K E S T R O H 

comments on the Internet. Co-produced by a German company, Yasmin also had some resonance in Germany, reflecting a shared interest in debates about multiculturalism, Muslim minorities, and (failed) integration. The film was shown in German cinemas in 2005 and has been discussed in a number of reviews and other features by journalists and lay authors in German print, radio, and online media,44 sometimes with explicit comparisons between the British and German situations.45 While responses from within Muslim and/ or Asian communities showed a mixed reaction to Yasmin,46 mainstream 44 See, for example, Bert Rebhandl, “Kultur unter Druck,” Die Tageszeitung (26 May 2005), www.taz.de (accessed 19 May 2008); Hanns–Georg Rodek, “Liebt Yasmin Osama?,” Berliner Morgenpost (26 May 2005), www.morgenpost.de (accessed 19 May 2008); Hadwiga Fertsch–Röver, “Yasmin von Kenneth Glenaan,” announcement for the H R 2 radio programme Mikado which discussed the film on 27 May 2005, www.hr-online .de (accessed 18 December 2009); Marguerite Seidel, “Yasmin” (24 May 2005), www .critic.de /filme/detail/film/yasmin-224.html (accessed 18 December 2009); Birgit Deiterding, “Yasmin” (nd), www .filmreporter .de (accessed 18 December 2009). Moreover, of the forty-three user comments on Yasmin published on the I M D b by 18 December 2009, twenty-four were identified as having come from Germany (compared to a mere nine from the U K ). 45

Fritz Lindner, “Victim of Prejudices Fights to Keep her Family Intact” (16 April

2007), www.imdb .com (accessed 18 December 2009).

It was criticized for its retention of certain stereotypes (of both Asians/Muslims and British ‘mainstreamers’) and as an overly negative portrayal of Muslims/Asians, but there was also praise for positive aspects of the portrayal, as well as for balance, a differentiated perspective, and ‘authenticity’ in spite of the film-makers’ ethnic/religious ‘outsider’ status. See, for example, Munira Mirza, “Yasmin” (16 January 2005), www.culturewars.org.uk (accessed 18 December 2009). There were also several relevant comments by web users from Britain who claimed Muslim and/or Asian identity. While users’ identity-claims on such web pages (often also using abbreviated names or pseudonyms) are impossible to verify and should thus be treated with caution, such comments should not be discounted entirely, because they still provide potentially interesting insights into popular opinion. These comments are: “Ahrais,” “Good Work!” (13 January 2005), “Waheed,” “Yasmin” (15 January 2005), and “Georgemichael1,” “Good Drama, Some Flaws” (14 January 2007), all on www.imdb.com (accessed 18 December 2009). Two further comments from viewers in Britain and Germany who did not state their religious/ethnic identity, but who might potentially be inferred to be Muslim and/or Asian British or Turkish-German on the (albeit problematic) basis of the provenance of their names and/or the content of their remarks, are those of Amna Bashir and S. Bhaskar (nd) on www.nmpft.org.uk (accessed 28 September 2006) and of “Asil” (“briefkasten asil”) on www.imdb.com (accessed 18 December 2009). The latter is the only potential snippet of information 46



Muslims, Integration, and Yasmin

251

responses in both countries suggest that the film fulfilled at least some of its objectives of (re)forming public opinion and creating a more balanced perspective on multiculture, (failed) integration, and Islam. Some viewers indicate that the film prompted them to regard these issues in a different light than previously,47 but other comments – even sympathetic ones – clearly reflect the (perhaps unwitting) retention of certain undifferentiated notions,48 though this can, of course, hardly be blamed on the film alone. Thus, Yasmin not only exposes the crucial role of public discourse and conflicting perceptions in shaping the image(s) of British Muslims as well as attitudes to, and practices of, multiculture, but it also has become a contested medium itself, thus exemplifying some of the problems that beset attempts at cultural mediation, constructions of cultural and national identities, and (re)definitions of boundaries and ‘insider’/‘outsider’ positions in contemporary hybrid, multicultural societies.



about the reception of Yasmin in the German Muslim community that I have so far been able to obtain. 47 Chris Docker, “Bend it like Blunkett” (23 August 2004), www.eyeforfilm.co.uk, republ. www.imdb.com; “Lucky Pinon,” “Changes your Mind!,” www.imdb.com; “Deepblue2,” “Film to Think About,” www .imdb.com (all accessed 18 December 2009). 48 For example, Rodek, “Liebt Yasmin Osama?”; Hans–Jörg Rother, “Die Koranleserin,” Der Tagesspiegel (26 May 2005), www.tagesspiegel.de (accessed 19 May 2008); and a viewer’s comment by “ullethestrange” entitled “Allah Sees it All” (19 March 2009) www.imdb.com (accessed 18 December 2009). Another example is “Ahrais,” who apparently assumed a binary distinction between ‘English’ and ‘Muslim’.

The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany Spatiality, Gender, and the Boundaries of the National Gaze

M ARKUS S CHMITZ

I

N R E C E N T D E B A T E S on immigration, national identity, and citizenship rights in Germany, the notion of a muslimische Parallelgesellschaft (Muslim parallel society) and the trope of Islamic veiling are used as strong arguments in favour of forcing immigrants with non-Western backgrounds (as well as their descendants) into a rigid system of national instructions and public pedagogical operations. Media outlets, backed by politicians and academics, repeatedly represent immigrant districts like Berlin-Kreuzberg/Neukölln as spatial references for their xenophobic call to end multiculturalism. At the same time, the wearing of the Muslim headscarf not only functions in mainstream representations as a gendered marker of the hidden alien and its corporate body, but is also used to support the growing equation of Islam with the oppression of women as well as with intolerance, undemocratic attitudes, and terrorism. While this chapter aims at offering a theoretical perspective on current practices of spatializing cultural otherness, it will also deal with the role of gender in the representation of Muslims and their spaces. The construction of a secluded Oriental sphere is thus reciprocally related to the practice of representing the veiled female body as a site of contestation over the place and rights of Muslims in Germany. This is not to say that there is no objective material basis for current conflicts over the right to the city, its concrete neighbourhoods and streets, such as economic and social hierarchies or housing inequalities linked to ethnicity.

254

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

(German) Muslims, (German) Arabs, (German) Turks or (German) Bosnians are clearly present in Germany’s cities as individuals as well as ethnic communities – and everybody is aware of that. Yet, at the same time they are excluded from Germany as a nation-state that is ideologically constructed in such a way that Muslim immigrants and their descendants cannot be represented in terms other than those of xenophobic stereotyping, exclusions or assimilations. Since I take it for granted that there is discrimination against Muslims (as well as other immigrants and diasporic people of non-Western backgrounds1) in Germany’s educational system, on the labour market, in the mass media, as well as in immigration policies and integration procedures, I do not aim to undertake an empirical investigation into the particular forms in which this discrimination is carried out and experienced. Rather, my present argument focuses on the way in which Germanness is (re)generated and perpetuated by the mainstream through the construction of a national ‘inside’ that depends on a specific spatio-cultural relation to an internal Muslim ‘outside’.

Intention: What About Agency? My primary interest is in analyzing the grammar and the historical semantics of the repressive discourse on Muslim parallel societies and the Muslim headscarf in Germany rather than in tracing its empirical spread or in representing ‘authentic’ articulations of resistance to that very spread. What follows is a critique of representation. The chapter does not investigate the presence of subaltern agency. However, various counter-narratives to the dominant discourse do exist: Yes, the bastards are coming, but not as the Germans would like to have them with kebab, cheap export shop kitsch, multicultural stamping, tearful ‘in a foreign land’-literature and bad rap, draped in gold and sultan chic, mumbling Anatolian songs [. . . ]. Anyone scared?2

This can be said for people of colour generally. “Ja, die Bastarde kommen, aber nicht mit Döner, Exportladenkitsch, Multikultigetrampel tränenreich ‘In der Fremde’-Literatur und schlechtem Rap, goldbehangen im Sultanschick und anatolische Lieder lallend, wie’s der Deutsche gern hätt, wenn überhaupt [. . . ]. Hat jemand Angst bekommen?”; Feridun Zaimolu, Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1998): 61. All translations mine unless otherwise indicated. 1 2



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

255

Anyone scared? – this is the question posed by Çağil, a 27-year-old student, as reproduced in Feridun Zaimolu’s Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft. As its title suggests, the book aims at providing uncanny ‘headstuff’ by giving a voice to those Fremddeutsche (‘Alien-Germans’)3 who speak from the periphery of society. The language used in the book is Kanaka Sprak, the slang of the Kanakas or Kanaksters, as young Turkish-Germans as well as other members of the urban hip-hop scene (both with and without migrant backgrounds) call themselves in a signifying act of repeating, decoding, and recoding Germany’s racist language. The noun Kanake is used in the dominant discourse in a pejorative way to discriminate people from nonWestern, and particularly Turkish, backgrounds. Adapted by members of a stigmatized minority, the term Kanaka signifies more than regained ethnic pride. It expresses the self-confident emancipatory will to speak out and act: “This song is ours. Es geht ab. Kanak Attak!”4 Anyone scared? There is indeed fear of Muslim immigrants and their descendants in Germany. But what are Germans really afraid of when talking about the dangers of opaque and self-contained spaces of difference? What is so provocative about this spatiality that they cannot see?5 Feridun Zaimolu, “Mein Deutschland,” Die Zeit 16 (12 April 2006): 1. The phrase Kanak Attak was coined by Zaimolu, who emerged in the mid-1990s as one of Germany’s most polemical and critical voices on issues of assimilation, integration, and the dialogue between cultures. Here I am referring to Kanak Attak, an anti-nationalist and anti-racist movement, founded predominantly by immigrants of the second generation in 1998 in order to provide a platform to counter the mainstream’s hegemonic definitions and assignments of ethnic identities and roles, and to fight against political and economic inequality. The quotation above is from the English version of the Kanak Attak manifesto. See www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about/manif_eng.html (November 1998; accessed 22 August 2008). ‘Es geht ab’ could be translated as ‘here we go’. On the struggle of immigrants and their descendants for self-representation, as well as on other artistic, literary, and critical practices of writing back by Muslims and people of colour in Germany, see Germany Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, ed. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling & Anton Kaes (Berkeley & London: U of California P , 2007): 383–468, and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland, ed. Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai & Sheila Mysorekar (Münster: Unrast, 2007). 5 Of course, there are also certain visible markers of Muslim presence in German urban spaces, such as mosques or Turkish shops. However, it is my contention that these – although they also trigger certain mainstream anxieties – are not part of the discursive construct of ‘parallel societies’, because the latter, by definition, cannot be seen. Here, it is 3 4

256

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

“I’m afraid you are not a Kanake at all [...] What are you really?”6 These are the words of Wolf Biermann, a well-known liberal left-wing poet and songwriter, who can by no means be considered a member of the extreme right for whom the sheer presence of Turks, Arabs, and other Muslims in Germany is already a national disaster. Nevertheless, during a T V talk show on issues of immigration, national identity, and integration, he shouted very excitedly at his German-Turkish co-disputant. The person addressed by Biermann was the writer and critic Feridun Zaimolu. In my view, it is not the Muslims’ physical presence, the Muslim immigrant/diasporic district or the individual Muslim’s body that is so threatening. The real fear seems to derive from a crisis in the national order of cognitive mapping. Initially, the latter was introduced to locate difference in distant binaries, and it now finds itself confronted with a new domestic geography in which marginalized immigrant communities have inscribed themselves. Thus, the debate on Muslim parallel worlds within German cities could be interpreted as a fetishistic rejection of a fragmented reality that radically questions traditional spatial patterns of knowing (where) oneself (stands). The discursive construction of an urban Orient under German skies therefore simultaneously aims at preserving the imaginative locus of the German self. While it is not my intention to represent the multiple real spaces that social difference and discriminatory geography make,7 or to provide a typology of the material geographical reality of German cities, my interest in discursive spatiality should not be interpreted as merely metaphorical or theoretical. In precisely the lack of visibility that is seen as a threat and functions as a screen for the projection of mainstream fears. 6 “Ich habe die Befürchtung, dass Sie überhaupt kein Kanake sind [. . . ] Was sind Sie wirklich?” – Wolf Biermann in conversation with Feridun Zaimolu, 8 May 1998 in the T V talk show Drei nach neun, produced by Radio Bremen (N D R 3); quoted from Kien Nghi Ha, “Sprechakte – SprachAttakken: Rassismus, Konstruktion kultureller Differenz und Hybridität in einer T V -Talkshow mit Feridun Zaimoglu,” in Migration als biografische und expressive Ressource: Beiträge zur kulturellen Produktion in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft, ed. Margrit Fröhlich, Astrid Messerschmidt & Jörg Walther (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2003): 146. 7 Here I am referring to Edward Soja & Barbara Hooper, “The Space that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith & Steve Pile (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 183–205.



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

257

my view, any counter-hegemonic practice that intends to intervene in the spaces of mass media and politics and that aims at subverting the oppressive spatial effects of sexism, capitalism, and racism needs to locate its struggle within a discursive landscape that is articulated through moments of closure. Therefore, the question of the location of one’s individual or collective emancipatory struggle can only be answered seriously through theoretical appeals to the spatial – whether real spaces, imaginary spaces, or symbolic spaces of representation.8

Method: Historical Contextualization and Theoretical Disordering Edward Said’s emphasis on the struggle over representations of place, space, and identities is of great relevance for this undertaking. The dominant debate on Muslims’ (collective) space within ‘our’ cities is obviously confined by the continuities of what he, when stressing the relationship between power, knowledge, and geography in the economy of orientalizing subject and orientalized object, has described as imaginative geography.9 In contemporary Germany, however, the desire to place the other’s space outside one’s own “by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close and what is far away”10 is confronted with individuals and groups who have left the “theatrical stage”11 to which they were formerly confined by Orientalist spatial reason. While the colonized Orient was historically domesticated by affixing it to a Europe that at the same time was closed in on itself, postcolonial Muslim immigrants are no longer willing to play the special derogative role that the Orient and Islam have traditionally played in the European imagination. To critically illuminate the fetishistic insistence on an invisible or hidden other that has been made a possible object only in its referential alterity, I will address two famous critical discourses: “DissemiNation” by Homi Bhabha12

8 Michael Keith & Steve Pile, “The Place of Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Keith & Pile, 26. 9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): 49. 10 Said, Orientalism, 55. 11 Orientalism, 63. 12 For example, in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 139–70.

258

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

and “Algeria Unveiled” by Frantz Fanon.13 While Fanon’s frankly propagandist essay is a partisan intellectual contribution to the nationalist project of Algerian liberation, written at a moment when the anticolonial struggle had turned into open war, Bhabha’s postcolonial theoretical engagement is clearly antinationalist. It aims at redrawing the frontiers of cultural difference within the metropolitan space at the very moment in which the presence of the postcolonial migrant undermines the narcissistic national imagination of people and home. While the latter reflects on the liminality of the Western nation and on its supplementary blind spots, the former uses the images of unveiling and re-veiling to argue that it was the European will to see, to exhibit, and to control that turned the veil into a weapon of resistance to the colonial gaze and penetration. I decided to engage with these discourses because both seem unresolved when it comes to current debates on integration in Germany. Thus, my recourse in this debate to certain ideas drawn from Fanon’s and Bhabha’s writing does not aim to demonstrate the validity or to provide a refutation of their positions. Rather, I mobilize fragments of their works in order to link my own parallel life within the field of criticism to the world of power, politics, and representations. This chapter is therefore an attempt to link theoretical interests and social commitment. While the urban space (and the human body) functions as a signifying system, it is not my intention to delineate the physical embodiments of this system. My emphasis on the production of space is drawn from the work of Henri Lefebvre,14 which has been taken up most powerfully in the works of Marxist urban geographers like Doreen Massey and Edward W. Soja.15 At the same time, I perceive an urgent need to explore the colonial origins of contemporary metropolitan spatial divisions. Postcolonial criticism has been slow in penetrating metropolitan urban geography. While scholars such as Janet L. Abu-Lughod began to explore the spatiality of colonial discourse, as 13 Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’an V de la révolution algérienne, 1959, tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 21–52. 14 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Production de l’espace, 1974; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), and The Urban Revolution, tr. Robert Bononno (La Révolution Urbaine, 1970; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003). 15 See Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (1991): 24–29, and Soja, Postmodern Geography: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000).



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

259

well as the material and social effects of colonial urban planning, within the colony in the early 1980s,16 it is only much more recently that questions have been raised about how the metropolis and metropolitan spatial identities were altered by colonialism and by the process of decolonization.17 I understand my own attempt at a theoretical disordering of the national isomorphism of people, territory, and belonging as a contribution to the emergent fields of postcolonial geography and postcolonial urban studies.

Uncanny Traces: Distant Histories – Domestic Continuities The idea of Muslim parallel societies represents more than imaginative parasites (sites of paranoia). Recent attempts to re-work national geography by separating the urban space into safe homeland and other spheres purported to be sources of terrorist or sexist threats legitimize and sustain repressive politics of immigration control and forced assimilation.18 What is relevant for the issue at stake is not only the claim that the age of multiculturalism in Germany is over, but the very idea of Europe as homogeneous space.19 As Edward Said and others have demonstrated, the selfimage of the West depends on “positional superiority”20 allowing the West to locate, to observe, and to represent the Orient. What links imperial dominance to the Orientalist’s knowledge is a positionality that permits him/her to narrate the Oriental as inferior. This process cannot be disconnected from 16

See Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton N J : Princeton U P ,

1980). 17 See, for example, Postcolonial Space(s), ed. Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu & Wong Chong Thai (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt & Cheryl McEwan (New York & London: Continuum, 2002). For an early study of the colonial genesis of French urbanism, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge M A & London: M I T Press, 1989). On the field of global cities studies, see also Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). 18 On different phases of multiculturalism, and on its post-9/11 crisis, see Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). See also Kien Nghi Ha & Markus Schmitz, “Der nationalpädagogische Impetus der deutschen Integrations(dis) kurse im Spiegel post-/kolonialer Kritik,” in Cultural Studies und Pädagogik: Kritische Artikulationen, ed. Paul Mecheril & Monika Witsch (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006): 241, 252. 19 See The History of the Idea of Europe, ed. Jan van der Dussen & Kevin Wilson (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). 20 Said, Orientalism, 7.

260

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

the worldly act of establishing the gaze on the Orient and rendering it visible. The history of colonial urbanism in the Middle East not only established new patterns of racial segregation and exclusion by inscribing the hierarchies and power-relations of the colonial order onto the colonized cities, but in turn also effected the modernization of metropolitan spatial technologies. The colonial city was, according to Fanon, an urban space of manichaean disjunction, divided into the zones of the colonizers and the zones of the colonized. This splitting order, established by military planners and engineers, implements an ideology that is governed by “the dictates of mutual exclusion.”21 The separation of the Islamic medina from the European city of the colonizers through concrete practices of urbicidal construction22 and the invention of a so-called ‘cordon sanitaire’ – green-space border strips to prevent contacts between colonizer and colonized – generates a situation of urban apartheid.23 At the same time, it is from this boundary between the old Islamic city and the European one that the European city draws its grandeur, rationality, and modernity.24 And it is the same boundary that, for cultural anthropologists and Orientalists, functions as a metaphorical raison d’être supporting their construction of the essence of Islamic culture. The postulated specificity of Islam can be disclosed only in a comparative analysis in which Europe naturally functions as the reference par excellence.25 In the field of material culture, it was the comparison between traditional Islamic dwellings and the classical European city that allowed Europe to identify its own superior concept of urban culture.26 At the same time, the Orientalist 21 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Richard Philcox (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 2004): 4. 22 See Philipp Misselwitz & Eyal Weizman, “Military Operations as Urban Planning,” in Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia, ed. Anselm Franke (Cologne: Walther König, 2003): 273–81. 23 Abu-Lughod, Rabat, 144–48. 24 See Martin Heidegger, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken,” in Bauen Wohnen Denken: Martin Heidegger inspiriert Künstler, ed. Hans Wielens (Münster: Coppenrath, 1994): 18–33. For Bhabha’s reading of Heidegger, see The Location of Culture, 1, 5. 25 For a critique of the Orientalist idea of the Islamic city, see Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Islamic City: Historical Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 155–76. 26 For more details, see Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), and Regina Göckede, “Der koloniale Le Corbusier: Die Algier-Projekte in postkolonialer Lesart,” Wolkenkuckucksheim: Internationale Zeitschrift



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

261

binary of Islamic umma27 versus Greek polis was used to corroborate the claim that the concept of secular citizenship is a unique product of Western civilization.

Horizons of Solidarity As Talal Asad has demonstrated in his critical anthropology of secularism as a political doctrine,28 the East/West binary is played out in the making and re-making of the modern European nation-state as a society of solidarity among those who are at home. The representation of citizenship depends on distinguishing between those considered citizens and those who are not. Islam constitutes Europe’s primary Other. The essential(ized) Muslim is represented as lacking the idea of (urban) community. The major historical shifts that have shaped the political formations of the secular in European nationstates show how boundaries of moral and legal belonging exclude Muslims.29 When it comes to Muslim immigrants and their descendants, the notion of the European nation-state as an unchangeable subject of civilization with the collective character and culture of a particular people sits uncomfortably with the concept of the abstract citizen. The image of an essential homo islamicus who is ontologically incapable of separating the public from the personal and the state from religion is reactivated within debates about and politics of forced assimilation. Muslim immigrants are already made illegal before they cross the border because the imaginative boundaries of Orientalism have crossed them before they come to Germany.

für Theorie und Wissenschaft der Architektur 10.2 (2006, special issue “From Outer Space: Architekturtheorie ausserhalb der Disziplin”), www.tu-cottbus.de/B T U /Fak2/TheoArch /wolke/deu/Themen/052/Goeckede/goeckede.htm (accessed 9 September 2007). 27 The Islamic umma in its classical meaning is the theological concept of a ‘community’ of faithful individuals who are self-governing but not autonomous. Since, in the Qur’an, the word umma is also used in the sense of ‘a people’, the modern expressions umma ‘arabiyya and ummatu-l-muslimin today are ideologically instrumentalized to denote the ‘Arab nation’ and the ‘Islamic nation’. Both modern terms share a concern with the (Western) concept of the modernizing nation-state. 28 Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003). 29 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 161–72.

262

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

Programming Integration: Modernizing the Integration Regime The new integration programmes have been accompanied by the call for a strict division between those to be integrated and those who shall be excluded.30 Starting with the reform of citizenship law in 1999 and the socalled ‘green-card decree’31 in 2000, the German migration regime has undergone extensive reforms. Especially since 11 September 2001, the debate on limited immigration and controlled integration drifted towards polemics about competing cultural–religious identities. When, on 1 January 2005, the new Zuwanderungsgesetz (immigration act)32 took effect, it unmistakably opted for the europeanization of the national immigrant labour market and for centralized control over non-E U immigrants. Exceptions to this rule were allowed only for highly qualified labour migrants. Today, the new law replaces the previous Ausländergesetz (foreigners act) with the new Aufenthaltsgesetz (residence act). Paragraph 44 of this act specifically regulates the national (re-)socialization of immigrants from non-European countries, who are required to attend so-called ‘integration courses’. Certain immigrants who already reside in Germany and who are perceived as being ‘in particular need of integration measures’ (“besonders integrationsbedürftig”) can be compelled to attend these courses. In cases of non-attendance or insufficient test results, sanctions can range from cuts in welfare and unemployment benefits to denying the renewal of temporary residence or even deportation. Thus, the stigma of ‘being in need of integration’ is turned into a juridical category that intensifies the already discriminatory security regulations of the new residence act (§§ 53–62). While the latter allow deportation in the case of a ‘fact-based prognosis of danger’ (“auf Tatsachen gestützt[e] Gefahrenprognose”), the new integration instruments place Muslim migrants under general suspicion. In the national industry of immigrant commodification, Muslims represent the paradigmatic Other of the normative reference culture. And it is they, more than any other minority group, who are expected Karin Schönwälder, “Assigning the State its Rightful Place? Migration, Integration and the State in Germany,” in Paths of Integration, ed. Lucassen et al., 91–92. 31 The green-card programme was introduced in March 2000 (with only slight success) to attract foreign specialists into the German information-technology industry. 32 “Gesetz zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und zur Regelung des Aufenthaltes und der Integration von Unionsbürgern und Ausländern” (Act on the control and limitation of immigration and on the regulation of residence and integration of E U citizens and foreigners). 30



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

263

to acquire adequate German-language proficiency and familiarize themselves with Germany’s culture, history, and legal system. While the germanization procedure of systematic questioning can easily turn into a form of temporary detention lasting 630 hours, it is officially presented as a form of internal development aid. The integration apparatus claims to transform an ontologically authoritarian, sexist, fundamentalist immigrant, who is insufficiently familiar with ‘our’ principles of democratic coexistence, into a proto-citizen. In its implicit and explicit notion of deficiency compensation, the integration (dis-)course becomes a public instrument of social submission and a technique of cultural subordination that can be traced back to the binary patterns of colonial pedagogies.33 To successfully complete the integration course and to pass the only recently introduced naturalization test34 is to become the product of a flawed neocolonial nationalist mimesis/mimicry, in which to be integrated is still – emphatically – not to be German.35 The integrated Muslim is conceptualized as a person who has divested herself or himself of what the dominant society regards as essential to Muslims. What continues to prove an urgent problem is determining the concrete boundaries of cultural difference. While the first and second generation of Turkish immigrants were largely excluded – as so-called ‘guest workers’ – from social and political participation for ethnic, cultural, and religious reasons, the islamophobic debates of the 1990s on so-called ‘parallel societies’ were closely linked to the question of Germany’s post-unification identity as a European nation-state. In this new ideological battle, the discursive modality of a fundamentalist Islamic parallel society and the fear-scenario of ‘Germany’s balkanization’ have been given a local reference in places like

33 For a detailed analysis of the neocolonial dimensions in Germany’s current discursive and social practices of integration, see Ha & Schmitz, “Der nationalpädagogische Impetus.” 34 The test was introduced on 1 September 2008 by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, based on an amendment to the Nationality Act. See “B M I veröffentlicht Fragenkatalog zum Einbürgerungstest” (7 July 2008), www.bmi.bund.de/cln_028/nn _334158/Internet /Content/Nachrichten/Pressemitteilungen/2008/07/Fragenkatalog Einbuergerungstest.html (accessed 10 September 2008). See also (nd) www.bmi.bund .de/cln_012/nn_122688/Internet/Content/Common/Anlagen/Themen/Staatsangehoe rigkeit/DatenundFakten/Einbuergerungstest_Allgemein,templateId=raw,property=publi cationFile.pdf/Einbuergerungstest_Allgemein.pdf (accessed 20 November 2008). 35 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87.

264

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

Kreuzberg in Berlin.36 The fall of the Wall not only triggered many transformations of Berlin’s material surface, but also generated symbolic struggles over Germany’s cultural identity. The inner-city construction site of Potsdamer Platz quickly became a catalyst for this dispute. By the mid-1990s, the discourse on the architecture and urban planning of Potsdamer Platz was articulated as a clear cultural commitment to the assumed continuity of Berlin’s urban identity as a European city against other traditions. When leading architects called for a conservative modernism inspired by humanistic Cartesian rationalism, architectural integration within the global system went hand in hand with the discursive fabric of Berlin and Germany’s spatio-cultural self as an exclusive product of European culture and Western civilization.37 For unified Berlin, the nearby immigrant district of Kreuzberg represented what the Islamic medina stood for in colonial urbanism: namely, the realm of a constitutive outside for the city’s national regeneration.

Exposing the Hidden – Containing the Outside The Islamic veil constitutes a similar symbolic matrix of negative affirmation. As a “portable habitat”38 it is not only bound up with traditional Islamic concepts of male/female spatial binaries. It is also involved with dominant German modalities of spatial order that create visual and physical control. As a secondary symbol of a veiled space of otherness, it functions like a secluded habitat in the eyes of the German spectator. The notion of veiling and unveiling carries a decisive political stamp, one that can be traced back to the colonial-Orientalist norms of exhibiting and governing. To re-think the ongoing instrumentalization of the veil as a stage for legal and educational debates concerning the (in)compatibility of face-covering with the secular character of the German state, it is not enough to point out the contradictions to be found in feminist and liberal arguments. We need to See Bassam Tibi, Islamische Zuwanderung: Die gescheiterte Integration (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002); Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Helmut Müller & Joachim Schröder, Verlockender Fundamentalismus: Türkische Jugendliche in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 37 On this Kulturkampf around the meaning of architecture, symbolic forms, history, and national identity, see Ute Lehrer, “Willing the Global City: Berlin’s Cultural Strategies of Inter-Urban Competitions after 1989,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 332–38. 38 Z. Pamela Karimi, “Women’s Portable Habitats,” I S I M Newsletter 13 (2003): 14–15. 36



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

265

understand the function of the veil as a fetish object and the role played by gender in constructing images of passive inferiority and superior subjectivity. The concepts of ‘an Islamic parallel society’ and ‘the Islamic headscarf’ embody the idea of what is not Germany. One refers to the urban landscape, the other to a female bodyscape. The common denominator of both ‘scapes’ is the implicit fear of the Other’s lost visibility. A central precondition of integration is self-exhibition: “Please undress a bit faster and explain yourself.”39 This is what, according to Zaimolu’s book, Turkish immigrants are asked to do once they decide to enter the “Alemannenweitewelt,” the wide world of the (native) Germans.40 The German faced with a person of Turkish origin wants to see, just like “the European faced with an Algerian woman wants to see.”41 S/he “reacts in an aggressive way before this limitation of his [her] perception.”42 This is how Fanon explains the frustration of the French colons in Algeria caused by a Muslim woman who wears a veil. For the European observer, the veil represents the feminine Orient. The French occupation forces during the 1930s concentrated their efforts to break the Algerian resistance on the unveiling of women. It was part of the tragedy of the mission civilisatrice “to bring the Algerian to expose himself [or, in this case, herself] [...] in the face of the colonialist.”43 While this colonialist strategy mobilizes humanist narratives of equality and emancipation to dehumanize the Muslim male resistance fighter, there is a second, more unconscious, psychological reason why the veil becomes a bone of contention in colonial discourse. Since their Romantic beginnings, modern representations of the Orient have been strongly tinged with what is hidden or absent, and with the will to unveil a hidden secret and to make it “a possible object of possession.”44 The dialectic of seeing and desire and the fetish character of objecthood under imperialism are closely linked to the practice of gendering colonial geographies. There is a particularly persistent motif in Orientalist representations that associates the so-called Islamic world with the veiled female body.45 The universal Western subject is con39 40 41 42 43 44 45

“Zieh dich doch etwas schneller bitte aus und erkläre dich.” (Zaimolu, Koppstoff, 34.) Zaimolu, Koppstoff, 34. Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 30. “Algeria Unveiled,” 30. “Algeria Unveiled,” 26. “Algeria Unveiled,” 29. Said, Orientalism, 186–90.

266

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

stituted through the feminization of the Orient as a passive object of scopic penetration. This phallo(go)centric perception of Muslims finds its paradigmatic expression in the motif of the harem, a heterotopian kind of spatiality within the patriarchal symbolic universe of Orientalism.46 The epistemology by which civilization and barbarism are classified cannot exist “without a racially exotic counterpoint” that functions as a “reference point of difference, critique, and desire.”47 While charges of decadence and sexual licentiousness were used to legitimize early colonialism as a civilizing mission, from the early twentieth century onwards Islam was attacked by Westerners for its alleged repression of (sexual) freedoms, particularly those of women.48 However, as Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” demonstrates, this pseudo-liberal discourse of “doing them good in spite of themselves”49 by unveiling Muslim women and westernizing Arabs has its origin in the colonial dialectic of body and territory. He reminds us that it was under latecolonial conditions that Islamic veiling was first transformed into a revolutionary technique of resistance to being integrated into the occupiers’ order of things.50 The equation of land and woman at once turns the veiled woman into a colonial symbol of the landscape to be conquered and possessed, and into the emblem of the colonized refusal to receive Europe’s emancipatory seed. In my view, Fanon’s polemic on the taboo and the cult of the veil risks reducing Algerian women to patriarchal nationalist symbols of Algerian male (dis)honour. Nevertheless, it helps in critically re-thinking the current debate on the place of veiled Muslims in Germany. The motive for unveiling Muslim immigrants in the Western metropole may itself, at certain historical

On the colonial fantasy of the harem, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, tr. Myrna & Wlad Godzich (Le harem colonial: Images d’un sous-érotisme, 1981; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1986). See also Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race & Class 27.2 (1985): 13, and Veena Das, “Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Colonial Organization of Knowledge,” Berkshire Review 21 (1986): 72–73. For the spatial concept of heterotopia, see Michel Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. 47 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1995): 6. 48 See Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2007): 3–10. 49 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 48. 50 On the reappearance of the veil as a means of the Algerian liberation struggle, see Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 32–49. 46



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

267

moments, be a form of imperial control.51 Meyda Yegenolu argues that the colonial perception of the veiled woman has been inherited by Western feminism in such a way that the status of the ‘liberated’ Western white woman is contingent on a juxtaposition with an ‘oppressed’ Muslim woman.52 To frame veiling simply as a quasi-criminal sign of patriarchal oppression and undemocratic attitudes not only obscures the inner contradictions and inconsistencies of the liberal democratic divide between public/secular and private/religious domains, but at the same time neglects the fact that the articulation of the public and the private in modern nation-states such as Germany is built on colonial history as well as on the postcolonial continuities of power-relationships. Using the veil as a political symbol to stigmatize and exclude an immigrant minority, while launching integration summits and presenting a national integration plan53 strengthens pre-existing negative attitudes towards Muslims. It helps islamophobia to enter the mainstream debate and reinforces discrimination against Muslim immigrants. The dominant coverage of Islamic veiling does not aim to uncover the truth about the life of Muslims in Germany, or to cover up Germany’s involvement in the cultural construction of a veiled other. Rather, it uses the trope of the veil as a screen on which it projects everything the German mainstream happens not to like about itself. It allows racists to discriminate Muslims under cover of liberal ideas and it legitimizes the attempts of the democratic state to cover (i.e. to monitor) them as potential enemies within. However, in times of crisis, the veil can be instrumentalized as a weapon to limit the dominant percep-

51 See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey & Jane Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1997): 148–63, and Meyda Yegenolu, Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). 52 Yegenolu, Colonial Fantasies, 102. 53 In July 2006, at the invitation of Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, an integration summit took place for the first time. Participants included representatives of the state, civic groups, media, culture, science, trade and industry as well as migrant organizations. The objective was to prepare a joint strategy on integration policy. The results were presented at the second integration summit in July 2007 as the National Integration Plan. See Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung (press and information office of the federal government), Der Nationale Integrationsplan: Neue Wege – neue Chancen (July 2007), www.bundesregierung.de (accessed 17 September 2007).

268

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

tion. The Muslim woman “who sees without being seen”54 does not offer herself to be integrated into the scopic power-relations of the German integration regime. She symbolically ensures that face-to-face interactions, which are “riddled with narcissistic and aggressive fantasy,” never take place.55 While wearing the headscarf can, from the dominant perspective, be interpreted as a threat of disintegration, it is in fact a versatile metaphor that assumes various meanings and functions. Thus, it is not surprising that Muslim immigrant districts like Kreuzberg/Neukölln are repeatedly represented as veiled urban spaces, spaces that cannot be seen but that can fill gaps in the imagination; spaces that are perceived as covered by the protective mantle of a parallel society and that must be turned into submissive objects of governmental scrutiny. It becomes obvious that the power of the integrative gaze extends beyond the question of women’s rights and Islamic oppression. Indeed, it can be linked to the history of panoptic surveillance. The notion of a totally obstructed line of vision between German mainstream society and the Muslim parallel society discursively places a split screen (i.e. a veil) on which the debates on integration are mediated.

Performing Integration and National Regeneration Kreuzberg/Neukölln has been dubbed Klein-Istanbul (Little Istanbul) owing to its large number of residents with a Turkish background. Yet the district is not an Oriental enclave in Occidental Berlin. Nor is living there the free choice of Turkish or Arab immigrants and their descendants. Turkish guest workers were brought to West Berlin to compensate for the massive loss of workers in West Germany after the construction of the Wall. Forced to live in wretched worker hostels, they finally obtained permanent residence permits and were allowed to bring their partners and children to Berlin. The municipality offered them apartments in rundown areas that had already been assigned for area-regeneration schemes. Many Germans moved out, and only the elderly and socially challenged individuals continued to live in the district. Other groups moved in, such as students from West Germany avoiding military service, as well as asylum seekers and refugees from all over the world. While in 1975 the Berlin municipality officially blocked the influx Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 29. W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2005): 296. 54 55



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

269

of non-E U citizens to avoid what was described as ghettoization, in the 1980s it started promoting the image of a multicultural site as a tourist attraction.56 Today the public debate about places like Kreuzberg or Neukölln is characterized by the ambivalent interplay between celebrating and stigmatizing cultural difference. It continuously shifts between marginalizing and marketing the margin. While, for instance, a recent special issue of the magazine Der Spiegel represented Neukölln as a paradigmatic example of the voluntary ghettoization and failed integration of Muslims,57 the local magazine zitty – in an article entitled “Neukölln rockt” (‘Neukölln rocks’) – informed its young readership that the immigrant district had advanced to Berlin’s latest and most exciting subcultural playground.58 However, the political and journalistic mainstream uses the neologism Parallelgesellschaften (parallel societies) to argue for an even more repressive integration policy. The phrase functions as a spatial reference for the Muslims’ refusal to integrate. At the same time, it represents all that is not compatible with Germany’s imagined cultural homogeneity. It was the Syrian-German political scientist Bassam Tibi who, in 1996, coined the term Europäische Leitkultur (European leading culture).59 It was quickly modified by journalists and politicians into calls for a German ‘leading culture’.60 The concept of a ‘parallel society’ was introduced in the same year by the social scientist Wilhelm Heitmeyer to denote segregated immigrant communities. In particular, he suspected the urban youth of Turkish-Islamic descent of forming fundamentalist counter-worlds on the edges of German society. Heitmeyer thus provided a model argument for the ongoing alarmist polemic against so-called hate preachers, potential terrorist

For a detailed history and political contextualization, see Stephan Lanz, Berlin aufgemischt: abendländisch, multikulturell, kosmopolitisch? (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 57 Norbert F. Potzl, “Schatten über Almanya,” Spiegel Special: Allah im Abendland. Der Islam und die Deutschen 2 (2008): 9–10. 58 Daniel Boese, “Neukölln rockt,” zitty 6 (2006): 15–16. 59 Tibi, “Multikultureller Werte-Relativismus und Werte-Verlust,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement to Das Parlament 52–53 (1996): 27–36. He later elaborated this idea in Europa ohne Identität: Leitkultur oder Wertebeliebigkeit (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 1998): 163–91. 60 The term was first used by Theo Sommer, editor of the ‘liberal’ weekly Die Zeit, in “Der Kopf zählt, nicht das Tuch,” Die Zeit 30 (1998), www.zeit.de/archiv (accessed 27 September 2008). 56

270

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

‘sleepers’, honour killers, and the like.61 Over the course of time, especially after 11 September 2001 and in the wake of the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004, the ‘diagnosis’ of the invisible formation and expansion of Islamic fundamentalist parallel societies within Germany’s metropolitan space became the key argument for bidding a national farewell to the ‘false’ and ‘deadly’ tolerance of multiculturalism. The option propounded instead was a fortified democracy, supposed to self-confidently defend the values of ‘our’ open society against Islamic fundamentalist infiltration.62 Political scientists who attempted to supply empirical evidence for the existence of Islamic parallel societies, and even those who tried to provide an alternative terminology, such as “incomplete parallel societies,”63 further helped to solidify the threatening narrative of the veiled duplication of Germany’s urban spaces as a viable scholarly diagnosis. What has been overlooked is the structural closeness of this discursive reconfiguration of national locality as a split space of internal liminality to the historical slogan “a state within the state.”64 Since the late-eighteenth century, it has been used for the paranoid projection of a completely segregated internal other. Until the end of the Nazi regime it particularly haunted German Jews. It is not my intention here to compare the discursive strategies of antisemitism and anti-Islam. Rather, I am interested in understanding the nationalist need to contain(er) a constitutive outside within the nation. Concerning the question of Islamic parallel societies, I therefore do not call “for a culture 61 Wilhelm Heitmeyer, “Für türkische Jugendliche in Deutschland spielt der Islam eine wichtige Rolle,” Die Zeit 35 (1996) www.zeit.de/archiv (accessed 4 August 2008). See also Verlockender Fundamentalismus, ed. Heitmeyer, Müller & Schröder. 62 For prominent examples of these polemics, see Stefan Luft, Abschied von Multikulti: Wege aus der Integrationskrise (Gräfelfing: Resch, 2006), Die Gotteskrieger und die falsche Toleranz, ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002), and Günther Lachmann, Tödliche Toleranz: Die Muslime und unsere offene Gesellschaft (Munich: Piper, 2006). 63 “unvollständige Parallelgesellschaften,” Thomas Meyer, “Parallelgesellschaft und Demokratie,” Online Akademie der Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (7 February 2007), http://library .fes.de/pdf-files/akademie/online/50368.pdf (accessed 25 August 2008). See also Dirk Halm & Martina Sauer, “Parallelgesellschaft und ethische Schichtung,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement to Das Parlament 1 (2006), www.das-parlament.de /2006/0102/beilage/003.html (accessed 25 August 2008). 64 Jacob Katz, “A State within the State: The History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan,” in Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1972): 47–76.



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

271

of close observation,”65 as the German anthropologist Werner Schiffauer does when recommending an ethnological case-study of a failed honour murder in Berlin as an appropriate method to grasp the Muslim immigrant’s perception of himself and the world. Instead, I plead for facing ourselves seeing: i.e. to look at the majority’s dependence on self-completion by setting its gaze on the nation’s edge. In my view, the real spectacle of integration we are witnessing in Germany today derives from a loss of clear representational divisions to exhibit the national self against the background of subaltern cultures. The discourse about veiled parallel societies within Germany’s cities in many ways represents the nationalist attempt to reproduce a gendered spatial abject by symbolically situating Muslim migrants outside the national order.66 As the social scientist and member of Kanak Attak Serhat Karakayali has pointed out in his critique of the national integration plan, immigrants and their descendants are considered to be a problem “precisely because they cannot be recognized as being outside.”67 The ambivalence of performative ‘ousting’ does not result from a clearly perceptible object of intrinsic difference that is opposed to the individual ego. Rather, it derives from a national superego that fears being annihilated once it acknowledges internal difference. The national superego therefore tries to safeguard its authority by excluding this tangible threat and relegating it to an imaginary border realm. Thus, the nation and its narrative closures are acted out on the backs of immigrants and their descendants. As Henri Lefebvre argued as early as 1968, the principally imperialist contradiction between centre and periphery and “between integration and segregation” has shifted to the metropolitan “urban phenomenon itself.”68 It was against the background of the historic defeat of French colonialism in Al65 “für eine Kultur des genauen Hinsehens,” Schiffauer, Parallelgesellschaften: Wie viel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Für eine kluge Politik der Differenz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008): 15. 66 Here, I am of course referring to Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). 67 “gerade weil sie nicht erkennbar draussen sind,” Karakayali, “Ambivalente Integration,” Dossier: Der nationale Integrationsplan auf dem Prüfstand, Heinrich-Boell Foundation website (November 2007), www.migration-boell.de/web/integration/47_1366.asp (accessed 23 August 2008). 68 Lefebvre, “The Urban Revolution,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Brenner & Keil, 412.

272

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z 

geria and under the impression of ongoing immigration from North Africa to Paris that Lefebvre developed his appeal for a new understanding of the urban dialectic “of place and non-place (elsewhere).”69 Thus, when analyzing Germany’s integration pedagogy as a performative process of ambivalent identification, we should keep in mind the postcolonial dialectic between isotopy and heterotopia.

How German Are You, Really? Homi Bhabha postulates that the “tension between the pedagogical and the performative”70 is not only constitutive of the narrative construction of nationness but also becomes concrete as a sign of liminality within the nation-space itself.71 If he is right, how is the ambivalent movement of turning cultural difference “from the boundary ‘outside’ to its finitude ‘within’”72 expressed in Germany’s marginalizing integration73 of Muslim immigrants and their descendants? On the one hand, the totality of the nation can no longer be signified. On the other, the point of departure and the point of reference for the practice of supplementary integration is precisely this imagined cohesion. Integration courses, language diplomas, and naturalization exams are performative spaces that cater more to the interests of the majority than to the individual needs of those who are added to the asserted abstract unity. The public mediation of the immigrant’s transformation into a citizen is part of the pedagogical project of national self-identification through patriotic commemoration.74 A particularly significant example is the T V quiz show Wie deutsch bist Du wirklich? (‘How German are you, really?’), broadcast on 4 September 2008.75 Three days after the naturalization test was introduced, the quiz show addressed the nation’s majority with the following question: “How many Lefebvre, “The Urban Revolution,” 412. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 146. 71 The Location of Culture, 146. 72 The Location of Culture, 150. 73 The Location of Culture, 151. 74 On the role of mass media in the German integration discourse, see Massenmedien und die Integration ethnischer Minderheiten in Deutschland, ed. Reiner Geissler & Horst Pöttker (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). 75 The quiz show was produced by A R D , a major T V station run under public law. See www.daserste.de/wiedeutsch/sendung.asp (accesed 7 September 2008). 69 70



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

273

Germans would actually be able to pass the naturalization test?”76 Among the invited candidates were politicians, movie actors, comedians, as well as the Iraqi-German T V presenter Dunja Hayali and the Tunisian-German rapper Bushido, who in 2005 released his album Staatsfeind Nr. 1 (‘Public Enemy No. 1’) to great acclaim. The members of the audience present in the studio were not passive bystanders. Divided into four groups – city mayors, school pupils, teachers, and so-called Passanwärter (candidates for the (German) passport: i.e. for naturalization) – they performed both as subjects and as objects of the national integration experiment. In addition, T V viewers at home were asked to participate live and to test their level of Germanness via the Internet in the fields of politics, history, geography, and society. The T V show’s well-known host Reinhold Beckmann not only presented “our [sic] candidates for the passport” as objects of the national inventory to be commodified via integration, but also called for the majority’s belated socialization and secondary education as Germans. Online newspapers like Die Welt online provide further opportunities to participate in these national pedagogies of systematic self-questioning and collective affirmation.77 In the same vein, in October 2008, the T V station Z D F launched its history series Die Deutschen (‘The Germans’): ten docufictions on a thousand years of German history that were supposed to transform T V consumers’ Sunday evenings into hours of national contemplation by teaching them answers to the questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong?”78 Observing current debates on integration through these public mediations of nationalist pedagogy allows us to critically review the strategy of signifying the veiled spaces and faces of Muslim minorities as markers of cultural difference. It encourages us to re-read Bhabha’s reflections on the nation’s double narrative of splitting as a critical comment on the dialectic of integration and national regeneration in Germany:

“Wie viele Deutsche wären eigentlich in der Lage den Einbürgerungstest zu bestehen?” 77 “Einbürgerungstest: Kennen Sie Deutschland?” (nd), http://appl.welt.de/quiz/ (accessed 10 October 2008). 78 “Wer sind wir? Woher kommen wir? Wohin gehören wir?” See www.diedeutschen .zdf.de/ (accessed 26 October 2008), and Jochen Hieber, “Z D F -Serie ‘Die Deutschen’: Geschichte im Fernsehen ist immer Roman” (23 October 2008), F A Z .Net, http: //fazarchiv.faz.net/ (accessed 26 October 2008). 76

274

M A R K U S S C H M I T Z  the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy [. . . ] while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative.79

Relegating the postnational/postcolonial ambivalence of an immigrant inner-city sphere to a self-contained world of pure difference interpretatively blocks off what is considered as blurring the national boundaries of Germany’s imaginary political geography. Instead of giving voice to the complex spaces of minorities, the dominant integration industry promises to place transformed minoritary subjects in the abstract order of a self-contained nation. As long as the spatialization of urban identities remains confined to the matrix of nationalism, racism, and cultural essentialism, places like Berlin cannot claim to be locations of openness, equality, and social justice. Under these conditions, wearing the headscarf by free choice does not necessarily indicate religious affiliations, undemocratic attitudes, or patriarchy. Instead, it can become a daily strategy to counter the binary neocolonial order of the gaze and hierarchical observation – an emancipatory appropriation of an inverted Orientalist trope in order to unveil the ideological boundaries of liberal Western democracies. To subvert the dominant integrationist imperative, these patterns of siting cultural difference must be traced back to the colonial production of knowledge. At the same time, current conflicts over who can live in Germany with which socio-economic and cultural rights are determined by contemporary international political and military conjunctures. The performance of more distant geographies such as Iraq, Palestine or Afghanistan of course influences local perceptions of belonging and non-belonging. However, while it remains a theoretical problem to situate discontinuities and continuities with respect to one another, the awareness of historical ambivalence in the colonial-nationalist semantics of self-generation can help to undermine the authority of a migration regime that is “anxious about (Muslim) exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond.”80

79 80

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145. Asad, Formations, 180.



The Current Spectacle of Integration in Germany

275

Thus, Bushido’s apparently naive question posed at the very end of the above-mentioned quiz show could be interpreted as a first step in the right direction, laying bare the inner contradictions of the integrationist ideology: “So now, am I still German or what?”



Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. “The Islamic City: Historical Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 155–76. ——. Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1980). Adefra. Exhibition “ ‘ Generation A D E F R A ’: 20 Jahre Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland,” Museum for European Cultures (Museum Europäischer Kulturen), Berlin–Dahlem, 2006, www.adefra.de/P D F /Konferenzprogramm%20und%20 Anmeldungsformular .pdf Adelson, Leslie A. “Opposing Oppositions: Turkish-German Questions in Contemporary German Studies,” German Studies Review 17.2 (1994): 305–30. “Afternoon Tea for Two from just £10,” Sunday Telegraph (6 May 2007): 33. Agyemong, Kofi, & Patricia Elcock. “Urban Afro Saxons: What Makes You British?” (MS, 2003, courtesy of Talawa Theatre Company). “A H R Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111.5 (2006): 1441–64. “A H R Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112.3 (2007): 710–99. Aldrich, Robert. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Alibhai–Brown, Yasmin. “Black Art Can Be Bad, just as Art by Whites,” The Independent (2 May 2005), www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown /yasmin-alibhaibrown-black-art-can-be-bad-just-like-art-by-whites-489793.html (accessed 18 January 2010). ——. Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). ——, Candace Allen, Ted Cantle & Dreda Say Mitchell. “Multiculturalism: A Failed Experiment?” (3 November 2006), 7 pp., www.eurozine.com (accessed 14 December 2009). Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem, tr. Myrna & Wlad Godzich (Le harem colonial: Images d’un sous-érotisme, 1981; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1986). Ames, Eric, Marcia Klotz & Lora Wildenthal, ed. Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 2005).

278

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. 1991, London & New York: Verso, 2006). Anderson, David. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2005). Anderson, Warwick. “Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-Century France and England,” Victorian Studies 35 (1992): 135–57. ——. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2006). Ani, Ekpenyong, Jasmin Eding, Maisha M. Eggers, Katja Kinder & Peggy Piesche. “Transformationspotentiale, kreative Macht und Auseinandersetzungen mit einer kritischen Differenzpositionierung,” in In Bewegung bleiben: 100 Jahre Politik, Kultur und Geschichte von Lesben, ed. Gabriele Dennert, Christiane Leidinger & Fransziska Rauchhut (Berlin: Querverlag, 2007): 164–67. Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies 30 (1988): 13–24. ——. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). ——, & Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public Modernity in India,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 1–20. Aragay, Mireia, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte & Pilar Zozaya. British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Arana, R. Victoria. “Black American Bodies in the Neo-Millennial Avant-Garde Black British Poetry,” Literature and Psychology 48.4 (2002): 47–80. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Harcourt, 2005). Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987). Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2000). Asmis, W. “Eingeborenenrecht und Eingeborenenpolitik in der Goldküste und in Nigerien,” Koloniale Rundschau (1912): 678–706. Asmis, W. “Law and Policy: Relating to the Natives of the Gold Coast and Nigeria,” Journal of the African Society 12 (1912–13): 17–51. Assmann, Jan. “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann & Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 9–19. Aston, Elaine. Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003).



Works Cited

279

——, & Geraldine Harris, ed. Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). ——, & Janelle Reinelt, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000). “Awards for Yasmin,” www.imdb.com (accessed 18 December 2009). Bachmann–Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006). Bade, Klaus J. Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). ——, ed. Imperialismus und Kolonialmission: Kaiserliches Deutschland und koloniales Imperium (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982). ——, & Jochen Oltmer, ed. Aussiedler: Deutsche Einwanderer aus Osteuropa (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1999). Bahloul, Joëlle. “On ‘ Cabbages and Kings’: The Politics of Jewish Identity in PostColonial French Society and Cuisine,” in Food in Global History, ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder C O : Westview, 1999): 92–106. Barkan, Elazar. Völker klagen an: Eine neue internationale Moral (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2000). Barker, Howard. Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2nd ed., 1993). Barker, Martin. The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London: Junction, 1980). Barlösius, Eva. “Nahrung als Kommunikationsmittel: Über die kulinarische Hierarchie als Abbild zwischenstaatlicher Machtdifferentiale,” in Brücken zwischen Zivilisationen: Zur Zivilisierung ethnisch–kultureller Differenzen und Machtungleichheiten – das türkisch–deutsche Beispiel, ed. Hans–Peter Waldhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1997): 137–51. Barry, Elizabeth, & William Boles. “Beyond Victimhood: Agency and Identity in the Theatre of Roy Williams” (2006), in Alternatives Within the Mainstream, ed. Godiwala, 297–313. Barth, Boris, & Jürgen Osterhammel, ed. Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserungen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Constance: U V K , 2005). Bashford, Alison. “Medicine, Gender, and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 112–33. Basu, Shrabani. Curry in the Crown (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 1999). ——. Curry: The Story of the Nation’s Favourite Dish (Stroud: Sutton, 2005). Baum, Andreas. “30 Jahre Döner,” zitty 5 (2001): 16–20. Bauschinger, Sigrid, & Susan L. Cocalis, ed. “Neue Welt” – “Dritte Welt”: Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik (Tübingen: Francke, 1994). Bayly, Christopher. The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). ——. “The Second British Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography, ed. Robin Winks (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 54–72.

280

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Beard, Francesca, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Ian Marchant, Kara Miller, Courttia Newland, Richard Rai O’Neill & Rommi Smith. White Open Spaces: Seven Plays about Race and Belonging in the Countryside (London: Oberon, 2006). Beard, George Miller. American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881; New York: Arno, 1973). Beaufoy, Simon. Interview conducted by Hanns–Georg Rodek [sic] entitled “ ‘ Diese Frauen führen ein Doppelleben’,” Berliner Morgenpost (26 May 2005), www.morgenpost .de (accessed 13 December 2009). Beautheae, Nadine, Gilles Brochard, Catherine Donzel, Alain Stella & Marc Walter. The Book of Tea, tr. Deke Dusinberre (Le livre du thé, 1991; tr. 1992, 2nd ed. 2005). Becci, Irene. “The Veil Debate: When the Religious Other and the Gendered Other Are One,” in Resituating Culture, ed. Titley, 125–49. Bechhaus–Gerst, Marianne, & Reinhard Klein–Arendt, ed. AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Münster: L I T , 2004). ——, & Reinhard Klein–Arendt, ed. Die (koloniale) Begegnung: AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland (1880–1945) – Deutsche in Afrika (1880–1945) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003). Becker, Frank. “Einleitung: Kolonialherrschaft und Rassenpolitik” (2004), in Rassenmischehen – Mischlinge – Rassentrennung, ed. Becker, 11–26. ——, ed. Rassenmischehen – Mischlinge – Rassentrennung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004). Beckstein, Günther. “Annäherung an die Leitkultur,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 3 (1999): 44–45. Beeton, Isabella Mary. The Book of Household Management (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861). Belasco, Warren J. “Ethnic Fast Food: The Corporate Melting Pot,” Food and Foodways 2.1 (1987): 1–30. Beloff, Max. “The British Empire,” History Today 46.2 (1996): 13–20. Berg, Karl. “Der Sadist,” in Der Sadist: Gerichtsärztliches und Kriminalpsychologisches zu den Taten des Düsseldorfer Mörders Peter Kürten, ed. Michael Farin (Munich: belleville, 2004): 69–192. Berghoff, Hartmut, & Dieter Ziegler. “Pionier und Nachzügler: Kategorien für den deutsch– britischen Vergleich?” in Pionier und Nachzügler? Vergleichende Studien zur Geschichte Grossbritanniens und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, ed. Berghoff & Ziegler (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1995): 15–28. Berman, Nina. Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1997). ——. “On the Relevance of Comparative Cultural Knowledge for German Literary Studies,” German Quarterly 78.2 (2005): 243–45. ——. Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997). ——. “Transnationalism and German Studies,” on-line posting, 18 January 2006, [email protected]



Works Cited

281

Berman, Russell. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1998). Besser, Stephan. “Tropenkoller: The Interdiscursive Career of a German Colonial Syndrome,” in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. George S. Rousseau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 303–20. B E S T : Black European Studies. Homepage, www.best.uni-mainz.de/modules/Informationen /index.php?id=13 (accessed 4 March 2010). Best, Nicholas. “They Died Cursing the British,” Sunday Telegraph (16 January 2005). Betts, G. Gordon. The Twilight of Britain: Cultural Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Toleration (New Brunswick N J : Transaction, 2001). Betts, Raymond F. Decolonization: The Making of the Contemporary World (London: Routledge 1998). Bevan, Sheila. Letter to Elizabeth Buettner, 7 November 2004. Bhabha, Homi K. “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 201–17. ——. “Culture’s In-Between” (1996), in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall & du Gay, 53–60. ——. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 291–322. ——. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 1–7. ——. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). ——. “The Manifesto,” Wasafiri 29 (1999): 38–39. ——. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (1984), repr. in The Location of Culture, 85–92. ——. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817” (1985), repr. (1986) in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Gates, 163–92. ——, ed. Nation and Narration (London & New York: Routledge, 1990). Bhachu, Parminder. “It’s Hip to Be Asian: The Local and Global Networks of Asian Fashion Entrepreneurs in London,” in Transnational Spaces, ed. Philip Crang, Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 40–59. Bhaji on the Beach, dir. Gurinder Chadha (Channel 4 & Umbi, U K 1993; 101 min.). Bhaskar, Sanjeev. Short review of Yasmin, The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television website, www.nmpft.org.uk, n.d. (accessed 28 September 2006). Bhogal, Vicky, Cooking Like Mummyji: Real British Asian Cooking (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Bickers, Robert. Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Bickford–Smith, Vivian. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). Bidisha. “The Arts Column,” The Observer (4 November 2007): 13.

282

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Billington, Michael. “Review of Angel House,” Theatre Record (28 January 2008): 134. Birnbaum, Karl. “Entartung,” in Handwörterbuch der medizinischen Psychologie, ed. Birnbaum (Leipzig: Thieme, 1930): 116–20. ——. Die krankhafte Willensschwäche und ihre Erscheinungsformen: Eine psychopathologische Studie für Ärzte, Pädagogen und gebildete Laien (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1911). ——. Über psychopathische Persönlichkeiten (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1909). Blair, Tony. “The Duty to Integrate: Shared British Values” (Part 5 in 8-part lecture series “Our Nation’s Future”), 8 December 2006, transcript, www.number-10.gov.uk /output/Page10563.asp (accessed 14 December 2009). Bley, Helmut. Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1894–1914 (Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968). Tr. Hugh Ridley as South-West Africa under German Rule (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1971); repr. as Namibia under German Rule (Hamburg: L I T , 1996). Bloch, Iwan. Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit in seinen Beziehungen zur modernen Kultur (Berlin: Louis Marcus, 1907). Blunt, Alison, & Cheryl McEwan, ed. Postcolonial Geographies (New York & London: Continuum, 2002). “B M I veröffentlicht Fragenkatalog zum Einbürgerungstest” (7 July 2008), www.bmi.bund .de/cln_028 /nn_334158/Internet/Content/Nachrichten/Pressemitteilungen/2008/07 /FragenkatalogEinbuergerungstest.html (accessed 10 September 2008). Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995). Boese, Daniel. “Neukölln rockt,” zitty 6 (2006): 15–16. Böhlke–Itzen, Janntje. Kolonialschuld und Entschädigung: Der deutsche Völkermord an den Hereros (1904–1907) (diploma thesis, Hamburger Universität für Wirtschaft und Politik; Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2004). ——, & Joachim Zeller. “Eine schöne Erinnerung: Wie der deutsche Kolonialismus heute verherrlicht wird,” iz3w. informationszentrum 3. welt 297 (2006): 14–17. Böll, Heinrich. Group Portrait with Lady, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Gruppenbild mit Dame, 1971; New York: McGraw–Hill, 1973). Bongard, Oscar. Wie wandere ich nach deutschen Kolonien aus? Ratgeber für Auswanderungslustige (Berlin: Süsserott, 1907). Bose, Brinda. “Transgressions: Female Desire and Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Indian Women’s Cinema,” in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, ed. Brinda Bose & Bishnupriky Ghosh (New York & London: Garland, 1997): 119–33. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: T. Cadell, F.C. & J. Rivington, 1822), http://books.google.de (accessed 8 August 2008). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Le sens pratique, 1980; Cambridge: Polity, 1990). ——. Masculine Domination, tr. Richard Nice (La Domination Masculine, 1998; Cambridge: Polity, 2001).



Works Cited

283

Boyce, D. George. Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Bradley, Ian. “Queen of Diversity: Face to Faith,” The Guardian (3 June 2002), www .guardian.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009). Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996). Brandt, Max von. Die englische Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialverwaltung (Halle: Gebauer–Schwetschke, 1906). Bride & Prejudice, dir. Gurinder Chadha (Bride Productions, U K / U S A 2004; 107 min.). Briggs, John Henry. In the East African War Zone (London: C M S , 1918). Bröck, Sabine, & Anna Koenen. “Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Any More: Toni Morrison als Repräsentantin afroamerikanischer Erzählerinnen,” in Frauen Literatur Politik, ed. Annegret Pelz, Marianne Schuller, Inge Stephan, Sigrid Weigel & Kerstin Wilhelms (Hamburg: Argument, 1988): 180–88. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847). Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1985). Buchholz, Hans Eberhard. “Imports and Consumption of Coffee in Germany” (doctoral dissertation, Göttingen University, 1961). Budde, Gunilla, Sebastian Conrad & Oliver Janz, ed. Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). Buettner, Elizabeth. “Cemeteries, Public Memory, and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,” History & Memory 18.1 (2006): 5–42. ——. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004). Bunzl, Matti, & H. Glenn Penny, ed. Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2003). Burton, Antoinette M. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003). ——. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2003). ——. “India, Inc.? Nostalgia, Memory and the Empire of Things,” in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2001): 217–32. ——, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). Byrnes, Sholto. “Meet Britain’s Only Black Farmer,” The Independent on Sunday (6 November 2005), www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/meet-britains-only-blackfarmer 514156.html (accessed 18 January 2010). Çağlar, Ayşe. “ ‘ McDoner’: Doner Kebap and the Social Positioning Struggle of German Turks,” in Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity, ed. Gary J. Bamossy & Janeen A. Costa (Thousand Oaks C A : Sage, 1995): 209–30. Cantle, Ted. “Parallel Lives,” www.eurozine.com (3 November 2006), 6 pp. (accessed 16 December 2009).

284

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Carby, Hazel. “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982): 212–35. Carey, John. “A Good Man in Africa?” Sunday Times (18 March 2007). Casciani, Dominic. “Islamophobia Pervades U K : Report” (2 June 2004), http://news .bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009). ——. “U K ‘Islamophobia’ Rises after 11 September” (29 August 2002), http://news .bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009). Castles, Stephen. “The Guests who Stayed: The Debate on ‘Foreigners Policy’ in the German Federal Republic,” International Migration Review 19.3 (1985): 517–34. Ceylan, Rauf. Ethnische Kolonien: Entstehung, Funktion und Wandel am Beispiel türkischer Moscheen und Cafés (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000) Chanock, Martin. The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001). Chapman, Pat. The 1999 Good Curry Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998). Chatterjee, Piya. A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2001). Chin, Rita. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2007). Chowdhry, Maya, & Nina Rapi, ed. Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance (New York & London: Harrington Park, 1998). Ciarlo, David M. “Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire: Colonialism and German Mass Culture, 1887–1914” (doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2003. ——. “Rasse konsumieren: Von der exotischen zur kolonialen Imagination in der Bildreklame des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs,” in Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Birthe Kundrus (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003): 136–79. Cibber, Colley. The Lady’s Last Stake or The Wife’s Resentment, in The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Esq., 5 vols., vol. 2 (London: J. Rivington, 1777): 193–299, http://books.google .de (accessed 21 January 2010). Clapp, Susannah. “Scrum Dancing,” Observer (29 February 2004), Review: 12. Clark, Rex, & Oliver Lubrich. “German Studies Go Postcolonial,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (2002): 625–34. Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Cohen, Deborah, & Maura O’Connor, ed. Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (The Cantle Report, Home Office, December 2001), http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents /2001/12/11/communitycohesionreport.pdf (accessed 14 December 2009).



Works Cited

285

Conlan, Frank F. “Dining out in Bombay,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 90–127. Conrad, Sebastian. “Doppelte Marginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 145–69. ——. Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006). ——. “Schlägt das Empire zurück? Postkoloniale Ansätze in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung,” WerkstattGeschichte 30 (2001): 73–83. ——, & Jürgen Osterhammel, ed. Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871– 1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). ——, & Jürgen Osterhammel, “Einleitung,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational, ed. Conrad & Osterhammel, 7–28. ——, & Shalini Randeria, ed. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002). ——, & Shalini Randeria. “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus, ed. Conrad & Randeria, 9–49. Cook, Ian, & Philip Crang. “The World on a Plate: Culture, Displacement and Geographical Knowledges,” Journal of Material Culture 1 (1996): 131–53. ——, Philip Crang & Mark Thorpe. “Eating into Britishness: Multicultural Imaginaries and the Identity Politics of Food,” in Practising Identities: Power and Resistance, ed. Sasha Roseneil & Julie Seymour (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1999): 223–48. Cooke, Rachel. “Oh, What it Is to Be a Man,” Observer (15 February 2004): 5. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 2005). ——, & Ann Laura Stoler. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire, ed. Cooper & Stoler, 1–56. ——, & Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997). Copjec, Joan, ed. Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994). Corbridge, Stuart, & John C. Harriss. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Cornwell, Gareth. “George Webb Hardy’s ‘The Black Peril’ and the Social Meaning of ‘Black Peril’ in Early Twentieth Century Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 441–53. “Courage of Explorer,” Daily Express (23 March 2007). Cowper, William. “The Task, Book I V : The Winter Evening” (1785), in Poems, vol. 2 (London: J. Johnson, 1785), http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/570.html (accessed 21 January 2010). Crang, Philip, & Peter Jackson. “Geographies of Consumption,” in British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity, ed. David Morley & Kevin Robins (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 327–42.

286

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

——, Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson. “Transnationalism and the Spaces of Commodity Culture,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (2003): 438–56. ——, Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson, ed. Transnational Space (London: Routledge, 2004). Crossick, Geoffrey. “And what should they know of England? Die vergleichende Geschichtsschreibung im heutigen Grossbritannien” (1996), in Geschichte und Vergleich:, ed. Haupt & Kocka, 61–77. Curtis Jr, Perry L. Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 2001). Darwin, John. Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). ——. The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). ——. “No Tea and Farewell, Just Brutal Repression,” Times Higher Education Supplement (30 September 2005). Das, Veena. “Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Colonial Organization of Knowledge,” Berkshire Review 21 (1986): 58–76. Davenport, Rodney. “The Cape Liberal Tradition to 1910,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, ed. Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick & David Welsh (Johannesburg: Wesleyan U P , 1987): 21–34. ——, & Christopher Saunders. South Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Davis, Geoffrey V., & Anne Fuchs, ed. Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006). Daye, Pierre, & Jules Renkin. Avec les Vainqueurs de Tabora: Notes d’un colonial belge en Afrique orientale allemande (Paris: Perrin, 1918). Dedering, Tilman. “The Ferreira Raid of 1906: Boers, Britons and Germans in Southern Africa in the Aftermath of the South African War,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 43–60. ——. “War and Mobility in the Borderlands of South Western Africa in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 39 (2006): 275–94. Deiterding, Birgit. “Yasmin” (nd), www.filmreporter.de (accessed 18 December 2009). Demir, Mustafa, & Ergün Sökmez. Die anderen Deutschen: 40 Jahre Arbeitsmigration – Von Gastarbeitern zur nationalen Minderheit (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2001). Deutschmann, Ludwig. Der Kaffee-Grosshandel (Berlin: Hobbing, 1918). Dietrich, Anette. Weisse Weiblichkeiten: Konstruktionen von ‘ Rasse’ und Geschlecht im deutschen Kolonialismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). Dietrich, Marlene. Marlene Dietrich’s A B C (1962; New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), www .teachat.com/viewtopic.php?t=5530 (accessed 21 January 2010). Dimbleby, Jonathan. The Prince of Wales: A Biography (London: Little, Brown, 1994). Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2001). Diop, Cheich Anta. Civilisation ou Barbarie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981). Docker, Chris. “Bend it like Blunkett” (23 August 2004), www.eyeforfilm.co.uk (re-publ. www.imdb.com) (accessed 18 December 2009).



Works Cited

287

Dodd, Vikram. “90% Whites Have Few or No Black Friends,” Guardian (19 July 2004): 1. Dolan, Andy. “Black Farmer Quizzed by Police T H R E E Times on Suspicion of Stealing from his Own Field,” Daily Mail [23 September 2008], www .dailymail.co.uk/news /article-1059780 (accessed 18 January 2010). “Der Dönerbusinessgeneral: Ahmet Basbug macht Fleischkegel für West und Ost nach den Regeln der Kunst und der Veterinärkontrolle,” Frankfurter Rundschau (12 November 1999). Dossmann, Axel, & Lutz Niethammer. Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000). Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles (London: George Newnes, 1902). Drechsler, Horst. Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (1884–1915) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966). Tr. by Bernd Zöllner as Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zed, 1980). ——. Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Die grossen Land- und Minengesellschaften (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996). Duncan, James S. In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth-century Ceylon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Duruz, Jean. “The Streets of Clovelly: Food, Difference and Place-Making,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13.3 (1999): 305–14. Dussen, Jan van der, & Kevin Wilson., ed. The History of the Idea of Europe (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). Dwyer, Claire, Peter Jackson & Nicola Thomas. “Consuming Transnational Fashion in London and Mumbai,” Geoforum 38 (2007): 908–24. Dyer, Richard. White (London: Routledge, 1997). Eckert, Andreas, & Albert Wirz. “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch: Deutschland und der Kolonialismus,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 372–92. Eckert, Guido. “Eine Welt für sich: Auf Entdeckungstour durch die Berliner Wrangelstrasse – eine türkische Insel in der deutschen Fremde,” ZeitPunkte 2 (1999): 28–33. Edgecombe, D.R. “The Non-Racial Franchise in Cape Politics, 1853–1910,” Kleio 10 (1978): 21–37. Ehlers, Fiona. “Haxe mit Sauerkraut: Warum ein Türke in Brandenburg an seiner DönerBude verzweifelt,” Der Spiegel 17 (25 April 2005): 62. “Einbürgerungstest: Kennen Sie Deutschland?” (nd), http://appl.welt.de/quiz/ (accessed 10 October 2008). Eldridge, Michael. “The Rise and Fall of Black Britain,” Transition 74 (1997): 32–43. Elkins, Caroline. Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). Ellis, Havelock. Love and Pain: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (1903; Honolulu: U P of Hawai‘i, 2001).

288

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

El-Tayeb, Fatima. “Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity,” in Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History 1890–2000, ed. Patricia Mazon & Reinhild Steingröver (Rochester N Y : U of Rochester P , 2005): 27–60. ——. Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2001). “The End of a Regime,” Overseas Pensioner 12 (1966): 17; originally publ. in Sunday Express (31 July 1966). Espagne, Michel. Les transferts culturels franco-allemands: Perspectives germaniques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Espinet, Ramabai. The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperFlamingoCanada, 2003). Essner, Cornelia. “ ‘ Wo Rauch ist, das ist auch Feuer’. Zu den Ansätzen eines Rassenrechts für die deutschen Kolonien,” in Rassendiskriminierung, Kolonialpolitik und ethnisch– nationale Identität, ed. Wilfried Wagner (Münster: L I T , 1992): 145–60. Eulenburg, Albert. Sadismus und Masochismus (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1902). Eves, Richard. “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: Debates over Climate and Colonization in New Guinea, 1875–1914,” Ethnic & Racial Studies 28.2 (2005): 304–30. Eyre, Richard, & Nicholas Wright. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Falkenhorst, Karl. Der Kaffeepflanzer von Mrogoro: Erzählung aus Ost-Afrika (Dresden & Leipzig: Köhler, 1895). Fallenbacher, Tim. “ ‘ Ethnic Business’ in Nürnberg: Fallstudie Dönerkebap,” Mitteilungen der Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft 48 (2001): 247–72. Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’an V de la révolution algérienne, 1959, tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 21–52. ——. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Richard Philcox (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. New York: Grove, 2004). Fassmann, Heinz, ed. Migration in Europa: Historische Entwicklung, aktuelle Trends und politische Reaktionen (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 1996). Featherstone, Mike, & Scott Lash, ed. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999). ——, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson, ed. Global Modernities (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995). Fehrenbach, Heide. Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2005). Fendall, C.P. The East African Force, 1915–1919: An Unofficial Record of its Creation and Fighting Career, together with some Account of the Civil and Military Administrative Conditions in East Africa before and during that Period (London: Witherby, 1921). Fenton, Steve. Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Ferguson, James, & Akhil Gupta. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6–23. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003).



Works Cited

289

——. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004). ——. “Home Truths about Famine, War and Genocide,” Independent (30 April 2007). Ferrero, Sylvia. “Comida sin par: Consumption of Mexican Food in Los Angeles. ‘Foodscapes’ in a Transnational Consumer Society,” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren J. Belasco (New York & London: Routledge, 2002): 194–219. Fertsch–Röver, Hadwiga. “Yasmin von Kenneth Glenaan” (27 May 2005), www.hr-online .de (accessed 18 December 2009). Fieldhouse, D.K. “A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brown & William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 64–87. Findeisen, Franz. Der Kaffeehandel (Halle: John, 1917). Fischer–Lichte, Erika. “Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre,” Theatre Research International 33.1 (2008): 84–96. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Fludernik, Monika, ed. Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments (Cross / Cultures 66; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003). Forschungsinstitut der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Abt. Arbeit und Sozialpolitik, ed. Ghettos oder ethnische Kolonie? Entwicklungschancen von Stadtteilen mit hohem Zuwandereranteil (Bonn, 1998). “Forty-Second Annual General Meeting of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association,” Overseas Pensioner 84 (2002): 13. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. François, Étienne, & Hagen Schulze, ed. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001). Frederiksen, Elke. Within Global Contexts: Literature and Culture of German Speaking Europe (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming). Frey, Erich. Ich beantrage Freispruch: Aus den Erinnerungen das Strafverteidigers Prof. Dr. Dr. Erich Frey (Hamburg: Blüchert, 1959). Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Sara Lennox & Susanne Zantop. “Introduction” (1998) to The Imperialist Imagination, ed. Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox & Zantop, 1–32. ——, Sara Lennox & Susanne Zantop, ed. The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998). Fröhlich, Michael. Von Konfrontation zur Koexistenz: Die deutsch–englischen Kolonialbeziehungen in Afrika 1884–1914 (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1990). From Hell, dir. Albert & Allen Hughes (Twentieth-Century Fox 2001, 117 min.). Fromm, Benno. Die Wohltätigkeitsvereine in Berlin (Berlin 1894). Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 1984).

290

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Furber, David Bruce. “Near as Far in the Colonies: The Nazi Occupation of Poland,” International Historical Review 26.3 (2004): 541–79. Gallagher, John. The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982). Gann, Lewis H. “Marginal Colonialism: The German Case,” in Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History, ed. Lewis H. Gann & Arthur J. Knoll (New York: Greenwood, 1987): 1–18. Gardam, Tim. “Livingstone was just the Beginning,” Observer (1 April 2007). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1986). Gawarecki, Kathrin, & Helma Lutz, ed. Kolonialismus und Erinnerungskultur: Die Kolonialvergangenheit im kollektiven Gedächtnis der deutschen und niederländischen Einwanderungsgesellschaft (New York, Munich & Berlin: Waxmann, 2005). Gebhardt, Hartwig. “Kollektive Erlebnisse: Zum Anteil der illustrierten Zeitschriften im 19. Jahrhundert an der Erfahrung des Fremden,” in Kulturkontakt und Kulturkonflikt: Zur Erfahrung des Fremden, ed. Ina–Maria Greverus, Konrad Köstlin & Heinz Schilling (Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Kulturanthropologie & Europäische Ethnologie, 1987): 517–44. Gegen die Wand / Head On, dir. Fatih Akın (Wüste Filmproduktion, Germany / Turkey 2004; D V D : Universal, 2005; 121 min.). Geissler, Reiner, & Horst Pöttker, ed. Massenmedien und die Integration ethnischer Minderheiten in Deutschland (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). “Germany and Islam in Eastern Africa,” Moslem World 3.4 (1918): 434. Gerstmeyer, Johannes. “Körperliche Züchtigung,” in Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, ed. Heinrich Schnee (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920), vol. 2: 366–68. Gerwarth, Robert, & Stephan Malinowski. “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33 (2007): 439–66. Geulen, Christian. Wahlverwandte: Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition H I S , 2004). Geyer, Martin H. Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914–1924, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 128 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). Geyer, Michael. “Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in Theory and Practice,” German Studies Association Newsletter 31.2 (2006): 29–37. ——, & Konrad Jarausch. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2003). Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).



Works Cited

291

Gilman, Sander L. “Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Degeneration: From a Theory of Race to a Race to Theory,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Edward J. Chamberlain & Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia U P , 1985): 72–96. Gilmour, David. “Calcutta in the Cotswolds,” London Review of Books (3 March 2005). ——. The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: Pimlico, 2007). Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004; Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2006). ——. “Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘War on Terror’,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.4 (2005): 431–43. ——. ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; London & New York: Routledge, 1992, repr. with new intro. 2002). ——. “Introduction: Race is Ordinary” (2002) to Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’, xi–xxxix. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London, 1747). Glassman, Jonathon. Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995). Glenaan, Kenneth. Interview by Jen Foley, in “Edinburgh features: Yasmin” (c. August/ September 2004), www.bbc.co.uk/films/festivals/edinburgh/yasmin.shtml (accessed 16 December 2009). ——. Interview (nd), website of inD D V D , www.yasminthemovie.co.uk/interviews.php (accessed 16 December 2009). ——. Interview, OutNow (10 January 2006), http://outnow.ch/Specials/2006/Yasmin /Interview-Glenaan.E (accessed 16 December 2009). Gnauck–Kühne, Elisabeth. “Die Lage der Arbeiterinnen in der Berliner Papierwarenindustrie: Eine sociale Studie,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 20 (1896): 373–431. Goddard, Lynette. Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Godiwala, Dimple, ed. Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006). Göckede, Regina. “Der koloniale Le Corbusier: Die Algier-Projekte in postkolonialer Lesart,” Wolkenkuckucksheim: Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie und Wissenschaft der Architektur 10.2 (2006), special issue “From Outer Space: Architekturtheorie ausserhalb der Disziplin,” www.tu-cottbus.de/B T U /Fak2/TheoArch/wolke/deu/Themen/052/Goeckede /goeckede.htm (accessed 9 September 2007). Göktürk, Deniz, David Gramling & Anton Kaes, ed. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 2007). Goldberg, David Theo. “Racial Europeanization,” Ethnic &Racial Studies 29.2 (2006): 331–64. Goodness Gracious Me, T V show, series 1, episode 1 (B B C , 1998; D V D : Fremantle, 2002). Graichen, Gisela, & Horst Gründer. Deutsche Kolonien: Traum und Trauma (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005).

292

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Grant, Kevin, Philippa Levine & Frank Trentmann, ed. Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Green, Simon. The Politics of Exclusion: Institutions and Immigration Policy in Contemporary Germany (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2004). Grewal, Inderpal, & Caren Kaplan. “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan & Minoo Moallem (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1999): 349–64. Griffin, Gabriele. Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003). Griffiths, John. Tea: The Drink That Changed the World (London: André Deutsch, 2007). Grimm, Hans. Afrikafahrt West (Frankfurt am Main: Hendschel, 1913). Grosse, Pascal. Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000). ——. “What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 2005): 115–34. Gründer, Horst. Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1985). ——. Eine Geschichte der europäischen Expansion: Von Entdeckern und Eroberern zum Kolonialismus (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 2003). ——, ed. “. . . da und dort ein junges Deutschland gründen”: Rassismus, Kolonien und kolonialer Gedanke vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: dtv, 1999). Gürich, Georg Julius Ernst. Während des Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika und Südafrika: Meine Erlebnisse bei Ausbruch des Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika, im englischen Gefangenenlager in Südafrika und auf der Rückreise nach Europa (Berlin: D. Riemer (E. Vohsen), 1916). Güngör, Murat, & Hannes Loh. Fear of the Kanak Planet: HipHop zwischen Weltmusik und Nazi-Rap (Höfen: Hannibal, 2002). Ha, Kien Nghi. Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). ——. “Sprechakte – SprachAttakken: Rassismus, Konstruktion kultureller Differenz und Hybridität in einer T V -Talkshow mit Feridun Zaimolu,” in Migration als biografische und expressive Ressource: Beiträge zur kulturellen Produktion in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft, ed. Margrit Fröhlich, Astrid Messerschmidt & Jörg Walther (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2003): 123–49. ——, & Markus Schmitz. “Der nationalpädagogische Impetus der deutschen Integrations(dis)kurse im Spiegel post-/kolonialer Kritik,” in Cultural Studies und Pädagogik: Kritische Artikulationen, ed. Paul Mecheril & Monika Witsch (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006): 225–62. ——, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai & Sheila Mysorekar, ed. re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (Münster: Unrast, 2007).



Works Cited

293

Häfner, Ansgar. “Das Kinder- und Jugendbuch als Träger und Vermittler von Fremdbildern,” in Kulturkontakt und Kulturkonflikt: Zur Erfahrung des Fremden, ed. Ina–Maria Greverus, Konrad Köstlin & Heinz Schilling (Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Kulturanthropologie & Europäische Ethnologie, 1987): 563–70. Hagen, Ute, Walther Hubatsch & Helge bei der Wieden. “Die Schutzgebiete des Deutschen Reiches,” in Grundriss zur deutschen Verwaltungsgeschichte 1815–1945, vol. 22: Bundund Reichsbehörden, ed. Walther Hubatsch (Marburg: J.G. Herder, 1983). Haken, Rebekka. “Dr. George Miller Beard (1839–1883) und seine Lehre von der Neurasthenie: Konjunkturen eines Konzepts” (dissertation, Heidelberg University, 2004. Halbwachs, Maurice. Das kollektive Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985). Hall, Catherine, ed. Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the 19th and 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2000). ——, & Sonya O. Rose, ed. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006). Hall, Stuart. “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. Barnor Hesse (London & New York: Zed, 2000): 209–41. ——. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony King (London: Macmillan, 1991): 41–68. ——. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). ——. “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1997): 223–90. ——. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Bram Gieben & Stuart Hall (Cambridge: Polity, 1992): 275–320. ——, & Paul du Gay, ed. Questions of Cultural Identity (London, Thousand Oaks C A & New York: Sage, 1996). Halle, Randall. Toward a Transnational Aesthetic: German Film after Germany (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2008). ——. “Views from the Polish–German Border: The Exploration of International Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter,” German Quarterly 80.1 (2007): 77–93. Halm, Dirk, & Martina Sauer. “Parallelgesellschaft und ethische Schichtung,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement of Das Parlament 1 (2006), www.das-parlament.de/2006 /01-02/beilage/003.html (accessed 25 August 2008). Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). Hansen, Randall. “The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act,” Twentieth Century British History 10.1 (1999): 67–95. Hansen, Thomas Blom. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002). Hardyment, Christina. Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating Since 1945 (London: B B C , 1995). Harlow, John, & Lesley Thomas. “Historians Feud over US Editor of Empire,” Sunday Times (21 January 1996).

294

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Harris, Jose. “English Ideas about Community: Another Case of ‘Made in Germany’?” in Aneignung und Abwehr, ed. Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann & Willibald Steinmetz (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998): 143–58. Hastings, Max. “The Dark Side of Empire,” Daily Telegraph (10 January 2005). Haupt, Heinz–Gerhard, & Jürgen Kocka, ed. Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996). Heathorn, Stephen. “ ‘ The Long Retreat of Stone Generals’: Imperial Memory, Decolonisation and the Repatriation of Imperial Monuments from Sudan, 1956–60,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (“Nation and Empire”; 2005): 43–61. Heckmann, Friedrich, & Dominique Schnapper, ed. The Integration of Immigrants in European Societies: National Differences and Trends of Convergence (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2003). Heidegger, Martin. “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken,” Bauen Wohnen Denken: Martin Heidegger inspiriert Künstler, ed. Hans Wielens (Münster: Coppenrath, 1994): 18–33. Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Heinrich Böll Foundation). Dossier “Schwarze Community in Deutschland” (May 2006), www.migration-boell.de/web/diversity/48_583.asp Heitmeyer, Wilhelm. “Für türkische Jugendliche in Deutschland spielt der Islam eine wichtige Rolle, ” Die Zeit 35 (1996), www.zeit.de/archiv (accessed 4 August 2008). ——, Helmut Müller & Joachim Schröder. Verlockender Fundamentalismus: Türkische Jugendliche in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). Henderson, Heike. “Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food in German Multicultural Literature and Society,” Glossen 20 (2004), http://www2.dickinson.edu /glossen/heft20/henderson.html (accessed 22 January 2010). Herbert, Alan Patrick. “A Nice Cup of Tea.” Part of the libretto for the musical Home and Beauty (1937). Quoted from Tea Dance: Another Cup (C D ; Whittard of Chelsea & Past Perfect, 2005). Herbert, Ulrich. Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001). Herzberger, Walter. Der Markenartikel in der Kolonialwarenbranche (Stuttgart: Poeschel, 1931). Heskins, Theresa. “Introduction” (2006) to White Open Spaces, ed. Beard et al., 7. Hesse, Albert. Gewerbestatistik (1904; Jena: Fischer, 1914). Hesse, Barnor, ed. Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’ (London & New York: Zed, 2000). ——. “Introduction: Un/Settled Multiculturalisms” (2000) to Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Hesse, 1–30. Hestermann, Sandra. “The German-Turkish Diaspora and Multicultural German Identity: Hyphenated and Alternative Discourses of Identity in the Works of Zafer Şenocak and Feridun Zaimoğlu” (2003), in Diaspora and Multiculturalism, ed. Fludernik, 329–73. Heyden, Ulrich van der, & Joachim Zeller, ed. Kolonialmetropole Berlin: Eine Spurensuche (Berlin: Quintessenz, 2002). ——, & Joachim Zeller, ed. “. . . Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft“: Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus (Münster: Unrast, 2005).



Works Cited

295

Heymann, Robert. Sexualverbrecher. Das Verbrechen: Eine Sittengeschichte menschlicher Entartung, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Lykeion, 1930). Heyningen, Elizabeth B. van. “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10 (1984): 170–97. H-German Forum: Transnationalism, www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/Trans/forum _trans_index.htm Hildebrandt, Klaus. Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, N S D A P und koloniale Frage, 1919–1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969). Hill, John. British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). Hillmann, Felicitas, & Hedwig Rudolph. Redistributing the cake? Ethnicisation Processes in the Berlin Food Sector (Discussion Paper FS I 97-101, Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung, 1997). Hirsch, Julius. Die Filialbetriebe im Detailhandel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der kapitalistischen Massenfilialbetriebe in Deutschland und Belgien (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers, 1913). Hohenegger, Beatrice. Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West (New York: St Martin’s, 2006). Höhn, Maria. GIs and Fräuleins: The German–American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002). Holdsworth, Nadine, & Mary Luckhurst, ed. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Holloway, Thomas Halsey. The Brazilian Coffee Valorization of 1906: Regional Politics and Economic Dependence (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1975). Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Ballad of the Boston Tea Party,” Boston Evening Post (20 December 1773), www.eldritchpress.org/owh/tea.html (accessed 21 January 2010). Holtom, E.C. Two Years’ Captivity in German East Africa, being the Personal Experiences of Surgeon E.C.H., Royal Navy (London: Hutchinson, 1919). Hong, Young Sun. “The Challenge of Transnational History,” on-line posting (19 January 2006), [email protected] ——. “Military Intelligence, Jumbo Shrimp, and European Transnationalism?” (MS). hooks, bell. “Eating the Other,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston M A : South End, 1992): 21–39. Hopwood, Francis J.F. “Tea and Coffee 1908: Return to an Order of the Honorable House of Commons,” Parliamentary Papers 96 Supplement (1908). Howe, Stephen. “Internal Decolonization? British Politics since Thatcher as Post-colonial Trauma,” Twentieth Century British History 14.3 (2003): 286–304. ——. “The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29.2 (2001): 131–41. Hübner, Arthur H. Lehrbuch der forensischen Psychiatrie (Bonn: Marcus & Webers, 1914). Hull, Isabel V. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2006).

296

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Hulme, Peter. “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge U P 1998): 1–38. Hunn, Karin. “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück…”: Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). Hunt, Leigh, & Alexander Kelly. On Duty under a Tropical Sun: Being some Practical Suggestions for the Maintenance of Health and Bodily Comfort and the Treatment of Simple Diseases. With Remarks on Clothing and Equipment for the Guidance of Travellers in Tropical Countries (London: W.H. Allen, 1882). Hutcheon, Jane. “England – Black Farmer,” www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2006 /s1701388.htm (accessed 18 January 2010). Hyam, Ronald. “The British Empire in the Edwardian Era,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century. ed. Judith M. Brown & William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 47–63. ——. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1990). Innes, C.L. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2002); 2nd ed. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008). I S D (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland / ‘Initiative Black People in Germany’). “Homestory Deutschland: Schwarze Biographien in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” joint project by I S D and the Federal Centre for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), mobile exhibition since 2006, www.isdonline.de /files/Ausstellungskonzept_Biographien.pdf “Islamophobia ‘Explosion’ in U K ” (24 May 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 December 2009). “It’s Time to Celebrate the Empire, Says Brown,” Daily Mail (15 January 2005). Jack, Ian. “Global Villagers,” The Guardian (30 October 2004): 7. Jack the Ripper, dir. Jesús Franco (Elite Film, 1976, 78 min.). Jackson, Peter. “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic,” Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002): 3–18. ——. “Geographies of Diversity and Difference,” Geography 87 (2002): 316–23. ——. “Local Consumption Cultures in a Globalizing World,” Transactions (Institute of British Geographers) 29 (2004): 165–78. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). James, Allison. “How British is British Food?” in Food, Health, and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 71–86. James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown, 1994). James, Lennie. “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” in Hidden Gems (2008), ed. Osborne, 197–277. ——. “‘Who do you Think you Are?’” The Guardian (11 February 2004): 12. Jacques, N. “Noch einiges über den Kaffeegenuss,” Hamburger Nachrichten (27 July 1909).



Works Cited

297

Jarausch, Konrad. “Reflections on Transnational History,” on-line posting (20 January 2006), [email protected] Jeal, Tim. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber & Faber, 2007). Jeffries, Stuart. “Coming to a Small Screen Near You,” The Guardian (13 January 2005), www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jan/13/broadcasting.film (accessed 13 December 2009). Jegelka, Norbert, Hanna Leitgeb & Jörn Rüsen, ed. Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000). Jekyll, dir. Stephen Moffat (B B C One, U K 2007). Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Dread, Beat and Blood (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975). Johnson, Samuel. “Review of A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey,” The Literary Magazine 2.13 (1757); repr. in Johnson, Works, vol. 6 (London: W. Pickering, & Oxford: Talboys & Wheeler, 1825), http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tea.html (accessed 8 August 2008). Joppke, Christian. Multiculturalism and Immigration: A Comparison of the United States, Germany, and Britain (Badia Fiesolana: European University Institute, 1995). Joseph, May. “Bodies outside the State: Black British Women Playwrights and the Limits of Citizenship,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Jill Lane & Peggy Phelan (New York & London: New York U P , 1998): 197–214. Kaelble, Hartmut. “Herausforderungen an die Transfergeschichte,” Comparativ 16.3 (2006): 7–12. ——. “Die interdisziplinären Debatten über Vergleich und Transfer,” in Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Hartmut Kaelble & Jürgen Schriewer (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003): 469–94. Kaiserliches Gesundheitsamt, ed. Der Kaffee: Gemeinfassliche Darstellung der Gewinnung, Verwertung und Beurteilung des Kaffees und seiner Ersatzstoffe (Berlin: Springer, 1903). Kaiserliches Patentamt, ed. Nachweisung der im Deutschen Reiche gesetzlich geschützten Warenzeichen 1–3 (1886). ——, ed. Warenzeichenblatt 1–28 (1894–1914). Kaminer, Wladimir. Russendisko (Munich: Manhattan, 2000). Kanak Attak manifesto (November 1998), www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about/manif_eng.html (accessed 22 August 2008). Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 20.3 (1991), repr. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 376– 91. Kankeleit (first name not given; probably Otto). “Heldentum und Verbrechen,” Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform 16 (1925): 193–201. “Kannibalen,” Vorwärts (31 December 1924). Karimi, Z. Pamela. “Women’s Portable Habitats,” I S I M Newsletter 13 (2003): 14–15.

298

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Karakayali, Serhat. “Ambivalente Integration,” Dossier: Der nationale Integrationsplan auf dem Prüfstand (November 2007), Heinrich Böll Foundation website, www .migration-boell.de/web /integration/47_1366.asp (accessed 23 August 2008). Katz, Jacob. “A State within the State: The History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan,” Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1972): 47–76. Keith, Michael, & Steve Pile. “The Place of Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Keith & Pile (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 22–40. Kennedy, Dane. “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24.3 (1996): 345–63. Khan, Naseem. The Arts Britain Ignores (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1976). Kilgour, Maggie. “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 238–59. Kirchner, Bharti. Darjeeling (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2002). King, Anthony D. Spaces of Global Cultures (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Kirk–Greene, Anthony. “Towards a Retrospective Record,” Overseas Pensioner 85 (2003): 20. Kisiang’ani, Edward Namisiko Waswa. “Decolonizing Gender Studies in Africa.” Paper presented at the conference “African Gender in the New Millennium,” organized by C O D E S R I A (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and the Arab Research Centre, Cairo, 7–10 April 2002, publ. on www.codesria.org /Links/conferences/gender/K I S I A N G A N I .pdf Klein, Thoralf, & Frank Schumacher, ed. Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). Klopp, Brett. German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship (Westport C T : Praeger, 2002). Klotz, Marcia. “White Women and the Dark Continent: Gender and Sexuality in German Colonial Discourse from the Sentimental Novel to the Fascist Film” (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1994). Knopf, Sabine. “ ‘ Nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank’: Der Kaffee im Kinderbuch und im Märchen,” in “Die Kaffeegesellschaft”: Drei Jahrhunderte Kaffeekultur an der Weser. Eine Ausstellung des Porzellanmuseums Fürstenberg und der Sammlung Eduscho, ed. Museum der Porzellanmanufaktur Fürstenberg (Bremerhaven: Nordwestdeutscher Verlag, 1992): 75–82. Kocka, Jürgen. “Comparison and Beyond,” History & Theory 42.1 (2003): 39–44. ——. “Historische Komparatistik in Deutschland,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Heinz–Gerhard Haupt & Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996): 47–60 Koenig, Rhoda. “Review of Angel House,” Theatre Record (28 January–10 February 2008): 134.



Works Cited

299

Koller, Christian. ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001). Kössler, Reinhart. “Awakened from Colonial Amnesia? Germany after 2004,” www .freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/koessler-colonial-amnesia.htm ——, & Henning Melber. “Völkermord und Gedenken: Der Genozid an den Herero und Nama in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1904–1908,” in Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Susanne Meinl & Irmtrud Wojak on behalf of Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2004): 37–75. Komitee zur Einführung der Erzeugnisse aus den deutschen Kolonien, ed. Deutsches Kolonial-Adressbuch 1–18 (1897–1914). Kontje, Todd. German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2004). Koponen, Juhani. Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Hamburg: L I T , 1995). Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (Vienna: Hölder, 1900). ——. Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886). Tr. as Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A MedicoForensic Study (London: F.J. Rebman, 1893; later tr. from the 12th German ed. [1912], intro. Franklin S. Klaf, New York: Arkade, 1965). Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l'abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). Krüger, Gesine. Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (diss., 1995; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). ——. “Vergessene Kriege: Warum gingen die deutschen Kolonialkriege nicht in das historische Gedächtnis der Deutschen ein?” in Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen europäischer Nationen und der U S A , ed. Nikolaus Buschmann & Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003): 120–37. Kruse, Ute. Ch’a-Tchai-Tee: 150 Jahre indische Teegeschichte (Norden: Ostfriesisches Teemuseum, 1993). Külz, Ludwig. Blätter und Briefe eines Arztes aus dem tropischen Deutschafrika (Berlin: Süsserott, 1906). Kümpel, P . “Kaffee: Nebst einigen allgemeinen Bemerkungen über die Mittel und Wege zur Nutzbarmachung unserer Kolonien,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1900): 181–94. Kuhn, Gabriel. “9 Spotlights auf die Würstelbude: Ein perspektivischer Beitrag zu einer Soziologie des Essens,” in Die Äpfel der Erkenntnis: Zur historischen Soziologie des Essens, ed. Jutta Anna Klaber (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995): 84–97. Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003). ——. “Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 575–608.

300

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Kundnani, Arun. “The Death of Multiculturalism,” Institute of Race Relations website, 1 April 2002, www.irr.org.uk (accessed 14 December 2009). ——. “The Rise and Fall of British Multiculturalism,” in Resituating Culture, ed. Gavan Titley (Strasbourg: Directorate of Youth and Sport, Council of Europe, 2004): 105–12. Kundrus, Birthe. “Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen: Überlegungen zur ‘Kolonialisierung’ des Nationalsozialismus,” Werkstatt Geschichte 43 (2006): 45–62. ——. Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003). ——. “Von den Herero zum Holocaust? Einige Bemerkungen zur aktuellen Debatte,” Mittelweg (2005): 82–91. ——. “Von Windhoek nach Nürnberg? Koloniale ‘Mischehenverbote’ und die nationalsozialistische Rassengesetzgebung” (2003), in Phantasiereiche, ed. Kundrus, 110–31. ——, ed. Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2003). Kunze, Stefanie. “ ‘ Kaffee-H A G schont ihr Herz’: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung eines klassischen Markenartikels in der deutschen Kaffeebranche 1906–1939,“ Hamburger Wirtschafts-Chronik 4 (2004): 85–120. Kurz und Schmerzlos / Short Sharp Shocked, dir. Fatih Akın (Wüste Filmproduktion, Germany 1998; D V D : Universal, 2000; 100 min.). Laak, Dirk van. “Kolonien als ‘Laboratorien der Moderne’?” in Das Kaiserreich transnational, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004): 257–79. ——. Über alles in der Welt: Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005). Lachmann, Günther. Tödliche Toleranz: Die Muslime und unsere offene Gesellschaft (Munich: Piper, 2006). Landon, Philip. “Great Exhibitions: Nature and Disciplinary Spectacle in the Victorian Novel” (doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, New York, 1995. Lambert, David, & Alan Lester. Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006). Langbehn, Volker, & Mohammad Salama. “Call for Papers: ‘Germany’s Colonialism in International Perspective’, International Interdisciplinary Conference on German Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 6–9 September 2007, San Francisco, U S A ,” unpubl. Lanz, Stephan. Berlin aufgemischt: Abendländisch, multikulturell, kosmopolitisch? (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). Le Naour, Jean–Yves. La honte noire: L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2003). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Production de l’espace, 1974; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). ——. The Urban Revolution, tr. Robert Bononno (La Révolution Urbaine, 1970; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003).



Works Cited

301

——. “The Urban Revolution,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 408–13. Lehrer, Ute. “Willing the Global City: Berlin’s Cultural Strategies of Inter-urban Competitions after 1989,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 332–38. Lennox, Sara. “Feminisms in Transit: American Feminist Germanists Construct a MultiCultural Germany,” in Multiculturalism in Transit: A German–American Exchange, ed. Klaus J. Milich & Jeffrey M. Peck (New York: Berghahn, 1998): 77–92. Lester, Alan. Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Lettow–Vorbeck, Paul Emil von. Meine Erinnerungen an Ostafrika (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920). Light, Ivan, & Carolyn Rosenstein. Race, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship in Urban America (New York: de Gruyter, 1995). Liliencron, Adda von. “Ein Wort über den Deutschkolonialen Frauenbund und seine Aufgaben,” Kolonie und Heimat 1.20 (1908–1909): 9. Lindner, Fritz. “Victim of Prejudices Fights to Keep her Family Intact,” www.imdb.com (accessed 18 December 2009). Lindner, Martin. “Der Mythos ‘Lustmord’: Serienmörder in der deutschen Literatur, dem Film und der bildenden Kunst zwischen 1892 und 1932,” in Verbrechen, Justiz, Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Joachim Linder & Claus– Michael Ort (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999): 273–305. Lindner, Ulrike. “Colonialism as a European Project in Africa before 1914? British and German Concepts of Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Comparativ 19 (2009): 88– 106. ——. “Contested Concepts of ‘White’/ ‘Native’ and Mixed Marriages in German SouthWest Africa and the Cape Colony: A Histoire Croisée,” Journal of Namibian Studies 6 (2009): 57–79. ——. “Das Kolonialviertel in München-Trudering,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden & Joachim Zeller (Erfurt: Sutton, 2008): 293–99. Link–Heer, Ursula. “Nervosität und Moderne,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 20 (1999), special issue: Konzepte der Moderne, ed. Gerhart von Graevenitz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999): 102–19. Lion, Alexander. Die Kulturfähigkeit des Negers und die Erziehungsaufgaben der Kulturnationen (Berlin: Süsserott, 1908). Livingstone, David N. “Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” Journal of Historical Geography 28.2 (2002): 159–80. Lloyd, John, & John Mitchinson. The Book of General Ignorance (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).

302

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Lombroso, Cesare. “The Criminal,” in The Criminal and Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso Published in the English Language Periodical Literature during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. David M. Horton & Katherine E. Rich, Criminology Studies 22 (Lewiston N Y : Edwin Mellen, 2004): 343–49. Louis, William Roger. “Great Britain and German Expansion in Africa 1884–1919,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Policy and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford & William Roger Louis (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1967): 3–46. Lucas, Valerie Kaneko. “ ‘ The World in Our Hearts’,” in Hidden Gems (2008), ed. Osborne, 192–6. Lützeler, Paul Michael. Der postkoloniale Blick (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). ——, ed. Schriftsteller und “Dritte Welt”: Studien zum postkolonialen Blick (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998). Luft, Stefan. Abschied von Multikulti: Wege aus der Integrationskrise (Gräfelfing: Resch, 2006). Macaulay, Alastair. “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” Financial Times (2 March 2004): 15. McClintock, Anne. “ ‘ No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 89–112. ——. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995). MacFarlane, Alan, & Iris MacFarlane. Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (London: Ebury, 2003). McGranaham, Carole, Peter C. Perdue & Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Imperial Formations (Santa Fe N M : School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). McIntyre, David W. British Decolonization, 1946–1997: When, Why and How Did the British Empire Fall? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). MacKenzie, John M., ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1986). McLaren, Angus. The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1997). MacMaster, Neil. Racism in Europe 1870–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). McPhee, Graham, & Prem Poddar, ed. Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007). Madley, Benjamin. “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35.3 (2005): 429–64. Magliocci, Sabina. “Playing with Food: The Negotiation of Identity in the Ethnic Display Event by Italian Americans in Clinton, Indiana,” in Studies in Italian American Folklore, ed. Luisa Del Giudice (Logan: Utah State U P , 1993): 145–61. Maier, Charles S. “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105.3 (2000): 807–31. Majer, Dietmut. “Das besetzte Osteuropa als deutsche Kolonie (1939–1944): Die Pläne der NS-Führung zur Beherrschung Osteuropas,” in Gesetzliches Unrecht: Rassistisches



Works Cited

303

Recht im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005): 111–34. “Mark Medlock gewinnt D S D S 2007,” www.dsds-superstar.de/2007/05/05/markmedlock-gewinnt-dsds-2007/(accessed 4 March 2010). Martin, Laura C. Tea: The Drink that Changed the World (Tokyo, Vermont & Singapore: Tuttle, 2007). Mass, Sandra. Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2007). Masselos, Jim, & Sujata Patel, ed. Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003). Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today 6 (1991): 24–29, repr. in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray & Jim McGuigan (London: Arnold, 1997): 232–40. Masson, J.R. “A Fragment of Colonial History: The Killing of Jacob Marengo,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (1995): 247–56. Mattes, Monika. “Gastarbeiterinnen” in der Bundesrepublik: Anwerbepolitik, Migration und Geschlecht in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2005). Mayer, Ruth. “Schmutzige Fakten: Wie sich Differenz verkauft,” in Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft, ed. Tom Holert & Mark Terkessidis (Berlin & Amsterdam: Edition I D -Archiv, 1996): 153–68. Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998). Mdumi, Martin Kayamba. “The story of Martin Kayamba Mdumi, M.B.E., of the Bondei Tribe,” in Ten Africans, ed. Margery Freda Perham (London: Faber & Faber, 1963): 173–272. Meer, Nasar. “ ‘ Get off your knees’: Print Media, Public Intellectuals and Muslims in Britain,” Journalism Studies 7.1 (2006): 35–59. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Army Diary, 1899–1926 (London & Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960). Melber, Henning, ed. Namibia: Grenzen nachkolonialer Emanzipation (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2003). ——, ed. Genozid und Gedenken: Namibisch–deutsche Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2005). Meldrum, Andrew. “German Minister Says Sorry for Genocide in Namibia,” Guardian (16 August 2004), www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/aug/16/germany.andrewmeldrum Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Meyer, Thomas. “Parallelgesellschaft und Demokratie” (7 February 2007), Online Akademie der Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/akademie/online/50368 .pdf (accessed 25 August 2008). Miller, Alexei, & Alfred Rieber, ed. Imperial Rule (Budapest: Central European U P , 2004). Miller, Frank. Sin City (Yarns) (Milwaukie O R : Dark Horse, 1991–2000).

304

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Elizabeth Sifton / Penguin, 1985). Mirza, Munira. “Yasmin” (16 January 2005), www.culturewars.org.uk (accessed 18 December 2009). Misselwitz, Philipp, & Eyal Weizman. “Military Operations as Urban Planning,” Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia, ed. Anselm Franke (Cologne: Walther König, 2003): 273–81. Mitchell, Katharyne. “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (1997): 101–14. Mitchell, W.J.T. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2005). Modood, Tariq. Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005). ——. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). ——, Anna Triandafyllidou & Richard Zapata–Barrero. “European Challenges to Multicultural Citizenship: Muslims, Secularism and Beyond” (2006), in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship, ed. Modood, Triandafyllidou & Zapata–Barrero, 1–22. ——, Anna Triandafyllidou & Richard Zapata–Barrero, ed. Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (London & New York: Routledge, 2006). Möhring, Maren. “Gastronomie in Bewegung: Migration, kulinarischer Transfer und die Internationalisierung der Ernährung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Comparativ 17.3 (2007): 68–85. ——. “TransLokal: Ausländische Gaststätten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” traverse 14.3 (2007): 86–96. Montanari, Massimo. “From the Geography of Taste to the Taste for Geography,” in Food and Environment: Geographies of Taste, ed. Armando Montanari (Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 2002): 29–32. Moorhouse, Geoffrey. “The Old Scenes Shall Rise Again,” Guardian (1 October 2005). Motte, Jan, ed. 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik – 50 Jahre Einwanderung: Nachkriegsgeschichte als Migrationsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 1999). Moxham, Roy. Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire (London: Robinson, 2004). Muhs, Rudolf, Johannes Paulmann & Willibald Steinmetz, ed. Aneignung und Abwehr (Bodenheim: Philo 1998). ——, Johannes Paulmann & Willibald Steinmetz, “Brücken über den Kanal? Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Grossbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Aneignung und Abwehr, ed. Muhs, Paulmann & Steinmetz, 7–20. Naipaul, V.S. The Middle Passage (London: André Deutsch, 1962). Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm Baydar, & Wong Chong Thai, ed. Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural P , 1997). Nandy, Ashis. “The Changing Popular Culture of Indian Food: Preliminary Notes,” South Asia Research 24 (2004): 9–19.



Works Cited

305

Narayan, Uma. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food,“ Social Identities 1.1 (1995): 63–86. Neuhaus, Jessamyn. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2003). Newland, Courttia. “A Question of Courage,” in White Open Spaces, ed. Beard et al., 46–54. Nicholls, C.S. Elspeth Huxley: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002). “Nie wieder Wiener Schnitzel!” jungle world (16 August 2007): 16. Nightingale, Benedict. “Review of Angel House,” Theatre Record (28 January–10 February 2008): 134. ——. “The Sons of Charlie Paora,” The Times (28 February 2004): 27. Nonn, Christoph. Verbraucherprotest und Parteiensystem im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1996). Nützenadel, Alexander. “Rez. A E G : Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914,” http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/rezensionen/id=5492 Oakeshott, Robert. “Mau Mau and all that,“ Spectator (5 March 2005). Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005). Office for National Statistics. “Country of Birth & National Identity: Majority Identify as British” (21 February 2006), www.statistics.gov.uk (accessed 21 May 2008). ——. “Ethnicity: Nine in Ten Sikhs Are from the Indian Group” (11 October 2004), www.statistics.gov.uk/ (accessed 21 May 2008). ——. “Religion in Britain: Census Shows 72% Identify as Christians” (13 February 2003), www.statistics.gov.uk/ (accessed 21 May 2008). Ogborn, Miles. Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (London & New York: Guilford, 1998). Oguntoye, Katharina, May Opitz (later May Ayim) & Dagmar Schultz, ed. Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda, 1986). Tr. Anne V. Adams in coop. with Tina Campt, M. Opitz & D. Schultz as Showing Our Colors: AfroGerman Women Speak Out (Amherst M A : U of Massachusetts P , 1992). Onselen, Charles van. The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (New York: Walker, 2007). Osborne, Deirdre. “ ‘ No Straight Answers’: Writing in the Margins, Finding Lost Heroes,” New Theatre Quarterly (February 2009): 6–21. [Interview with Mojisola Adebayo & Valerie Mason–John.] ——. “Not ‘in-yer-face’ but what Lies beneath: Experiential and Aesthetic Inroads in the Drama of debbie tucker green and Dona Daley,” in “Black” British Aesthetics Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007): 222–42. ——. Personal interview with Kwame Kwei-Armah, 15 October 2004. ——. Personal interview with Roy Williams, 24 October 2005. ——, ed. Hidden Gems (London: Oberon, 2008). Osterhammel, Jürgen. Kolonialismus: Geschichte – Formen – Folgen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995).

306

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

——. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009). Our Shared Future (final report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, advisory body under the U K Secretary of State for Community and Local Government, 14 June 2007), 142 pp, http://collections.europarchive.org/tna/20080726153624/http:/ /www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/~/media/assets/www.integrationandcohesion. org.uk/our_shared_future%20pdf.ashx (accessed 14 December 2009). Ören, Aras. Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse: Ein Poem (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973). Özdemir, Cem. Currywurst und Döner: Integration in Deutschland (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1999). Parekh, Lord Bhikhu. “Europe, Liberalism and the ‘Muslim Question’,” in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou & Richard Zapata–Barrero (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 179–203. ——. “Two Ideas of Multiculturalism” (7 December 2006), http://number-10.gov.uk /output/Page10558 (accessed 18 December 2009). Parker, David. “The Chinese Takeaway and the Diasporic Habitus: Space, Time and Power Geometries,” in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Hesse, 73–95. Parks, Suzan–Lori. “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” in The America Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995). Pastuschka, Bernd. “Die Geschichte der Hamburger ‘Kaffeeklappen’ seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert: Die sozialstaatliche Versorgung der Hafenarbeiter durch den ‘Verein für Volkskaffeehallen’ ” (M A thesis, Hamburg University, 1989. Paulmann, Johannes. “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649–85. Peckham, Shannon. “Consuming Nations,” in Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, ed. Sian Griffith & Jennifer Wallace (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1998): 171–82. Peers, Douglas. “Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again? The Revival of Imperial History and the Oxford History of the British Empire,” Journal of World History 13.2 (2002): 451–67. Penny, H. Glenn. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2002). Pereira, Charmaine. “Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminism in Scholarship on Africa?” Feminist Africa 1 (2002): Intellectual Politics, www.feministafrica .org/index.php/between-knowing-and-imagining (accessed 4 March 2010). Pesek, Michael. “Colonial Heroes: German Colonial Identities in Wartime, 1914–1918,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael F. Perraudin & Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). ——. “Für Kaiser und Allah: Ostafrikas Muslime im Grossen Krieg für die Zivilisation, 1914–1919,“ Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaften Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen. 19 (2004): 9–18.



Works Cited

307

——. “Islam und Politik in Deutsch–Ostafrika, 1905–1919,” in Alles unter Kontrolle: Disziplinierungsverfahren im kolonialen Tanzania (1850–1960), ed. Katrin Bromber, Andreas Eckert & Albert Wirz (Hamburg: L I T , 2003): 99–140. ——. Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2005). ——. “Kreuz oder Halbmond: Die deutsche Kolonialpolitik zwischen Pragmatismus und Paranoia in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1908–1914,” in Mission und Gewalt, ed. Jürgen Becher & Ullrich van Heyden (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000). Pettigrew, Jane, & Bruce Richardson. The Tealover’s Companion: A Guide to Teas throughout the World (London: The National Trust, 2006). Pfäfflin, Friedemann. “Zur Lust am Lustmord,” Der Nervenarzt 53 (1982): 547–50. Phillips, Caryl. “Lost Generation,” The Guardian (23 April 2005): 16. Phillips, Mike. “Re-writing Black Britain,” Wasafiri 36 (2002): 62–64. ——, & Trevor Phillips. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998). Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1993). Piesche, Peggy. “Black and German? East German Adolescents before 1989: A Retrospective View of a ‘Non-Existent Issue’ in the G D R ,” in The Cultural After-life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives, ed. Leslie Adelson (Washington D C : American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (A I C G S ), 2002), 37–59. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Globalization as Hybridization, (1995), in Global Modernities, ed. Featherstone, Lash & Robertson, 45–68. Pitcher, Ben. The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Plehn, Albert. Kurzgefasste Vorschriften zur Verhütung und Behandlung der wichtigsten tropischen Krankheiten bei Europäern und Eingeborenen für Nichtärzte (Jena: Fischer, 1906). Plehn, Friedrich. Tropenhygiene, mit spezieller Berücksichtigung der deutschen Kolonien: Ärztliche Ratschläge für Kolonialbeamte, Offiziere, Missionare, Expeditionsführer, Pflanzer und Faktoristen (Jena: Fischer, 1906). Poiger, Uta G. “Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism” (2006), in Between Marx and Coca-Cola, ed. Schildt & Siegfried, 177–99. ——. “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History & Memory 17 (2005): 117–43. Poley, Jared. Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 2005). Poole, Elizabeth. Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002). Porter, Andrew N. The Origins of the South African War: Joseph Chamberlain and the Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1895–99 (New York: St Martin’s, 1980).

308

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Porter, Bernard. The Absent-minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006). Potzl, Norbert F. “Schatten über Almanya,” Spiegel Spezial: Allah im Abendland 2 (2008): 9–13. Prantl, Heribert. “Reichtum im Gepäck. Geschichtslos, erinnerungslos: Die Crux unserer Ausländerpolitik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (1 December 2003). Pratt, Geraldine, & Margaret Walton–Roberts. “Mobile Modernities: A South Asian Family Negotiates Immigration, Gender and Class in Canada,” Gender, Place and Culture 12 (2005): 173–95. Presse- & Informationsamt der Bundesregierung. Der Nationale Integrationsplan: Neue Wege – neue Chancen (July 2007), www.bundesregierung.de Prince, Magdalene von. Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1904). Quantz, Bernhard. Zur Lage des Bauarbeiters in Stadt und Land: Eine volkswirtschaftliche Studie mit Haushaltsrechnungen und einem Überblick über die Entwicklung der baugewerblichen Verhältnisse Göttingens seit 1860 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1911). Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge M A & London: M I T Press, 1989). Radkau, Joachim. Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Hanser, 1998). Randeria, Shalini. “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and the Post-Colonial State in India,” in Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, ed. Yehuda Elkana, Ivan Krastev et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 284–311. ——. “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Norbert Jegelka, Hanna Leitgeb & Jörn Rüsen (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2000): 87–96. Rattansi, Ali. “ ‘ Western’ Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a ‘Postmodern’ Frame,” in Racism, Modernity and Identity, ed. Ali Rattansi & Sallie Westwood (Cambridge: Polity, 1994): 15–87. Raum, Otto Friedrich. “German East Africa: Changes in African Life under German Administration, 1892–1914,” in History of East Africa, ed. E.M. Chilver & Vincent Todd Harlow (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1965): 177. Rausch, Susanne. “Ernährung und Sozialhygiene: Die Ernährung der Kleinbauern in der Eifel,” Zeitschrift für Ernährung 1.2 (1931): 62–72. Raviv, Yael. “Falafel: A National Icon,” Gastronomica 3.3 (2003): 20–25. Rebhandl, Bert. “Kultur unter Druck,” Die Tageszeitung (26 May 2005), www.taz.de (accessed 19 May 2008). Reed–Anderson, Paulette. Rewriting the Footnotes: Berlin and the African Diaspora, ed. & publ. by the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Berlin (Die Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats Berlin), 2000.



Works Cited

309

Reeve, Katharine. Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Writer’s City (New York: The Little Book Room, 2006). Reichel, Peter. Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich & Vienna: Hanser, 1995). Reisner, Stefan. “Kneipen, Destillen, Currybuden und Döner Kebab,” in Stadtfront: Berlin West Berlin, ed. Irene Lusk & Christiane Zieseke (Berlin: Elefanten, 1982): 145–47. Rempe, Martin. “Dekolonisation: Prozess und Verflechtungen 1945–1990,” http://hsozkult .geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsbericht/id=1516 Reppelier, Agnes. To Think of Tea! (Boston M A : Houghton Mifflin, 1932). Riemenschneider, Dieter, ed. Postcolonial Theory: The Emergence of a Critical Discourse; A Selected and Annotated Bibliography (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004). Rischbieter, Laura Julia. “Globalisierungsprozesse vor Ort: Die Interdependenz von Produktion, Handel und Konsum am Beispiel ‘ Kaffee’ zur Zeit des Kaiserreichs,” Comparativ 3 (2007): 28–45. Robertson, Robert. “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity” (1995), in Global Modernities, ed. Featherstone, Lash & Robertson, 25–44. Robins, Kevin. “Interrupting Identities: Turkey/Europe” (1996), in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall & du Gay, 61–86. Rodek, Hanns–Georg. “Liebt Yasmin Osama?” Berliner Morgenpost (26 May 2005), www .morgenpost.de (accessed 19 May 2008). Roehl, Karl. Ostafrikas Heldenkampf: Nach eigenen Erlebnissen dargestellt (Berlin: M. Warneck, 1918). Rogers, Dan. “Genocide in Germany’s African Colonies,” on-line posting (18 September 1995), [email protected] Rohrbach, Paul. Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft: Kulturpolitische Grundsätze für die Rassen- und Missionsfragen (Berlin: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1909). Rose, Hilary & Stephen Rose. “Why We Should Give Up on Race,” The Guardian (9 April 2005): 21. Rosenbach, Marcel. “Frittenalarm im Falafelkiez,” Spiegel Online (18 May 2007): 1–3. Rother, Hans–Jörg. “Die Koranleserin,” Der Tagesspiegel (26 May 2005), www.tagesspiegel .de (accessed 19 May 2008). “Rotierendes Kebap (Döner Kebap),” in Türkische Küche (in Deutsch) (Istanbul: Minyatür Yayınları): 74–75. Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 8–23. Rubo, Ernst Traugott. Kommentar über das Strafgesetz für das deutsche Reich und das Einführungsgesetz vom 31. Mai 1870 sowie die Ergänzungsgesetze vom 10. Dezember 1871 und 26. Februar 1876. Nach amtlichen Quellen, ed. Werner Schubert (Frankfurt am Main: Keip, 1992). Runnymede Trust. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report (London: Profile, 2000).

310

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Rushby, Kevin. Review of Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. Guardian (24 March 2007). Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale,” Granta 11 (1984): 125–38. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). ——. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). ——. “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race & Class 27.2 (1985): 1–15. Sarasin, Philipp. Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers, 1765–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Sarker, Sonita. “Afterword: Modernisms in our image … always, partially,” Modernism/ Modernity 13.3 (2006): 54–56. Sayyid, S. “Beyond Westphalia: Nations and Diasporas – the Case of the Muslim Umma,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms, ed. Hesse, 33–50. Schetschke, Michael. “Der Wille, der Trieb und das Deutungsmuster vom Lustmord,” in Serienmord: Kriminologische und kulturwissenschaftliche Skizzierungen eines ungeheuerlichen Phänomens, ed. Frank J. Robertz & Alexandra Thomas (Munich: belleville, 2004): 346–64. Schiffauer, Werner. Parallelgesellschaften: Wie viel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Für eine kluge Politik der Differenz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008). Schildt, Axel, & Detlef Siegfried, ed. Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980 (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch & Christina Blanc–Szanton. “Transnationalism: A New Analytical Framework for Understanding Migration,” Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, ed. Schiller, Basch & Blanc–Szanton (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992): 1–24. Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. “The Uprising against the East India Company,” Political Science Quarterly 32.1 (1917): 60–79. Schmidt, Dorothea. “Unternehmertum und Ethnizität – ein seltsames Paar,” Prokla 30.3 (2000): 335–62. Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, tr. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1985). Schmokel, Wolfe W. Dream of Empire: German Colonialism 1919–1945 (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1964). Schnee, Heinrich. Deutsch-Ostafrika im Weltkriege: Wie wir lebten und kämpften (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919). ——. Die koloniale Schuldlüge (Munich: Knorr & Hirth 1924). Schönwälder, Karen. “Assigning the State its Rightful Place? Migration, Integration and the State in Germany,” in Paths of Integration, ed. David Feldman, Leo Lucassen & Jochen Oltmer (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 78–97. ——. “The Difficult Task of Managing Migration: The 1973 Recruitment Stop,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer & Mark Roseman (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P ): 252–67.



Works Cited

311

——. Einwanderung und ethnische Pluralität: Politische Entscheidungen und öffentliche Debatten in Grossbritannien und der Bundesrepublik von den 1950er bis zu den 1970er Jahren (Essen: Klartext, 2001). Schrenck–Notzing, Albert von. “Beiträge zur forensischen Beurtheilung von Sittlichkeitsvergehen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathogenese psychosexueller Anomalien,” Archiv für Kriminologie 1.1 (1898): 5–25. ——. Die Suggestions-Therapie bei krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Enke, 1892). Schulte–Althoff, Franz–Josef. “Rassenmischung im kolonialen System,” Historisches Jahrbuch 109 (1985): 52–94. Schulze–Engler, Frank. “Theoretical Approaches: Commonwealth Literature – New Literatures in English – Postcolonial Literature,” in Postcolonial Theory: The Emergence of a Critical Discourse: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004): 1–14. Schwarz, Anja, & Russell West–Pavlov, ed. Polyculturalism and Discourse (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007). Schwarz, Bill. “Actually Existing Postcolonialism,” Radical Philosophy 104 (2000): 16–24. ——. “‘Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette’: Reflections on the Emergence of PostColonial Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 14.3 (2003): 264–85. ——. “ ‘ The Only White Man in there’: The Re-Racialisation of England, 1956–1968,“ Race & Class 38.1 (1996): 65–78. Schwarzer, Alice, ed. Die Gotteskrieger und die falsche Toleranz (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002). Scott, Joan Wallach. “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 22–40. Scully, Pamela. “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review 100.2 (1995): 335–59. Seidel, Marguerite. “Yasmin” (24 May 2005), www.critic.de/filme/detail/film/yasmin-224 .html (accessed 18 December 2009). Seidel–Pielen, Eberhard. Aufgespiesst: Wie der Döner über die Deutschen kam (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996). Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners (London: Alan Wingate, 1956). Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2001). Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1993). Shevtsova, Maria. “Minority/ Dominant Culture in the Theatre (with Special Reference to Bakhtin and Bourdieu),” Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993, Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 2006): 3–20. Showalter, Elaine. “Prada Queen,” London Review of Books (10 August 2000), www.lrb .co.uk/v22/n15/show01_.html (accessed 20 April 2007).

312

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Siebenpfeiffer, Hania. “Böse Lust”: Gewaltverbrechen in Diskursen der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005). Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1999). Simpson, Helen. The Ritz London Book of Afternoon Tea (London: Ebury, 2006). Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. “Britain’s Gulags,” Race & Class 27.3 (1980): 81–85. Smith, Iain R. The Origins of the South African War 1899–1902 (London: Longman, 1996). Smith, Laura. “Meet Britain’s Other Black Farmer,” The Guardian (26 June 2006): 10. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999). Smith, Woodruff. The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1978). Smotlacha, Jörg. “Kaffee: Vom Massenartikel zur Luxusware. Politische Debatten im Deutschen Reich, 1909–1923” (MA thesis, Hanover University, 1997. “A Social History of the Nation’s Favourite Drink,” www.tea.co.uk/a-social-history-ofthe-nations (accessed 21 January 2010). Soho Theatre. “White Open Spaces: A Passive Apartheid in the U K ?” (publicity flyer, 2004). Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000). ——. Postmodern Geography: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). ——, & Barbara Hooper. “The Space that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics,“ in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith & Steve Pile (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 183–205. Sommer, Theo. “Der Kopf zählt, nicht das Tuch,” Die Zeit 30 (1998), www.zeit.de /archiv (accessed 27 September 2008). Spanton, Ernest Frederick. In German Gaols: A Narrative of Two Years Captivity in German East Africa (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917). Speitkamp, Winfried. Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Ditzingen: Philip Reclam jun., 2005). ——. “Kolonialherrschaft und Denkmal: Afrikanische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur im Konflikt,” in Architektur und Erinnerung, ed. Wolfram Martini (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000): 165–90. Spencer, Charles. “Powerful Rites of Passage Drama Emerges from the Scrum,” Daily Telegraph (28 February 2004): 20. ——. “Review of Angel House,” Theatre Record (28 January–10 February 2008): 134. Spiekermann, Uwe. “Das Andere verdauen: Begegnungen von Ernährungskulturen,” in Ernährung in Grenzsituationen, ed. Gesa U . Schönberger & Uwe Spiekermann (Berlin: Springer, 2002): 89–105. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg & Cary Nelson (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988): 271–313.



Works Cited

313

——. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism ed. Catherine Belsey & Jane Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1997): 148–63. ——. Interview conducted by Kerry Chance & Yates McKee (24 April 2001), http://hrp .bard.edu/resource_pdfs/chanceandmckee.spivak.pdf ——. Interview conducted by Tani E. Barlow, “Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12.1 (2004): 141–43. St Louis, Guy. Gedichte einer schönen Frau (Berlin: Gudula Lorez, 1983). Städtisches Museum Ludwigsburg, ed. “Die Hauptstadt der Cichoria”: Ludwigsburg und die Kaffeemittel-Firma Franck (Ludwigsburg: Städtisches Museum, 1989). Standage, Tom. A History of the World in Six Glasses (London: Atlantic, 2007). Statistisches Reichsamt, ed. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs. Stengers, Jean. “British and German Imperial Rivalry: A Conclusion,“ in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Policy and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford & William Roger Louis (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1967): 337–50. Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, 1886). Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1995). Straub, Jürgen. “Personale und kollektive Identität: Zur Analyse eines theoretischen Begriffs,” in Identitäten, ed. Aleida Assmann & Heidrun Friese (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 73–107. Straw Dogs, dir. Sam Peckinpah (A B C , U K 1971; 118 min.). Sturm–Martin, Imke. “ ‘ Race, Colour or Religion’: Der politische Blick auf Minderheitenreligionen in Grossbritannien seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 3.2 (2005), www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Sturm-3-2005 ——. Zuwanderungspolitik in Grossbritannien und Frankreich: Ein historischer Vergleich, 1945– 1962 (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2001). Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (1997): 735–62. “Die südwestafrikanischen Bastards,” Kolonie und Heimat 1.13 (1908–1909): 6. Sunier, Thijl. “Religious Newcomers and the Nation-State: Flows and Closures,” Paths of Integration, ed. David Feldman, Leo Lucassen & Jochen Oltmer (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 239–61. Sznaider, Natan. “Verhandlungspartner: Elazar Barkans Theorie der Wiedergutmachung,” Frankfurter Rundschau (30 September 2002). Tabener, Stuart, ed. German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham: U of Birmingham P , 2004).

314

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Tanner, Jakob, & Heidi Witzig. “Kaffeekonsum von Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Kaffee im Spiegel europäischer Trinksitten, ed. Daniela U . Ball (Zürich: Johann Jacobs Museum, 1991) 153–68. Tatar, Maria. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997). Taylor, Paul. “Review of The Sons of Charlie Paora,” The Independent (3 March 2004): 17. Terkessidis, Mark. Migranten (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt & Rotbuch, 2000). ——. “Zwischen Hysterie und Utopie: Orte der Verstrickung,” KulturAustausch Online 3 (1999), http://cms.ifa.de/ro/pub/kulturaustausch/archiv/zfk-1999/zwischen-hysterie -und-utopie/terkessidis/ (accessed 4 December 2007). Ther, Philip. “Imperial Instead of National History: Positioning Modern German History on the Map of European Empires,” in Imperial Rule, ed. Alexei Miller & Alfred Rieber (Budapest: Central European U P , 2004): 47–68. Thompson, Andrew. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2005). Thoms, Ulrike. “Er stärkt und nährt die matten Glieder: Kaffee in der Arbeitswelt,” in Kaffee: Vom Schmuggelgut zum Lifestyle-Klassiker: Drei Jahrhunderte Berliner Kaffeekultur, ed. Peter Lummel (Berlin: be.bra, 2002): 49–60. Thorp, Daniel B. “Going Native in New Zealand and America: Comparing Pakeha Maori and White Indians,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31.3 (2003): 1–23. Tibi, Bassam. Europa ohne Identität: Leitkultur oder Wertebeliebigkeit (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 1998). ——. Islamische Zuwanderung: Die gescheiterte Integration (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002). ——. “Multikultureller Werte-Relativismus und Werte-Verlust,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement to Das Parlament 52–53 (1996): 27–36. Timm, Uwe. The Invention of Curried Sausage, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, 1995; New York: New Directions, 1995). Tinker, Hugh. A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830 to 1920 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1974). Titley, Gavan, ed. Resituating Culture (Strasbourg: Directorate of Youth and Sport, Council of Europe, 2004). Topik, Steven. “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500–1989, ed. William Gervase Clarence–Smith & S. Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2003): 21–49. Torres, Rodolfo D., & Victor M. Valle. Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2000). Toynbee, Polly. “Why Trevor is Right,” The Guardian (7 April 2004), www.guardian.co .uk/politics/2004/apr/07/society.immigration/(accessed 16 December 2009). Trivedi, Parita. “To Deny our Fullness: Asian Women in the Making of History,” Feminist Review 17 (1984): 37–50.



Works Cited

315

Turgeon, Laurier, & Madeleine Pastinelli. “ ‘ Eat the World’: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants,” Journal of American Folklore 115/456 (2002): 247–68. “Die Türken kommen – rette sich wer kann,” Der Spiegel (26 March 1973). Ullrich, Volker. Die nervöse Grossmacht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1997). United Kingdom. Foreign Office. Reports on the Treatment by the Germans of British Prisoners and Natives in German East Africa (London: H M S O , 1917). “University of Oxford Development Records Project,” Overseas Pensioner 39 (1980): 10. Van Leeuw. “Souvenirs de deux années de captivité en Afrique orientale allemande: Août 1914–Septembre 1916,” Congo 3.3 (1923): 313–34. Verhandlungen des Reichstages: Stenographische Berichte. Vertovec, Steven. “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999): 447–62. Vick, Brian. “ConRpt: German Colonialism and National Identity,” on-line posting (27 September 2006), [email protected] Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 2002). Wagner, Christoph. Fast schon Food: Die Geschichte des schnellen Essens (Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei–Lübbe, 2001). Wahhab, Iqbal. “The Truth about Tikka Masala,” The Independent (24 April 2001), www .independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/the-truth-about-tikka-masala682356.html (accessed 25 June 2009). Walgenbach, Katharina. “Die weisse Frau als Trägerin deutscher Kultur”: Koloniale Diskurse über Geschlecht, “Rasse“ und Klasse im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005). Walkowitz, Judith R. The City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992). Warburg, Otto. “Ergebnosse und Ansichten der Kolonialen Landwirtschaft,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1906): 1–15. Ward, Stuart, ed. British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2001). Warde, Alan. “Eating Globally: Cultural Flows and the Spread of Ethnic Restaurants,” in The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In, ed. Don Kalb (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 299–316. “Was lehrt uns die englische Kolonialpolitik?” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (28 August 1897). Weaver–Hightower, Rebecca. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2007). Webster, Wendy. Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005). Wehler, Hans–Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 3: Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995). ——. “Transnationale Geschichte – der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad & Oliver Janz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006): 161–74.

316

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999): 194–213. Werbner, Pnina. “Metaphors of Spatiality and Networks in the Plural City: A Critique of the Ethnic Enclave Economy Debate,” Sociology 35.3 (2001): 671–93. Werner, Michael, & Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History & Theory 45.1 (2006): 30–50. ——, & Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607–36. Wetzell, Richard F. Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2000). Whatmore, Sarah. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2002). The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (British Lion, U K 1973; 88 min.). Wierlacher, Alois. “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte und Systematik interkultureller Germanistik (1984–1994),” Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 20 (1994): 37–56. Wigger, Iris. Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007). Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2002). Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (London: Blackwell, 2001): 10–24. Williams, Roy. Joe Guy (London: Methuen, 2007). ——. Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads (London: Methuen, 2002). ——. “Twilight Zone,” Spread the Word talk, Morley College, London, 22 May 2005. Wilson, Jon. “Niall Ferguson’s Imperial Passion,” History Workshop Journal 56 (2003): 175–83. Wilson, Kim. Tea With Jane Austen (Madison W I : Jones, 2004). Wirz, Albert. “Essen und Herrschen: Zur Ethnographie der kolonialen Küche in Kamerun vor 1914,” Genève–Afrique 22.2 (1984): 38–62. Wities, Bernhard. “Das Wirkungsprinzip der Reklame: Eine psychologische Studie,“ Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 2 (1906): 138–54. Wodehouse, P.G. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Wohltmann, Ferdinand. “Zur Methode des Kaffeepflanzens in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Der Tropenpflanzer (1898): 169–78. Wolter, Sabine. Die Vermarktung des Fremden: Exotismus und die Anfänge des Massenkonsums (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005). Wright, C.T. Hagberg. “German Methods of Development in Africa,” Journal of the African Society 1 (1901–1902): 23–38. Wu, Duncan. Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Dramatists and their Directors (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).



Works Cited

317

Wulffen, Erich. Der Sexualverbrecher: Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Polizei- und Verwaltungsbeamte, Mediziner und Pädagogen (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1928). Yasmin, dir. Kenneth Glenaan, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (Parallax, Germany/U K 2004; D V D : inD D V D , 2005; 87 min.). Yegenolu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). ——. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). ——. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Zachariah, Benjamin. “Rewriting Imperial Mythologies: The Strange Case of Penderel Moon,” South Asia 24.2 (2001): 53–72. Zaimolu, Feridun. Abschaum: Die Geschichte des Ertan Ongun (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1997). ——. Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995). ——. Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1998). ——. “Mein Deutschland,” Die Zeit (12 April 2006): 1. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770– 1870 (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1997). Zeller, Joachim. “Andauernde Auseinandersetzungen um das Kolonialkriegdenkmal in Göttingen: Eine Chronik,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Goettingen-kolonialadler .htm (accessed 30 January 2010). ——. “Deutschlands grösster Afrikaner’: Zur Geschichte der Denkmäler für Hermann von Wissmann,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 12 (1996): 1089–111. ——. “Einweihung des Namibia-Gedenksteins in Berlin,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de /Seiten/2009-Zeller-Namibiagedenkstein-Berlin.htm (accessed 30 January 2010). ——. “Germany: The Latecomer,” in The Age of Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007): 238–53. ——. “Granatenwerfer und andere Helden: Namibia weiht seine neue nationale Gedenkstätte ein,” iz3w. informationszentrum 3. welt 264 (2002): 5. ——. Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Eine Untersuchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2000). ——. “Kolonialkrieg und Denkmal: 100 Jahre Politik mit der Erinnerung,“ Namibia – Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte: Widerstand, Gewalt, Erinnerung, ed. Michael Bollig, Larissa Förster & Dag Henrichsen (Cologne: Minerva, 2004): 124–43. ——. “(Post-)Koloniale Monumente: Denkmalinitiativen erinnern an die imperiale Übersee-Expansion Deutschlands,” www.afrika-hamburg.de/denkmal5.html (accessed 30 January 2010). ——. “Das Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek (Namibia) – Die Geschichte eines deutschen Kolonialdenkmals,” www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Zeller-Reiterdenkmal-1912 .htm (accessed 30 January 2010).

318

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

——. “Das Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek/Namibia: Ein deutsches Kolonialdenkmal im Wandel der Zeiten,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 9 (1995): 773–94. ——. “Zwischen Wilhelmshaven und München: (Post-)Koloniale Erinnerungskultur in Deutschland,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden & Joachim Zeller (Erfurt: Sutton, 2008): 267–74. ——, & Jürgen Zimmerer, ed. Genocide in German South–West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 in Namibia and its Aftermath (London: Merlin, 2008). ——, & Jürgen Zimmerer, ed. Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904– 1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2003). Ziemann, Hans. Gesundheits-Ratgeber für die Tropen (Berlin: Reimer, 1913). Zimmerer, Jürgen. “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. Dirk A. Moses (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2004). ——. “Die Geburt des ‘Ostlandes’ aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus: Ein postkolonialer Blick auf die NS-Eroberungs- und Vernichtungspolitik,” Sozial.Geschichte (2004): 10–43. ——. “Kolonialer Genozid? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer historischen Kategorie,” in Enteignet – vertrieben – ermordet: Beiträge zur Genozidforschung, ed. Dominik J. Schaller (Zürich: Chronos, 2004): 109–28. ——. “Menschenfresser und barbusige Mädchen: Eine Z D F -Serie und ein Buch verkitschen und verharmlosen den deutschen Kolonialismus,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (24 November 2005). ——. Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: L I T , forthcoming). Zimmerman, Andrew. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001).



Notes on Editors and Contributors

E V A B I S C H O F F is an assistant professor and postdoc researcher in History

at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University, Berlin. She studied modern history, American cultural history, political science, and philosophy at the Universities of Cologne, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, before becoming a member of the D F G -Graduiertenkolleg ‘Postcolonial Studies’ at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (2003–2005), where she received her doctorate in 2009. Her dissertation examines the influence of colonial discourses on the construction of white bourgeois masculinity. She is currently co-editing the volume “Colonialism and Beyond: Race and Migration from a (Post)Colonial Perspective” (with Elisabeth Engel, forthcoming 2010). Her general research interests include British, German, and U S -American colonial and imperial history, the history of criminality and psychiatry, postcolonial theory, and gender and queer studies. E L I Z A B E T H B U E T T N E R received her doctorate from the University of

Michigan at Ann Arbor and is now Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York (U K ). She has published extensively on British domestic and imperial history, including her book Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004). Her articles have appeared in a number of edited collections and in journals, including Scottish Historical Review, Women's History Review, Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space, History and Memory, and the Journal of Modern History. Alongside embarking on new work on South Asians and South Asian culture in post-imperial Britain, she is completing a comparative study entitled Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. M A U R E E N M A I S H A E G G E R S received her doctorate in Education at the University of Kiel in 2005. She worked as an assistant professor in the In-

320

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

stitute for Education in Gender Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin from 2005 to 2008, and is now Professor for Childhood and Difference (Diversity Studies) at the University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule) Magdeburg–Stendal. Since 1993 she has also been active in Adefra, an organization of black women in Germany. Her main research areas are childhood studies, diversity studies, gender, and intersectionality. She has co-edited the volume Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (with Susan Arndt, Grada Kilomba & Peggy Piesche, 2005) and is currently working on her first monograph, “Racialization and Children’s Perceptions of Social Power Differences.” P E T E R J A C K S O N is Professor of Human Geography at the University of

Sheffield (U K ). He was educated at Oxford University (BA Geography, 1976; Diploma in Social Anthropology, 1977; DPhil Geography, 1980). He taught at University College London (1980–93) and held visiting positions in Chicago, Minnesota, and Montreal before moving to his current post in Sheffield, where he served as Head of Department (2000–2003) and as Director of Research for the Social Sciences (2004–2007). He was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2001 and received the Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society (with the I B G ) in 2007. His research interests are in social and cultural geography with a particular interest in contemporary consumption cultures. He directed the ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2003–2008) and has recently begun a new research project on ‘Consumer culture in an age of anxiety’, funded by the European Research Council (2009–12). His publications include Maps of Meaning (1989), Shopping, Place and Identity (1998), Commercial Cultures (2000), Transnational Spaces (2004), and Changing Families, Changing Food (2009). S A R A L E N N O X is Professor and Program Director of German and Scandi-

navian Studies and Director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Recent books include The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (1998, co-ed. with Sara Friedrichsmeyer & Susanne Zantop), Feminist Movements in a Globalizing World (2002, co-ed. with Silke Roth), and Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann (2006). She has also published on German and Austrian writers of the twentieth century; literary, cultural and feminist theory; women’s history and the women’s movement in Germany and the U S A ; German studies; German colonialism; globalization and trans-



Notes on Editors and Contributors

321

nationalism; black Germans; and postcolonial writing in Germany. She is past president resident of the German Studies Association and has received grants from the Volkswagen Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for collaborative projects on black Germans and black Europeans. U L R I K E L I N D N E R is lecturer in global and transnational history at the University of Bielefeld. She studied history, German literature, and politics at the University of Erlangen–Nürnberg, the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and St John’s College, Oxford. Her research interests lie in comparative and, more recently, colonial and transnational history. Her doctorate, awarded by the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich in 2001, addressed health policy in West Germany and Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and won the prize of the G H I London. She has recently finished a book (Habilitationsschrift) on “Koloniale Begegnungen: Großbritannien und Deutschland als europäische Imperialmächte in Afrika vor dem 1. Weltkrieg” (‘Colonial Encounters: Great Britain and Germany as European imperial powers in Africa before World War I’), for which she held several scholarships, for a one-year stay in Cambridge/U K by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for research in African archives, and for a research stay at the E U I Florence. Publications include Ärztinnen – Patientinnen: Frauen im deutschen und britischen Gesundheitswesen des 20. Jahrhunderts (2002, co-ed. with Merith Niehuss), Gesundheitspolitik in der Nachkriegszeit: Großbritannien und die Bundesrepublik im Vergleich (2004), and several articles on British and German colonialism, on globalization and imperialism, and on transnational movements between empires. M A R E N M Ö H R I N G is a lecturer in modern and contemporary history at the

University of Cologne. She studied history and German literature at the University of Hamburg and at Trinity College, Dublin, before becoming a member of the D F G -Graduiertenkolleg “Geschlechterdifferenz & Literatur” at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (1998–2001), where she received her doctorate in 2002 with a study of the German nudist movement. She has recently finished a postdoctoral book project (Habilitationsschrift) on “Ausländische Gastronomie: Migrantische Unternehmensgründungen, neue Konsumorte und die Internationalisierung der Ernährung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (‘Foreign Cuisine: Migrant Businesses, New Places of Consumption, and the Internationalization of Food Consumption in West Germany’), for which she has done research in Rome, Istanbul, London,

322

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Washington D C , where she held a N E H /G H I scholarship in 2007, and Zurich, where she was a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2008/09. Publications include Marmorleiber: Körperbildung in der deutschen Nacktkultur (1890–1930) (2004) and several articles on the history of the body, gender history, and consumerism. She has co-edited a special issue of the academic journal Comparativ on “Ernährung im Zeitalter der Globalisierung” (‘Food in the Age of Globalization’) with Alexander Nützenadel (2007), a book on the representations of the human–animal relation in film with Massimo Perinelli and Olaf Stieglitz (2009), and a special issue of Food & History 7.2 (2009) on “Public Eating, Public Drinking: Places of Consumption from Early Modern to Postmodern Times.” D E I R D R E O S B O R N E is Australian-born and has lived in London for more

than twenty years. She is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her doctorate, “New Woman Writers, Motherhood and Colonial Ideology (1880–1903),” initiated her research interest in maternity, nationhood, and Victorian writers, and in issues of indigenousness and representation. Most recently she contributed to Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal (ed. Klaver & Rosenmann, 2008). She has edited an anthology of new black British plays and critical essays, Hidden Gems (2008). A monograph, Critically Black: Black British Dramatists and Theatre in the New Millennium, and an anthology, Contradictions and Heritages: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing, are in preparation. M I C H A E L P E S E K took performance studies, sociology, and African studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. After completing an M.A. degree in 1996,

he held the position of doctoral research fellow in the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2004, he finished his doctoral dissertation on the establishment of German colonial rule in East Africa, which was published in 2005 under the title Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Currently he is a research fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre 640 “Changing Representations of Social Order – Intercultural and intertemporal comparisons” at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has published several articles on German colonialism and Eastern African and German travellers in the nineteenth century. His next book (forthcoming 2010) deals with World War I in East Africa. L A U R A J U L I A R I S C H B I E T E R is a lecturer in economic and social history at

the Humboldt University of Berlin. She studied history, political science, and



Notes on Editors and Contributors

323

sociology at the Humboldt and Free Universities, Berlin, and holds an M.A. from Humboldt University. She worked as a Research and Teaching Associate in the Volkswagen Research Group “Globalization as a Historical Process” at the University of Cologne before becoming a lecturer in economic and social history at Georg August University, Göttingen. She received her doctorate in 2009 from the European University of Viadrina and is currently revising her dissertation on “Kaffee im Kaiserreich: Eine Geschichte der Globalisierung” for publication. Her research areas include the economic and social history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the history of globalization, consumption, and science. Her publications include Henriette Hertz (1846–1913): Mäzenin und Gründerin der Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rom (2004), and several articles on the history of globalization. M A R K U S S C H M I T Z read Islamic sciences/Middle Eastern studies, Oriental

philology, political science, and international law at the universities of Bochum and Cairo, and cultural studies at Potsdam University. He holds an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Bochum University and completed his doctorate on Edward W. Said’s cross-cultural impact, with a special focus on his Middle Eastern reception, at Münster University in 2007. His book Kulturkritik ohne Zentrum: Edward W. Said und die Kontrapunkte kritischer Dekolonisation (Cultural Criticism without a Centre: Edward W. Said and the Counterpoints of Critical Decolonization) was published in 2008. He was a scholarship holder of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and has taught transnational literatures, comparative cultural criticism, and postcolonial theory. He now is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department of Münster University. His research interests include comparative cultural theory, contemporary Arab (American) representations, transmigration and travelling theories, Orientalism/Occidentalism, ethnic studies, gender, and critical urban studies. Current projects include a study of “Cultural Articulations of Arab American Transmigration: Criticism, Literature and the Visual Arts.” M A R K S T E I N is Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies and Head

of the Department of English at the University of Münster, Germany. He is President of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (A S N E L ). His publications include African Europeans (special issue of Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, 2008, co-ed. with Lyn Innes), Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (2005, co-ed. with Susanne Reichl), Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004), Postcolonial

324

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S 

Passages: Migration and Its Metaphors (special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2001, co-ed. with Mita Banerjee & Markus Heide), and Can ‘The Subaltern’ Be Read? – The Role of the Critic in Postcolonial Studies (1996, co-ed. with Tobias Döring & Uwe Schäfer). S I L K E S T R O H studied at the Universities of Aberdeen and Frankfurt, where

she completed her doctorate on “(Post)Colonial Scotland? Literature, Gaelicness and the Nation” in 2006. Having taught at the universities of Frankfurt and Giessen, she now works at the English department of Münster University, working on a postdoctoral research project (Habilitationsschrift) on diasporic identities in British colonial settler cultures. She is the author of Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry (forthcoming soon). She has also published on anglophone Scottish, Asian British, African and Canadian literature and culture; on postcolonial theory; and on strategies for teaching transcultural competence in E F L (English as a foreign language) classes. C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M is a native of Singapore and studied English, German, and psychology at the University of Essen, Germany. From October 2002 to June 2008, she was a junior lecturer and research assistant in the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She spent a year (2006–2007), at the University of York, England as a Marie Curie Gender Graduate Fellow and completed her doctoral dissertation on “Women and Transculturality in Contemporary Fictions by South Asian Diasporic Women Writers.” She has published on South Asian diasporic women’s literature from the U S A , Canada, England, and the Caribbean. She is co-editor of and contributor to Disturbing Bodies (2008), an essay collection on artistic and literary representations of deviant bodies, as read by scholars of literary and cultural studies, using contemporary feminist and queer theories. Other fields of academic interest include Indo-Caribbean women’s poetry, Bollywood film, Asian diasporic fusion music, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy works. She moved to the U S A in June 2008 and is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She currently divides her time between Atlanta and the University of Münster, Germany, where she teaches. J O A C H I M Z E L L E R was born in 1958 in Swakopmund, Namibia. He studied history, art, and German in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, where he also received his doctorate. He lives as an historian in Berlin. His publications include: Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Eine Untersuchung der kolonial-



Notes on Editors and Contributors

325

deutschen Erinnerungskultur (2000); Kolonialmetropole Berlin: Eine Spurensuche (joint ed., 2002); Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg 1904– 1908 in Namibia und seine Folgen (co-ed., 2003; tr. as Genocide in German SouthWest Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 in Namibia and its Aftermath, 2008); “... Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft”: Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus (co-ed., 2005); Bilderschule der Herrenmenschen: Koloniale Reklamesammelbilder (2008); Kolonialismus hierzulande: Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland (co-ed., 2008); Weiße Blicke – Schwarze Körper: Afrika(ner) im Spiegel westlicher Alltagskultur (2010).



Index

11 Josephine House (Fagon), 226 9/11, xxxii, xxxvii, lxxi, 230, 232, 234, 239, 242, 259, 270 93.2 FM (Addai), 226 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, 221 Absolute Beginners (MacInnes), 226 Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 258, 260 activism, xlv, xlvi, 189, 197, 223 Addai, Levi David, 93.2 FM 226; Oxford Street 226 Adefra, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 Adelson, Leslie A., 165 advertising, xliv, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 134, 144, 156, 162, 168, 174, 175 aesthetics, diasporic, 158; Polish-

German, lxx Africa, xxi, xxvii, xxix, xli, xlvi, liii, liv, lv, lviii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 48, 62, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 76, 84, 88, 89, 95, 96, 100, 104, 109, 116, 118, 144, 190, 194, 199, 200, 201, 214, 272 African colonies, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 18, 21, 98, 116

Afro-Deutsche, 190, 196 Afro-German(s), lvi, 6, 74, 75, 87, 190– 96

Agbaje, Bola, Gone Too Far 224, 226 Agboluaje, Oladipo, Christ of Coldharbour Lane 226

agriculture, colonial, 29 Agyemang, Kofi, & Patricia Elcock, 203 Akın, Fatih, dir., Gegen die Wand / Head On xxxv; Kurz und Schmerzlos / Short Sharp Shocked xxxv Aldrich, Robert, 66, 92 Alibhai–Brown, Yasmin, 175, 207, 223, 245

Alloula, Malek, 266 ambivalence, xxiii, 9, 21, 26, 170, 269, 271, 272, 274 America, li, liv, 51, 56, 102, 103, 148, 157, 194, 225 American feminism, l, li American scholarship, xxi, lii, lxii, lxxii, 101, 102, 103 American studies, li, lxxi, lxxii americanization, 157, 169 Ames, Eric, liv Amin, Idi, xxx Anderson, Benedict, xiv, xxxvii, lxx, 67, 100, 194, 231 Anderson, David, 98, 99, 100 Anderson, Warwick, 56 Angel House (Roy Williams), 223 Angola, 100, 194 Ani, Ekpenyong et al., 189, 191 anthropology, xlii, lvi, lx, 46, 59, 62, 217, 218, 261 anti-Americanism, 159 anti-apartheid movement, 71 anticolonialism, 70, 71, 75, 97, 258

328 anti-imperialism, l, 68, 70, 80 antisemitism, xxxiv, 270 Appadurai, Arjun, 170, 179; & Carol A. Breckenridge, 168 appropriation, xliii, xlix, lii, liii, lxix, lxxi, 34, 50, 68, 155, 158, 160, 162, 170, 178, 185, 193, 196, 215, 274 Aragay, Mireia et al., 204 Arana, R. Victoria, 208 Arendt, Hannah, 244 Arens, William, 45 aristocracy, British, 129, 133, 141, 142, 143

Asad, Talal, 261, 274 Ashcroft, Bill et al., xvi Askari, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 40, 46 Asmis, W., 11 Assam, 133, 149 assimilation, xxxii, xlvi, 174, 185, 229, 233, 234, 240, 244, 245, 255, 259, 261 Assmann, Jan, 4 Austen, Jane, 137, 235 authenticity, xxxv, 148, 156, 157, 159, 160, 164, 182, 185, 203, 224, 250, 254 autobiography, 35, 192, 193, 194, 195 Ayim, May (formerly May Opitz), 193, 196

Bachmann–Medick, Doris, lxxiii Bade, Klaus J., xxxvi, 65 Bahloul, Joëlle, 159 Bangladesh, 171, 172 Bangladeshis, in Britain, 171 Banks, Joseph, 132 barbecue, 162 Barker, Howard, 224 Barker, Martin, xxxix, 225 Barlösius, Eva, 153 Barry, Elizabeth, & William Boles, 223 Barth, Boris, xxvii Basch, Linda, 168 Bashford, Alison, 56 Bashment (Beadle–Blair), 226 Basu, Shrabani, 170, 172, 174

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Baum, Andreas, 157 Bauschinger, Sigrid, & Susan L. Cocalis, li Bayly, Chris, xviii, xxv, 6 Beadle–Blair, Rikki, Bashment 226; FaddaMuddaSistaBrudda 226 Beard, George Miller, 51 Beaufoy, Simon, 231, 235 Becci, Irene, 242 Bechhaus–Gerst, Marianne, & Reinhard Klein–Arendt, lix Becker, Frank, 17 Beckmann, Reinhold, 273 Beckstein, Günther, 164 Beeton, Mrs, 171 Belasco, Warren J., 155 Belgian Congo, 23 Belgium, 96 Beloff, Max, 101 Berg, Karl, 52 Berghoff, Hartmut, & Dieter Ziegler, 5 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin), 61 Berlin, xlvi, lviii, lix, 7, 9, 14, 19, 24, 44, 45, 74, 75, 76, 84, 87, 88, 124, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 163, 191, 253, 264, 268, 269, 271, 274 Berman, Nina, liii, lxix, lxxi Berman, Russell, liii, lxix Besser, Stephan, 58 Best, Nicholas, 99 Betts, G. Gordon, xxix Betts, Raymond F., xxi Bhabha, Homi K., xii, xv, xvi, xviii, xxiv, xxx, 5, 257, 258, 260, 263, 272, 273, 274

Bhachu, Parrinder, 158 Bhaji on the Beach (dir. Chadha), 183 Bhaskar, Sanjeev, 235 Bhim, Michael, 226 Bhogal, Vicky, 180, 181 Bickers, Robert, 90 Bickford–Smith, Vivian, 18, 20 Bidisha, 222 Biermann, Wolf, 256 Birmingham, 172, 173



329

Index

Birnbaum, Karl, 50, 52 black activism See under: black feminist activism black African scholars on colonial historiography, lvii black Africans and British colonialism, 18; and European colonialism, 21; and German colonialism, 5, 14, 17, 62, 73, 120, 121; in German POW camps, 32 black Americans, 103 black British culture, xxxi Black Consciousness, 197 black diaspora, xlv ‘black disgrace’ (Schwarze Schmach), xxii, 62

black drama, 208, 223, 224, 225, 226 black experience and transnationalism, lxv, lxxii black feminist activism in Germany, xlv, 74, 189–202; in the Netherlands, 192, 197

black German studies, lxix, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198 black Germans and autobiography, 194, 199; and self-perception, 200; creativity of, 225 black market, 132 black presence in Germany, xlv black soldiers in German imperial army, 37; in postwar Germany, xxxviii, 194; in Rhineland, xxii, 194 Blackman, Malorie, Noughts and Crosses 226

blackness, and the German language, 192, 193; stereotypes of, in Britain, xlv blacks, German denial of their existence in Germany, 192; German depictions of, 121, 122; German perceptions of, 189, 192 blacks, German, and self-perception, 190, 191, 192 Blair government, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, 239 Blair, Tony, 232, 233, 234, 244 Blechynden, Richard, 149 Bley, Helmut, lv, 17

Bloch, Iwan, 55 Blue Mountain Theatre Company, Revenge of a Black Woman 226 Bockwurst, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163

Boehmer, Elleke, 134 Boese, Daniel, 269 Böhlke–Itzen, Janntje, lvii, 74 Böll, Heinrich, Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady), xxxiii Bombay, 39, 131, 141, 168, 169, 172, 175, 178, 179, 182 Bond, Edward, 219 Bongard, Oscar, 58, 282 Bonn, Moritz Julius, 69 Bonteko, Cornelius, 131 border-crossing, 237 borders, xiii, xv, xli, xlviii, lx, lxii, lxiii, lxiv, lxv, lxvi, lxx, 4, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 161, 163, 168, 230, 237, 239, 247, 260, 261, 271 Bose, Brinda, 242 Boston Tea Party, 132 Boswell, James, 138 Bourdieu, Pierre, 114, 191, 195, 196, 201, 212

Boyce, D. George, xxi Bradley, Ian, 232 Brady, Ian, 211 Brah, Avtar, 168 Brathwaite, Kamau, xxx Brazil, 115, 116, 123, 125, 174 Bremen, lvii, 71, 82, 84, 191 Bride & Prejudice (dir. Chadha), 235 Briggs, John Henry, 34, 35 Brink, Cornelia, 52 Bristol, 93, 103 British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, 93, 94 British Empire, xii, xiii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxv, xxviii, xliv, 7, 12, 59, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 129, 175 British India, 103, 145, 170 British Nationality Act, xxix British studies, xiv

330 British subject, 19 Britishness, xix, xxiii, xxxi, 104, 159, 175, 207, 218, 232, 246 Bröck, Sabine, & Anna Koenen, l Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights 211 Brown, Gordon, 104 Brown, Judith M., xx Bruce, Robert, 133 Brunswick, 72 Buchholz, Hans Eberhard, 110 Budde, Gunilla, lxviii Buettner, Elizabeth, 92, 93, 103 Burton, Antoinette M., xix, xxviii, 93, 94 Bush, George W., 240 Bushido (rapper), 273, 275 Byrnes, Sholto, 209 Çağlar, Ayşe, 156, 157, 158 Cameron, David, 209 Cameroon, 81 camp, prisoner-of-war, for Germans, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 192 cannibalism, xlii, 45, 47, 60, 62, 157 Cantle Report, xxxii, 233 Cantle, Ted, 233 Cape Colony, xli, 4, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Cape Town, 6, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20 Carby, Hazel, xxx Carey, John, 95 Caribbean Artists Movement, xxx Caribbean, xxi, xxx, lxxii, 129, 144, 145, 146, 207, 214, 222, 224 Casciani, Dominic, 233, 234, 244 Castles, Stephen, xxxiv Catherine of Braganza, 131, 141 Celtic fringe, xxiv Chadha, Gurinder, dir., Bhaji on the Beach 183; Bride & Prejudice 235 chai (masala chai), 148; (spiced chai latte), 148

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 109 Chanock, Martin, 18 Chapman, Jan, 172, 177 Chapman, Pat, 170

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Charles II, King of England, 131 Chatterjee, Piya, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 140, 142, 144 Chicano/Chicana literature, lxx chicken tikka (masala), xliv, 155, 167–85 Chin, Rita, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix China, 98, 128, 130, 132, 182 Christ of Coldharbour Lane (Agboluaje), 226 Christianity, lxxi, 35, 36, 37, 89, 232, 261 Ciarlo, David M., xxii, 121 Cibber, Colley, 137, 143 citizenship, xxix, xxxiv, xxxv, lxvii, 17, 194, 226, 234, 253, 261, 262 civilizing mission, 31, 36, 41, 45, 99, 266 Clapp, Susannah, 217 Clark, Rex, & Oliver Lubrich, liii Clifford, James, xvi, xvii C O D E S R I A , 200, 201 coffee houses, 112, 113, 135 coffee rituals, 112, 124 coffee, xliv, 30, 107–25, 129, 135, 136, 140, 148; consumption of, 113, 114 Cohen, Deborah, & Maura O’Connor, 98

colonial discourse analysis, xxv colonial knowledge, 5 Colonial Office (British), 9, 10, 15, 19, 25, 89

colonial order, xli, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 260 colonial pedagogies, 263 Colonial Society (German), xxii, 3, 17 Colonial-Economic Committee, 116 colonialism, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli, xlii, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlix, l, li, lii, liii, liv, lv, lvi, lvii, lviii, lix, lx, lxi, lxii, lxviii, lxxi, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94,



Index

95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 131, 133, 134, 135, 144, 146, 147, 148, 154, 156, 167, 169, 170, 178, 184, 193, 194, 208, 214, 230, 231, 235, 258, 259, 260, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 271, 274

colonization, xv, xviii, xxiv, xxv, xli, xlii, l, lvii, lviii, lix, lxi, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 36, 58, 66, 69, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 100, 101, 134, 184, 257, 260, 266 coloured’ people, in UK, British attitude towards, xxxviii, 172; German attitude towards, 57, 62; in African colonies, 21; in Cape Colony, 18; in German East Africa, 37; in South-West Africa, 20; in South Africa, 14 commemorative culture, in Germany, xlii, 66, 77, 78 Commission for Racial Equality, xxxii, 203, 208, 209 commodification, xliv, 158, 262 commodities, 109 commodity chain, 108 Commonwealth Immigration Acts, xxix, xxx Commonwealth, xx, xxv, xxix, 93, 94, 102, 103, 185, 207 comparative history, 98 Congo, 28, 74, 95, 98, 100 Congress of Berlin, 74, 88 Conlan, Frank F., 168, 169 Conrad, Joseph, 208 Conrad, Sebastian, xiii, xxviii, xlviii, xlix, lii, liii, liv, lvi, lviii, lxii, lxiii, lxiv, lxviii, 5, 6, 66, 108 consumer culture, xii, xliii, xliv, 128, 165, 167, 168, 169, 182, 185, 192 conviviality, 246, 249 Cook, Ian, & Philip Crang, 159, 175, 181 Cook, Robin, 175, 176, 177, 178 Cooke, Dominic, 226 Cooper, Frederick, xxiv, lviii, 4, 5, 6, 46 Corbridge, Stuart, & John Harriss, 183

331 Cornwell, Gareth, 18 Cowper, William, 136, 137 Crang, Philip, 167; & Peter Jackson, 169; Claire Dwyer & Peter Jackson, 168 cream tea, 148 criminality, xlvi, lvi, lvii, lix, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37, 43, 49, 50, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 71, 74, 75, 78, 87, 100, 211, 212, 241, 246 criminals, prisoners of war as, 33 criminals, sexual, xlii, 49, 52, 54, 62 criminology, 44, 48, 49, 50, 59, 61, 62 critical race theory, xxxix Crossick, Geoffrey, xiii cross-race relationships, 213, 214 cuisine, colonial African, 30 culinary hierarchy, 153 cultural politics, 175, 184, 185 cultural studies, xi, xix, xxvi, xxviii, xxxv, xl, xlvi, xlix, liv, lxi, lxviii, lxx, lxxi, lxxii, 65, 193, 194, 231 culture of remembrance, globalized, 78; in Germany, 75 culture of taste (exclusivity), 111, 128; Raymond Williams on, 147 culture, and anthropology, 218; and difference, 164; and European nationstates, 261; and hierarchization, 230; and homogeneity, 163; and hybridity, xxxvii, 178; and interdisciplinarity, xii; and location, 163, 164, 169, 264; and narration, 195; and representation, 192; and state power, xiv, xv; and superiority, 148; and whiteness, 200 — See also: authenticity, 164 culture, black British, 208, 226; as seen abroad, 214, 215 culture, British culinary, 148, 169, 178 culture, British Muslim/Asian, 168, 169, 237, 241, 242 culture, British, xix, xxviii, xxix, xlii, xliv, 91, 147; ghetto, 233; high, 147; culinary, 148, 169, 178; popular, xxx, 61, 147, 218, 225, 239; youth, xxxi, 221; as white, 220

332 culture, colonial, xxviii, 4; discourse on, xv culture, consumer, xl culture, culinary, 128, 130, 152, 165, 169, 178, 180; and hierarchization, 179; and transnationalism, 185 culture, ethnic, negative effect on colonizer, 56 culture, European, xvii culture, German, xxii, xxvi, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, xlii, xlviii, li, lii, lxx, 263, 264, 269; German attitude towards, 54; culinary, 158, 159, 163; hybrid, xxxv; imperial, xxi, xxvii, liii, liv, lviii, lxv, 68, 113, 125; Muslim, 262, 270; popular, xliv, xlvi, 116, 158; and Turkish/Muslim integration, 164 culture, German-Turkish, 158, 164, 262, 270; youth, 158 culture, Indian, and location, 181; culinary, 170, 178, 182; as globalizing, 179; in Britain, 185; in Europe, 260 culture, material, and European perceptions of superiority, 260; appropriation of, 185 culture, non-German: German ignorance of, lxxi; representation of Germany in, lxxi culture, of colonizer, xv; postcolonial, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxv, xl; public, 168; Raymond Williams on, 147; subaltern, 271; translational approaches to, lxvi, lxx; urban, 260 cultures of memory, xli, xlii, 72, 78 Cumper, Pat, & Courttia Newland, Sweet Yam Kisses 226 curry, xliv, 151, 154, 167–85 Currywurst, 151, 154, 161, 164 Curtis, L. Perry, Jr., 44 Dar-es-Salaam, 39, 67, 79 Darjeeling, 133, 143, 144, 146, 149 Darwin, John, xxi, 100 Das, Veena, 266

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Davenport, Rodney, & Christopher Saunders, 12, 14 Daye, Pierre, & Jules Renkin, 38 Days of Significance (Roy Williams), 221, 222, 226 De Botty Business (Zephaniah), 226 decline, British cultural, xx, 59; British imperial, xx, xxi, 93, 97; of British identity, 176 decolonization, 70, 76, 91, 200, 201, 202, 259; British, xvii, xxi, 90, 91, 94, 97, 100, 101, 215; 100, 202; German, 66, 68, 69, 73, 79, 200; mental, 69, 77 Dedering, Tilman, 13 degeneracy, 52, 57, 138; criminal, 50, 52, 53, 60, 63, 64, 216 Deiterding, Birgit, 250 Demir, Mustafa, & Ergün Sökmez, 164 Denke, Karl, 44, 45, 60, 62 Dernburg, Bernhard, 7, 8 Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, xxii Deutschmann, Ludwig, 112 deviance, xxiv, 50 dialectic of seeing and desire, 265 diaspora studies, 193 diaspora, xxi, xxv, xxxiv, xxxvi, xlv, xlvi, lxix, 143, 144, 168, 184, 193, 204, 229, 230, 233, 236, 238, 244, 245, 246, 249, 254, 256; Jewish, 244; South Asian, xlv, 148, 167, 168, 169, 178, 180, 184, 231, 236 Dietrich, Anette, 57 Dietrich, Marlene, 128 Dimbleby, Jonathan, 232 Diop, Cheich Anta, 68 dirty butterfly (green), 226 Dix, Otto, 61 Döblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz 61 Docker, Chris, 251 documentaries, television, 93, 94 Dodd, Vikram, 208 Dolan, Andy, 210 domestic spaces, 137 döner kebab, xliv, 151–64, 172, 178



333

Index

Dooars, 133 Dossmann, Axel, & Lutz Niethammer, 4 Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Hound of the Baskervilles 211 drama, 137; black British, xlv, 203–27 Dread Beat an Blood (Linton Kwesi Johnson), xxx Drechsler, Horst, liv, lv Dresden, 83 Duncan, James S., 56 Duruz, Jean, 157 Dussel, Enrique, xlvii Düsseldorf, 85 Dwyer, Claire, 167, 179 Dyer, Richard, 63, 93 Dzidzonou, Victor, 74, 88 East Africa, xli, 25, 29, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41 East Germany, 69, 163, 194, 195 East India Company, 131, 132, 145, 167 Eastern Europe, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxiv eastern Germany, xxxvi, 161 Eckert, Andreas, & Albert Wirtz, lii, liv Eckert, Guido, 156 Eckl, Andreas, lviii Edgar, David, 219 Edgecombe, D.R., 18 Eggers, Maisha, 225 Ehlers, Fiona, 161 Eldridge, Michael, 204 Elkins, Caroline, 98, 99, 100, 102 Ellis, Havelock, 47, 48, 54, 62 Elmina’s Kitchen (Kwei-Armah), 219 El-Tayeb, Fatima, xxii, 6 Emmanuel–Jones, Wilfred, 209, 210 Empire and Commonwealth Museum, 103

English studies, xxv Englishness, xix, 91, 131, 148, 149, 207, 215, 218, 221 entangled histories (histoires croisées), xiii, xli, 66 Entdeckung der Currywurst, Die (Uwe Timm), 152

epistemic change, xlv, 189, 191, 197, 199, 200

epistemic models, lxxii epistemic production, 189, 190, 197, 201 Escobar, Arturo, xlvii Espagne, Michel, xiii Espinet, Ramabai, The Swinging Bridge 145 Essner, Cornelia, 20 ethnic cuisine, xxxi, xxxvi, xl, xliii, xliv, xlv, 30, 159, 154, 160, 165, 180, 182 ethnicity, xxxviii, xxxix, l, 207, 212, 229, 253

eurocentrism, xlvii, xlviii, lxxi, 70 European CommunityIUnion, xxxv, xxxiv Eves, Richard, 56 exhibiting and governing, 264 exoticism, xliii, lix, lxv, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 144, 148, 156, 159, 173, 175, 177, 245, 266 extremism, xxxvii, xlv, 230, 243, 246 Eyre, Richard, 219; & Nicholas Wright, 204

FaddaMuddaSistaBrudda (Beadle–Blair), 226

Fagon, Alfred, 11 Josephine House 226 failed integration, xxxvii, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 269 Falkenhorst, Karl, 117 Fallenbacher, Tim, 154 Fallout (Roy Williams), 222, 224 Fanon, Frantz, 258, 260, 265, 266, 268 Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (ed. Oguntoye et al.), 193 Fassmann, Heinz, xxxviii fast food, xliv, 124, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 162, 179, 182 Fat Les, 178 Fehrenbach, Heide, xxxviii, xxxix feminism, l, li, 184, 190, 199, 201, 225, 242, 267 feminization, of domestic space, 129; of fashion, 184; of Orient, 266; of tea,

334 134, 140, 141, 142, 143; of tea, in India, 134, 140 Fendall, C.P., 28, 37

Fenton, Steve, xxxix Ferguson, James, & Akhil Gupta, 163, 164

Ferguson, Niall, xix, 96, 97, 98, 100 Ferrero, Sylvia, 155 Ferri, Enrico, 50 Fertsch–Röver, Hadwiga, 250, 289 Fieldhouse, D.K., xx film, and black British culture, 225; and gothic, 211; and Muslim presence in Britain, 231–51; in Mumbai, 168 Findeisen, Franz, 110, 112 Fisher–Lichte, Erika, 211 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, lxxii food cultures, 152, 165, 170, 181, 182, 184 football, English, 178, 220, 221, 222 Foreign Office, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Forrest, Denys, 138 Fortune, Robert, 133 Francis–Mills, Sonia, 210 Franco, Jesús, dir., Jack the Ripper 43 François, Étienne, & Hagen Schulze, 67 Frederiksen, Elke, lxix Frey, Erich, 45 Friedrichsmeyer, Sara et al., xxiii, xxvi, li Fröhlich, Margrit et al., 256 Fröhlich, Michael, 10, 11 From Hell (dir. Hughes), 43 Frontline, The (Che Walker), 224 Fryer, Peter, xxix Gallagher, John, xxi Ganguli, Dwarkanath, 133 Gann, Lewis H., xxi Gardam, Tim, 95 Gaskill, Bill, 219 Gastarbeiter (guest workers), xxxv, xxxvi gaze, colonial, 274; German integrative, 268; mainstream, 271; postcolonial, liii; white Western, 201, 260 G D R , xxxiii, liv, 70, 153, 163, 194

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Gebhardt, Hartwig, 118 Gedichte einer schönen Frau (St Louis), 193 Gegen die Wand / Head On (dir. Akin), xxxv Geissler, Reiner, & Horst Pöttker, 272 gender, xxxvii, xxxviii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, lii, lxiii, lxxi, 5, 44, 47, 59, 112, 128, 129, 134, 136, 140, 156, 162, 200, 201, 205, 211, 212, 222, 225, 230, 233, 235, 236, 237, 239, 242, 246, 253, 265, 271 genocide, xv, xxvi, lvii, lviii, lix, 72, 75, 76, 84, 85, 88, 100 geographies, colonial, 265; real/imaginary, xliv, 160, 164 Geological Survey, 12 German appropriation of, lxxi German East Africa, xli, 9, 11, 24, 26, 29, 30, 36, 40, 67, 69, 116, 117 German Empire, xiii, xviii, xxii, xxiv, 12, 25, 39, 70, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125 German South-West Africa, xxvi, xli, 4, 6, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 72, 75, 76, 85 German Studies Association, li, lx, lxx German studies, xiv, xxvi, xl, xlvii, xlviii, xlix, l, li, lx, lxii, lxiv, lxix, lxxi, lxxiii, 193 German-Jewish studies, lxix Germanness, xxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, 191, 193, 194, 254, 273 Gerstmeyer, Johannes, 50 Gerwarth, Robert, & Stephan Malinowski, xxvii geteilte Geschichten, 108, 125 Geulen, Christian, 58 Geyer, Martin H., 60 Geyer, Michael, xxxvi, xlviii, lxv, lxvi; & Konrad R. Jarausch, xxxvi Ghana, 222 Gillespie, Marie, 169 Gilman, Sander L., 55 Gilmour, David, 102, 103 Gilroy, Paul, xi, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxx, xxxi, 92, 233, 245, 246 Gladstone, William, 9 Glasse, Hannah, 171



335

Index

Glassman, Jonathon, 32 Glenaan, Kenneth, dir., Yasmin 229–51 globalization, xi, xii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxvi, xxxvi, xlii, xlvi, xlvii, xlviii, lxiii, lxix, 6, 78, 107, 108, 163, 169, 182, 201, 221, 243

glocalization, 108, 148, 163 Gnauck–Kühne, Elisabeth, 113 Göckede, Regina, 260 ‘going native’, 45, 56, 58, 63 Göktürk, Deniz et al., 255 Goldberg, David, xxvi, xxxiv Gone Too Far (Agbaje), 224, 226 Goodness Gracious Me (TV show), 183 gothic, rural, 211 Göttingen, 70, 71, 84 Graichen, Gisela, lv Grant, Kevin et al., xiii Grass, Günter, liii green, debbie tucker, dirty butterfly 226; generations 226; random 226; stoning mary 226; trade 226 Green, Simon, xxxv Greenwich Council, xxxi Greer, Bonnie, Marilyn and Ella 226 Grewal, Inderpal, & Caren Kaplan, 184 Griffin, Gabriele, 205 Griffiths, John, 149 Grimm, Hans, 9 Grosse, Pascal, xxii, xxvii, lvi, lix, 78 Grossmann, Karl, 44, 52 Grosz, George, 61 Group Portrait with Lady (Böll), xxxiii Gründer, Horst, lv Gruppenbild mit Dame (Böll), xxxiii guest workers (Gastarbeiter), xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxviii, 263, 268 Gupta, Tanika, 220 Gürich, Georg Julius Ernst, 23 gyros (pitta gyros), 151, 162 Haarmann, Friedrich (Fritz), 44, 49, 60, 62

Habitual Criminal Act (UK), 52 Häfner, Ansgar, 118

Hagen, Ute et al., 12 Haken, Rebekka, 51 Halbwachs, Maurice, 4 Hall, Catherine, xix Hall, Peter, 219 Hall, Stuart, xii, xxx, xxxi, xxxix, 108, 129, 135, 145, 147 Halle, Randall, lxx Halm, Dirk, & Martina Sauer, 270 Hamburg, 61, 67, 68, 70, 80, 84, 113, 124, 151, 191 Hannerz, Ulf, 185 Hanover, 71 Hansen, Randall, xxix Hansen, Thomas Blom, 178 Hanway, Jonas, 138, 141 Harder They Come, The (dir. Henzell), 226 Hardy, Robin, dir., Wicker Man 211 Hardyment, Christina, 161 Hare, David, 219 Harlow, John, & Lesley Thomas, 102 Harris, Jose, 11 Hartmann, Wolfram, lvi, lviii Hastings, Max, 99, 100 Hayali, Dunjya, 273 headscarf, 164, 241, 253, 254, 265, 268, 274

See also: veil Heathorn, Stephen, 92 Heckmann, Friedrich, & Dominique Schnapper, xxxv Heidegger, Martin, 260 Heitmeyer, Wilhelm et al., 264, 270 Henderson, Heike, 151 Henzell, Perry, dir., The Harder They Come 226

Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service, 94 Herbert, Alan Patrick, 127 Herbert, Ulrich, xxxvi Herero and Nama War, xxvi, 13, 15, 17 Herero people, xxvi, xxvii, liii, lv, lvi, lvii, lix, lxi, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 72, 75, 76, 78, 84, 88 Hering, Carl Gottlieb, 118 Heskins, Theresa, 209, 210

336 Hesse, Barnor, xvi, xxi, xxxi, 110, 111, 153 Hestermann, Sandra, xxxv Heymann, Robert, 60 H-German (discussion group), lvi, lix, lxi, lxiv, lxv, lxvi, lxix, lxxi High Heel Parrotfish (Christopher Rodriguez), 226 Hildebrandt, Klaus, xxiii Hill, John, 91 Hillmann, Felicitas, & Hedwig Rudolph, 152

Hindley, Myra, 211 Hirsch, Julius, 123 histoire croisée (entangled histories), xiii, 46, 98

historiography, xii, xix, xxviii, xlvi, xlviii, lii, liv, lxiii, lxvii, lxviii Hobson-Jobson (Yule), 169 Hohenegger, Beatrice, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145 Höhn, Maria, xxxviii Holloway, Thomas Halsey, 115 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 132 Holocaust, xxvi, xxvii, lix, 70, 75, 78 Holtom, E.C., 29, 30, 31, 33 holy war, Muslim, 36, 37 homo islamicus, 261 hooks, bell, 175 Hopwood, Francis J.F., 109 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Doyle), 211 Howe, Stephen, 91, 102 Hübner, Arthur, 53, 55 Hughes, Albert, & Allen Hughes, 43 Hughes, dir., From Hell 43 Huguenots, 163 Hull, Isabel V., lx Hulme, Peter, 45 Hunn, Karin, xxxvi Hunt, Leigh, & Alexander Kelly, 56 Hutcheon, Jane, 209, 210 Huxley, Elspeth, 96 Hyam, Ronald, xviii, xx, 19 hybridity, xi, xv, xvi, xviii, xxiv, xxv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xliii, xlvi, lxiv, 152, 159, 164, 178, 185, 193, 249

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  identity, collective, xii, xviii, 4, 192; cf. with transnationalism, lxiv; colonial, xv, xxiv, lxviii, 5, 20, 21, 30; cultural, xi, xii, xv, xxi, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, 4, 22, 56, 58, 118, 129, 130, 147, 175, 192, 203, 208, 221, 227, 264; cultural (Asian-Muslim), 242, 247; cultural (Berlin), 264; diasporic, 249; hybrid, xlv, 241; national, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxx, xxxi, xxxvii, xlv, lx, lxv, lxix, lxxii, 177, 220, 229, 231, 244, 249, 253, 256, 263, 264; racial, 17, 20, 21, 207, 208; racial (black British), 205, 224, 226; transcultural, 5, 157 identity-formation, xxiv, xliii, 3, 16, 21 imaginative geography, 257 imagined communities, xiv, lxx, 231, 243 immigration, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 59, 145, 151, 152, 153, 154, 164, 165, 171, 176, 185, 207, 208, 209, 229, 231, 233, 236, 246, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274 imperial nostalgia, 93 imperialism, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxiv, xxv, xxvii, xxxi, xli, xlii, xliii, xliv, l, liv, lviii, lx, lxi, lxiii, lxv, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 24, 60, 65, 68, 70, 75, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 116, 117, 119, 122, 132, 133, 134, 140, 143, 144, 145, 167, 193, 200, 208, 214, 215, 259, 265, 267 indentured labour, 133, 145 India, xx, xxix, 24, 39, 46, 92, 93, 94, 103, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 207, 278 Indian Civil Service, 102 Indian Ocean, 24, 25, 89 Indian Office, 25 indigenization, 134, 178, 179, 185 Inimitable Jeeves, The (Wodehouse), 127



Index

Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, 195, 196, 198 Innes, C.L., xxx, 219 integration courses, 272 integration policy, 267, 269 integration, of diasporic communities, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xlv, xlvi, 151, 152, 164, 165, 229, 233, 238, 239, 241, 242, 247, 248, 250, 254, 256, 258, 262, 263, 265, 267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275 integration, supplementary, 272 interdisciplinarity, xi, xii, xiv, xxviii, xxxix, xl, xlvi, xlix, liv, lx, lxxii, lxxiii, 90, 102, 193

internet, 67, 77, 160, 250, 273 interracial marriage, 57 Invention of Curried Sausage, The (Timm), 152

Ireland, xxix, 176, 220 Irish Free State, xx Islam, xxxi, xxxvii, 36, 37, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251, 253, 257, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270

islamophobia, xxxiv, xlv, 234, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 248, 249, 263, 267, 270 Italian Americans, 165 Italians, 164 ius sanguinis, xxxiv ius soli, xxxiv Jack the Ripper (dir. Franco), 43 Jack the Ripper, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 53, 59, 61, 62, 64 Jack, Ian, 209 Jackson, Peter, 169, 175, 177 Jacobs, Jane M., 260 Jacques, N., 112 Jamaican patois, 222 James, Allison, 163 James, Lawrence, xxi, 102 James, Lennie, 206, 207, 208, 214–17, 226; The Sons of Charlie Paora 206, 214– 217

337 Jansen, Fasia, 192 Janz, Oliver, lxviii Jarausch, Konrad, xxxvi, lxv, lxvi, lxviii Jeal, Tim, 95 Jeffries, Stuart, 248 Jekyll & Hyde syndrome, 49 Jekyll (dir. Moffat), 43 Jewish immigration to Britain, 59, 207 jihad, 37, 242, 243, 248 Joe Guy (Roy Williams), 206, 221, 222–26 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, Dread Beat an Blood xxx Johnson, Samuel, 138, 141 Joppke, Christian, xxix Joseph, May, 205 journalism, xii, xl, xlv, 248 Kaelble, Hartmut, xii, 160 Kaffeekränzchen, 112 Kaminer, Wladimir, Russendisko xxxv Kanak Attak (Turkish-German movement), 255, 271 Kanak Sprak (Zaimolu), xxxv Kanaksprak (Turkish German), 196, 255 Kanaksta style, 158 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 230 Kaneko Lucas, Valerie, 216 Kankeleit [Otto?], 61 Karakayali, Serhat, 271 Karimi, Z. Pamela, 264 Katz, Jacob, 270 Keith, Michael, & Steve Pile, 257 Kennedy, Dane, 102 Kenya, 96, 98, 99, 100, 149, 174 Khan, Naseem, 203 Kikuyu, 99, 100 Kilgour, Maggie, 45 King, Anthony D., 259 Kirchner, Bharti, 144, 146 Kirk–Greene, Anthony, 101 Kisiang’ani, Edward, 200 Klopp, Brett, xxxv Klotz, Marcia, liv Knopf, Sabine, 118 knowledge order, 202

338 knowledge production, xlv, 190, 191, 197, 198

Kocka, Jürgen, xii, lxviii, 98 Koller, Christian, 62 Kolonialwaren, xl, xliii Kontje, Todd, liii, liv Koponen, Juhani, 29 Kössler, Reinhart, lvi, lix, lx, 75 Krafft–Ebing, Richard von, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 62 Kreuzberg (Turkish-German enclave in Berlin), 153, 155, 157, 253, 264, 268, 269

Kristeva, Julia, 207, 271 Krüger, Gesine, lvii, 65, 79 Kruse, Ute, 131 Kuhn, Gabriel, 159 Külz, Ludwig, 55, 57 Kumar, Krishan, xx, 220 Kümpel, P., 117 Kundnani, Arun, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 233, 234, 246 Kundrus, Birthe, xxiii, xxvii, lviii, 4, 17, 20, 57, 75 Kunze, Stefanie, 123 Kürten, Peter, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 59, 61, 62 Kurz und Schmerzlos / Short Sharp Shocked (dir. Akin), xxxv Kwei–Armah, Kwame, 219, 220, 226; Elmina’s Kitchen 219; Let There Be Love 226

Lachmann, Günther, 270 Lambert, David, xxviii Landon, Philip, 61 Langbehn, Volker, lxi Lanz, Stephan, 269 Latin America, 109, 117, 119, 125 law, British, 20; British colonial, 11, 18, 97; colonial, 20; German citizenship and, xxxiv, 262; German colonial, 19, 26; international, 20, 21, 78; racial, 20 Le Naour, Jean–Yves, 62

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  leading culture (Leitkultur), xxxvii, 269 League of Gentlemen, The (comedy group), 211 Lefebvre, Henri, 258, 271, 272 legislation, cultural, xxxviii; German colonial, 17 See also: law Lehrer, Ute, 264 Lennox, Sara, li, liii Leopold, King of the Belgians, 95 Lester, Alan, xxviii Let There Be Love (Kwei–Armah), 226 Lettow–Vorbeck, 24, 25, 37, 40 liberalism, xxxii, 14, 18, 69, 93, 102, 116, 164, 177, 230, 247, 256, 264, 266, 267, 269, 274 Lift Off (Roy Williams), 219 Light, Ivan, & Carolyn Rosenstein, 154 Liliencron, Adda von, 57 Lindner, Fritz, 250 Lindner, Martin, 61 Lindner, Ulrike, 4, 17, 76 Link–Heer, Ursula, 51 Lion, Alexander, 7, 211 literary studies, xi, xii, xxvi, xxviii, xxxv, xlvi, xlix, liv, lxi, lxviii, lxx, lxxi, 193, 231 literature, xii, xvii, xxv, xxvi, xl, xlii, xlv, xlvi, li, liii, lxi, lxix, lxx, lxxi, 40, 44, 61, 118, 137, 143, 211, 218, 225, 254 Livingstone, David N., 56, 95 Lloyd, John, & John Mitchinson, 171 Lombroso, Cesare, 49, 50 London, xxx, xxxii, xliv, 8, 11, 14, 15, 43, 44, 45, 53, 59, 60, 62, 64, 103, 133, 135, 137, 146, 158, 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 204, 206, 209, 214, 220, 226 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon), xxx Longido, battle of, 27 Louis, Roger, 101, 102 Louis, William Roger, 10 Luft, Stefan, 270 Lustmord, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 61, 62, 64 Lützeler, Paul Michael, liii



339

Index

Macaulay, Alastair, 216 McClintock, Anne, 121, 162 McDonaldization, 157, 169 MacFarlane, Alan, 131, 135, 139, 142, 146; & Iris MacFarlane, 130 McGranaham, Carole et al., xiii MacInnes, Colin, Absolute Beginners 226 McIntyre, David W., xxi McLaren, Angus, 44, 61 MacKenzie, John M., xix MacMaster, Neil, xxx McPhee, Graham, & Prem Poddar, xx Madley, Benjamin, xxvi, xxvii Magliocci, Sabina, 165 Mahlow, Doreen, 161 Maier, Charles, 78 Majer, Dietmut, xxiii Maori traditions, 56, 216, 217 Marggraf, Andreas, 145 Marilyn and Ella (Greer), 226 marketing, xliii, xliv, 109, 116, 123, 125, 156, 201, 237, 269 Marks & Spencer (fdepartment store), 172

Martin, Laura C., 141 masculinity, xlii, 44, 46, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 134, 162, 221 Mass, Sandra, xxii, xxiii, 46, 62, 69 Massad, Joseph, 266 Massey, Doreen, 163, 258 Masson, J.R., 16 Mattes, Monika, xxxvi Mau Mau, 98, 99, 100 Mayer, Ruth, 158 Mazower, Mark, xxiii Mdumi, Martin Kayamba, 28, 33, 34, 35 media, and globalization, 243; and national identity-formation, 231; and terrorism, 243, 248 media, British, xxx, xlv, xlvi, 101, 211, 218, 221, 224, 231, 232, 234, 236, 239, 242, 243, 244, 248, 249; German, lix, lxi, 49, 52, 66, 77, 156, 199, 250, 253, 254, 257, 267, 272; Muslim, 248 medical studies, xlii, 46

Medlock, Mark, 199 Meer, Nasar, xxxi, 232, 233, 234 Meinertzhagen, Richard, 24, 31 Melber, Henning, lviii, 75 Meldrum, Andrew, lvii memorials, lix, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 94 memory culture, in Germany, 66, 67 Mercer, Kobena, 223 Merkel, Angela, 267 Mexican-American transmigration, 168 Meyer, Thomas, 270 middle classes, 48, 51, 54, 57, 59, 63, 111, 112, 114, 116, 129, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 168, 182, 209, 218 Middle Passage, The (Naipaul), xxx Mignolo, Walter, xlvii migration, xi, xii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiii, xxv, xxix, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, li, lx, lxix, 27, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 171, 178, 184, 185, 193, 194, 196, 198, 208, 255, 258, 262, 267, 271, 274 military, British, 221; British colonial, 24, 25, 28, 40; colonial, 15, 23, 25, 260; colonial German, 17; colonial, in southern Africa, 11; German, 10, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 60, 72, 268, 274; German colonial, 24, 27, 58, 69, 73; US, 56; US, in Germany, 194 Miller, Frank, Sin City 43 Ming dynasty, 130 Mintz, Sidney W., 120 Mirza, Munira, 250 Misselwitz, Philipp, & Eyal Weizman, 260

missionaries, 5, 7, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38 Mitchell, Katharyne, 179 Mitchell, W.J.T., 268 mixed-race relations, 17, 18, 19, 20 Modood, Tariq, xvii, 232, 234, 259 Moffat, Stephen, dir., Jekyll 43 Möhring, Maren, 154

340 Montanari, Massimo, 163 monuments, and public commemoration, 66; German colonial, xlii, 39, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 91 Moorhouse, Geoffrey, 103 Morenga, Jacob (Nama leader), 16 Motte, Jan, xxxvi, 102 Moxham, Roy, 130, 131, 135 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 221

Muhs, Rudolf et al., xiii Mules (Pinnock), 226 multiculturalism, xi, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xliv, xlvi, l, li, liv, lxxi, 151, 157, 158, 164, 165, 175, 177, 178, 179, 207, 208, 218, 219, 229, 233, 238, 244, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 259, 269, 270 multiculture, xi, xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, xxxi, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, xliii, xlv, 203, 229, 231, 232, 244, 248, 251 Mumbai, xliv, 168, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185 Munich, 76 Münster, 72 murder, xlii, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 59, 62, 99, 212, 270, 271; sexual, 44, 53 Muslims, xvii, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvii, xlv, xlvi, 36, 118, 162, 164, 165, 208, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274 Naipaul, V.S., The Middle Passage xxx Nairobi, 96 Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm Baydar, & Wong Chong Thai, 259 Nama people, xxvi, lv, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 75, 88 Namibia, xxvi, lv, lvi, lvii, lviii, lix, 3, 17, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 194

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Nandy, Ashis, 182 Naoko–Pilgrim, Anita, 204 Narayan, Uma, 156, 170, 184 narrative of splitting, 273 national dishes, 152, 163, 164, 177 national regeneration, 264, 273 National Socialism, xxiii, xxvi, xxvii, lix, 72, 83 national superego, 271 nationalism, xix, 178, 220, 274 nationalist icons, 134 nationhood, xii, 198 nation-state, xiv, xvi, xvii, xxvi, xxxii, lxi, lxvii, lxix, lxxi, 168, 229, 254, 261, 263 ‘native law’ (colonial), 18; (German colonial), 19, 20 ‘native policy’ (Boer), 18; (British colonial), 9, 14, 15; (German colonial), 14

‘native question’ (Germany), lvi native uprisings (in Africa), 10 naturalization, xxxiv, xxxv, lxvii, 160, 193, 206, 263, 272 Nazism, 98, 99 negative memory, 78 neocolonialism, xvii, 69, 70, 76, 230, 263, 274 neo-millennial black British poets, 208 neo-millennial black British theatre, 204, 226

neo-Nazis, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 nervous breakdown, 55, 56, 63 nervous disorders, 55, 138 nervous states, xviii, xxiv, xxxvii, 58 nervous system, 55, 58, 59, 63 nervousness, xviii, xx, xxiv, xxxiv, xxxvii, 58, 59, 63 Netherlands, 130, 131, 132, 221, 270 Neuhaus, Jessamyn, 162 New Delhi, 171 New Labour, xxxii, xliv, 175, 232 new literatures in English, xxv New Zealand, xx, xlvi, 48, 56, 206, 214, 217



341

Index

Newland, Courttia, 205, 206, 208, 209– 14, 219, 226; A Question of Courage 206, 209–213 Nghi Ha, Kien, xliii, 158, 256, 259 Nicholls, Christine, 96 Nightingale, Benedict, 216, 217 Nonn, Christoph, 114 Noughts and Crosses (Blackman), 226 Nunn, Trevor, 219 Nyasaland (British), 23, 34 Oakeshott, Robert, 100 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 45 Ogborn, Miles, 183 Oguntoye, Katharina et al., ed., Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte 193 opium trade, 131, 132 Ören, Aras, Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse xxxiii Orientalism, xlv, liii, 156, 230, 235, 243, 249, 257, 259, 260, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 274; as field of study, 37 Osborne, Deirdre, 205 Osborne, John, 210 Osterhammel, Jürgen, xiii, xviii, xxvii, xxviii, lvi, lxiii, lxiv, 108 Ottoman Empire, 36 Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association, 89, 93, 94 Oxford Development Records Project, 93, 94 Oxford History of the British Empire, xviii, xx, xxv, 102 Oxford Street (Addai), 226 Özdemir, Cem, 151, 152, 158, 164 Pakistan, xxix, 171, 207, 236, 243 Pan-German Society, 17 parallel society, Anglo-Pakistani, 236, 237; Muslim-British, xlvi; MuslimGerman, xxxvii, xlv, 253, 254, 259, 263, 265, 268, 269, 270; TurkishGerman, 269 Parekh, Bhikhu, xxxvii, 207, 244

Parker, David, 156, 161, 164 Parks, Suzan–Lori, 225 Pastinelli, Madeleine, & Laurier Turgeon, 157

Pastuschka, Bernd, 112, 113 Patak’s (curry manufacturer), 174 Pathak, Kirit, & Meena Pathak, 174 Paulmann, Johannes, xiii Pax Britannica, 8 Pax Germanica, 8 Peckham, Shannan, 152 Peckinpah, Sam, dir., Straw Dogs 211 pedagogical project of national selfidentification, 253, 272, 272, 274 Peers, Douglas, 102 Penny, H. Glenn, lx Pereira, Charmaine, 190, 199, 200 performance, poetics of, 204, 210, 211, 212, 217, 225, 274; politics of, 274 Pesek, Michael, xxiv, xxvii, xli, 23, 25, 26, 36, 37, 40 Peters, Carl, 58, 69, 71, 76 Pettigrew, Jane, & Bruce Richardson, 131 Pfäfflin, Friedemann, 61 phallo(go)centric perception of Muslims, 266

Philippine–American War, 56 Phillips, Caryl, 219, 226; adapt., Rough Crossings (Simon Schama), 226 Phillips, Melanie, xxxi Phillips, Mike, 207; & Trevor Phillips, xxix Phillips, Trevor, xxxii, 209 Pick, Daniel, 52, 59 Piesche, Peggy, 194 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 159, 163 Pinnock, Winsome, Mules 226; One Under 226 Pinter, Harold, 219 Pitcher, Ben, xxix plantations, 40, 116, 117, 129, 134, 135, 140, 143, 144, 145 Plehn, Albert, 57, 58 Poiger, Uta, xxiii, xliii, l Poland, xxiii, lxx, 69

342 Poley, Jared, xxii Poole, Elizabeth, xxxi, 230, 231, 232, 233, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247 porcelain, 130, 140 Porter, Andrew N., xx Porter, Bernard, xix Portugal, xxxiii, lvii, 23, 131 postcolonial studies, xii, xxv, xxviii, xlviii, li, liii, liv, lxi, lxiii, 45, 46, 66, 102 postcolonialism, xi, xviii, xx, xxvi, xl, lii, lxvii, 90 postcoloniality, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, xlii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlvii, xlviii, xlix, l, li, lii, liii, liv, lix, lxi, lxiii, lxiv, lxvii, lxx, 43, 45, 46, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 78, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 109, 134, 143, 144, 148, 154, 157, 162, 167, 170, 178, 189, 194, 198, 230, 235, 242, 257, 258, 259, 267, 272, 274 Potzl, Norbert F., 269 Prantl, Heribert, 152 Pratt, Geraldine, & Margaret Walton– Roberts, 183, 184 Prevention of Crimes Act (UK), 52 prisoners of war, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 72 prostitution, 43, 61 psychiatry, xlii, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 58, 61, 62, 63 psychopathology, 50, 53, 54, 63 psychopathy, 50, 52, 53, 55, 63 public culture, 68, 168 Pure Gold (Bhim), 226 Quantz, Bernhard, 113 Question of Courage, A (Newland), 206, 209–213 Quijano, Aníbal, xlvii, l, li Qur’an, 261 Rabinow, Paul, 259 Race Equality Council, 210 Race Relations Act, xxix

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  race, xxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xlvi, xlvii, l, lii, lxxi, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 51, 55, 60, 68, 75, 205, 206, 207, 211, 213, 215, 220, 222, 231, 235 racial segregation, xxi, 14, 17, 18, 213, 233, 260, 271 racism, xvi, xxiv, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxviii, xxxix, xlii, l, 14, 19, 46, 48, 50, 60, 94, 95, 96, 121, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 175, 176, 189, 192, 193, 198, 201, 203, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 220, 221, 224, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240, 255, 257, 274; rural, xlvi, 208, 209, 210, 213, 214 Radkau, Joachim, xviii, xxiv, 51 Raj, the, 92, 93, 103, 133, 134, 141 Randall, Paulette, 220 Randeria, Shalini, xiii, xlix, 5, 46, 66, 108 random (green), 226 Rattansi, Ali, 5 Raum, Otto Friedrich, 29, 67 Raviv, Yael, 160 Rebhandl, Bert, 250 Red Cross, 39 Reed–Anderson, Paulette, 194 Rees, D.E., 28 Reeve, Katharine, 137 Reichel, Peter, 70 Reisner, Stefan, 159 religion, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xlv, lxiv, 5, 37, 169, 207, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 240, 243, 244, 246, 248, 250, 261, 262, 263, 267, 274 remembrance culture, xl, xlii, lvi, 65, 66; German, xlii, 66 Rempe, Martin, lxviii Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, xx Reppelier, Agnes, 142, 143 Revenge of a Black Woman (Blue Mountain Theatre Company), 226 revisionism, historical, xxii, xxiii, xli, xlii, lv, 68, 94, 96, 102 Rheinsberg (neo-Nazi hotspot), 161 Rhineland, xxii, 62, 85 Rischbieter, Laura Julia, 109



343

Index

rituals, tea, 148 Robertson, Robert, 163 Robertson, Roland, 108 Robins, Kevin, 165 Rodek, Hanns–Georg, 250, 251 Rodriguez, Christopher, High Heel Parrotfish 226 Rodriguez, Richard, 159 Roehl, Karl, 38 Rogers, Dan, lvi Rogers, Steve, 172, 173 Rohrbach, Paul, 7 Roma, 196 Rose, Stephen, & Hilary Rose, 207 Roselius, Ludwig, 123 Rosenbach, Marcel, 157 Rother, Hans–Jörg, 251 Rough Crossings (Schama, adapted by Phillips), 226 Rouse, Roger, 168 Royal Court Theatre, 206, 216, 219, 224, 226

Royal Shakespeare Company, 221 Rubasingham, Indhu, 219, 220 Rubo, Ernst Traugott, 46 Runge, Friedlieb Ferdinand, 112 Rushby, Kevin, 95 Rushdie, Salman, 93 Russell, Anna, Duchess of Bedford, 142 Russendisko (Kaminer), xxxv Sachdev, Neil, 173 Sade, Marquis de, 47 sadism, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 63

Said, Edward W., xix, liii, 230, 257, 259, 265, 266 Salama, Mohammad, lxi Samoa, 215, 216 São Paolo, 115 Sarasin, Philipp, 51 Sarker, Sonita, lxix Sayyid, S., 229 Schama, Simon, Rough Crossings (adapted by Phillips), 226

Schetsche, Michael, 44 Schiffauer, Werner, 271 Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch & Christina Blanc–Szanton Schlesinger, Arthur M., 132 Schmidt, Dorothea, 153 Schmokel, Wolfe W., xxii Schnee, Governor Heinrich, 23, 24, 27, 69

Schneider, Peter, liii Schönwälder, Karen, xxix, xxxiii, xxxvi, 262

Schrenck–Notzing, Albert von, 52 Schulte–Althoff, Franz–Josef, 17, 19 Schulze–Engler, Frank, xxv Schwarz, Bill, xxxviii, 91, 92 Schwarze Schmach, xxii, 62 Schwarzer, Alice, 270 Scotland, 132, 176, 207 Scott, Joan Wallach, 93 Scott–Bronn, Jas, 32 Scully, Pamela, 18 secessionism, xvii secularism, 230, 243, 261, 264, 267 segregation, ethnic, 269, 270; gender, 112; social, 109 Seidel, Marguerite, 250 Seidel–Pielen, Eberhard, 161, 163 Selvon, Samuel, The Lonely Londoners xxx settler culture, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 19, 56, 96, 99, 118 sexology, 47 sexuality, xlii, lx, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 213, 238, 266 Seyhan, Azade, lxix, lxx Shakespeare, William, 214; Much Ado About Nothing 221 Sharma, Jayeeta, 133 Sharpe, Jenny, 93 Sharwood, James Allen, 175 Sharwood’s (curry manufacturer), 174 Sheffield University, lvii, lx, lxi Sheffield, 173 Sheridan, Lorraine, 233 Shevtsova, Maria, 212, 217, 218

344 Showalter, Elaine, 146 Siebenpfeiffer, Hania, 44, 62 Sierz, Aleks, 204 Simpson, Helen, 142 Sims, George, 59 Sin City (Miller), 43 Sinfield, Alan, 204 Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (Roy Williams), 206, 220–21 Sinti, 196 Sivanandan, Ambalavaner, xxx slavery, 32, 33, 78, 120, 133, 144, 145 slavery, white, 43, 61 Smith, Iain R., xx Smith, Laura, 210 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 195, 200, 202 Smith, Woodruff, lv Smotlacha, Jörg, 114 snack-bars, 154, 155, 156, 161 Soar, Frances, 173 Social Democratic Party (Germany), 114 social field, 168, 169, 181, 184 social movements, xl, xlv, 190, 197 Soja, Edward W., 258; & Barbara Hooper, 256 Solingen, 165 Sommer, Theo, 269 Sons of Charlie Paora, The (Lennie James), 206, 214–17 South Africa, xviii, xx, xxviii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 73, 103 South Asia, British presence in, 184 southern Africa, 4, 11, 12 Soyinka, Wole, 78 Spanton, Ernest Frederick, 30, 31, 34, 36 spatial divisions, 258 spatial politics, xliv, 160 spatiality, 255, 256, 258, 266 spatialization, of cultural otherness, 253; of urban identities, 274 spatio-cultural constructions, 254, 264 Speitkamp, Winfried, xxii, 66 Spencer, Charles, 217 Spencer, Herbert, 51 Spiegel, Der, xxxiv, 165

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Spiekermann, Uwe, 158, 159, 160 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 101, 190, 195, 197, 200, 267 St Louis, Guy, Gedichte einer schönen Frau 193

Standage, Tom, 136 Stanley, Henry Morton, 95, 96 Statute of Westminster, xx Steinmetz, Willibald, xiii Stengers, Jean, 9 Stephen, Michelle Ann, lxxii Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 61 Stoler, Ann Laura, xiii, xxiv, lviii, 5, 6, 46, 266

stoning mary (green), 226 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The (Stevenson), 61 Straub, Jürgen, 4 Straw Dogs (dir. Peckinpah), 211 street food, 154 Sturm–Martin, Imke, xxix, xxxviii Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 98 Sudan, 36, 92 sugar, 129, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148 Sun Hong, Young, lxv, lxvi, lxvii Sweet Yam Kisses (Cumper & Newland), 226

Swinging Bridge, The (Espinet), 145 Sznaider, Natan, 78 Tanga, battle of, 24, 27 Tanner, Jacob, & Heidi Witzig, 112 Tatar, Maria, 44 Taylor, Paul, 217 tea gardens, English, 133, 135, 136, 137, 146; Indian, 135 tea poems, 137 tea rituals, 128, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149 tea, xliv, 127–49; sorts of and modes of preparation, 149 tea-pluckers, 135, 140, 143, 144, 146 tea-shop, 146, 147



345

Index

television, lv, 43, 91, 93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 125, 183, 199, 209, 211, 225, 232, 239, 240, 249, 256, 272, 273 temperance movements, 139 Terkessidis, Mark, xxxiii, 164 territorialization, 164 terrorism, xvii, xxxii, xxxvii, xlvi, 59, 230, 233, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 248, 253, 259, 269 Ther, Philip, xxiii Third Reich, xxvii, l, 192, 194 Third World, 70, 71, 77, 82, 85, 242 Thomas, Nicola, 179 Thompson, Andrew, xix, 91 Thoms, Ulrike, 113 Thorp, Daniel B., 56 Tibi, Bassam, 264, 269 Timm, Uwe, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (The Invention of Curried Sausage) 152 Tinker, Hugh, 145 Tirailleurs Sénégalais, 62 Togo, 74, 76 Topik, Steven, 109 Toynbee, Polly, 233 trade (green), 226 tradition, xliv, 13, 14, 18, 70, 72, 73, 125, 157, 168, 181, 182, 219, 230 transcoloniality, 3 transculturalism, xxv transculturality, xvi, 5, 128, 148, 149, 160, 235, 245, 249 transfer, cultural, xiii, xliii, 108, 155, 160, 163

transfer, of power, 91 translocal, the, xliv, 155, 157, 163 transnational dishes, xliv, 155 transnationalism, xii, xiii, xiv, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxxii, xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli, xliv, xlviii, xlix, li, lx, lxi, lxii, lxiii, lxiv, lxv, lxvi, lxvii, lxviii, lxix, lxx, lxxi, lxxii, lxxiii, 3, 4, 21, 22, 46, 66, 108, 109, 134, 155, 159, 163, 165, 167, 168, 169, 178, 179, 184, 185, 193, 198, 201, 233, 234, 242

transnationality, lxiv, 167, 168, 181, 185 Trench, Colonel, 15, 16 Trivedi, Parita, 242 Trommler, Frank, li Tropenkoller, 55, 58, 59, 63 tropical climate, 55, 56, 63, 123 Trudering (‘colonial quarter’ of Munich), 76

Turkish Germans, xlvi, lxx, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 165, 250, 255 Twining, Thomas, 135, 136 Uganda, xxx, 173 Union of South Africa, 4, 14, 18 urban geography, postcolonial, 258 urban planning, 26, 259, 264 van der Dussen, Jan, & Kevin Wilson, 259

van der Heyden, Ulrich, lviii van Heyningen, Elizabeth B., 18 van Laak, Dirk, xxii, 4, 6 Van Leeuw, 28, 30, 32 van Onselen, Charles, 43, 44, 50 veil, xlvi, 230, 241, 242, 245, 253, 258, 264, 265, 266, 267 See also: headscarf Versailles Treaty, xx, xxii, 25, 69 Vertovec, Steven, 168 Vick, Brian, lxi Vietnam War, l Visram, Rozina, xxix Vogt–William, Christine, 144 von Brandt, Max, 7 von Lettow–Vorbeck, Paul, 24 von Prince, Magdalena, 118 Wagner, Christoph, 162 Wahhab, Iqbal, 177, 178 Wales, 176, 232 Walgenbach, Katharina, 57 Walker, Che, Frontline, The 224 Walkowitz, Judith R., 44, 59, 61 Waller, Edmund, 141 Walser, Martin, liii

346 War Office, 15, 24, 25 war on terror, xvii, xxxvii, 230, 239 Warburg, Otto, 117 Ward, Stuart, 91 Warde, Alan, 160 Wares, Sacha, 220 Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse (Ören), xxxiii Waterberg, battle of the, 76, 86 Weaver–Hightower, Rebecca, 56 Webster, Wendy, 91 Wedding (‘African quarter’ of Berlin), 75 Wehler, Hans–Ulrich, lxiii, lxviii, 114 Weimar Republic, xxii, 44, 60, 61, 64 Welsch, Wolfgang, xvi Werbner, Pnina, 161 Werner, Michael, xiii, 46, 55, 98 West Indies, xxix West–Pavlov, Russell, xxxviii Wetzell, Richard F., 50 Whatmore, Sarah, 179 White Open Spaces (B B C co-production), 206, 209, 210, 226 Whitechapel, 43, 59 whiteness, 197, 200 Wicker Man (dir. Hardy), 211 Wieczorek–Zeul, Heide, lvi Wierlacher, Alois, xxxv Wigger, Iris, xxii Wildenthal, Lora, liv, lx, 57, 58 Wilhelmshaven, 71 Williams, Raymond, 146, 147 Williams, Roy, 206, 208, 218–24, 226; Angel House 223; Days of Significance 221, 222, 226; Fallout 222, 224; Joe Guy 206, 221, 222–26; Lift Off 219; Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads 206, 220–21 Wilson, August, 220 Wilson, Jon, 101 Wilson, Kim, 137 Windhoek, xxvii, lvi, 68, 72, 73, 74, 86 Windrush, xxix, 224 Wirz, Albert, 30

H Y B R I D C U L T U R E S  Wissmann monument (Hamburg), 67, 68, 70, 79, 80 Wissmann, Hermann von, 67, 69 Witbooi, Hendrik, 16 Wities, Bernhard, 121 Wodehouse, P.G., The Inimitable Jeeves 127

Wohltmann, Ferdinand, 117 Wolter, Sabine, 121 working classes, 44, 129, 132, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 236, 237 World War I, xviii, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxvii, xli, lx, 4, 11, 12, 21, 23, 26, 36, 37, 41, 60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 119, 123, 194 World War II, xv, xviii, xx, xxiii, xxix, xxxiii, xli, xlii, 68, 69, 133, 151, 193, 231 Wright, C.T. Hagberg, 11 Wu, Duncan, 204 Wulffen, Erich, 49 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) 211 Yasmin (dir. Glenaan), 231–51 Yegenolu, Meyda, 267 Young, Robert J.C., xvi, 91, 178, 230, 242

Yule, Sir Henry, Hobson-Jobson 169 Zachariah, Benjamin, 104 Zaimolu, Feridun, 254, 256, 265; Kanak Sprak xxxv Zantop, Susanne, xxiii, xxvi, li, liv Zanzibar, 35, 38 Zeller, Joachim, lvii, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 92; & Jürgen Zimmerer, 75

Zephaniah, Benjamin, De Botty Business 226

Ziemann, Hans, 57 Zimmerer, Joachim, 75 Zimmerer, Jürgen, xxvi, lv, lvii, lix; & Joachim Zeller, xxvi Zimmerman, Andrew, lx Zimmermann, Bénédicte, xiii, 46, 98 Zwemer, Samuel, 37