ABSTRACT

Drawing on a rich lineage of anti-discriminatory scholarship, art, and activism, Locating African European Studies engages with contemporary and historical African European formations, positionalities, politics, and cultural productions in Europe.

Locating African European Studies reflects on the meanings, objectives, and contours of this field. Twenty-six activists, academics, and artists cover a wide range of topics, engaging with processes of affiliation, discrimination, and resistance. They negotiate the methodological foundations of the field, explore different meanings and politics of ‘African’ and ‘European’, and investigate African European representations in literature, film, photography, art, and other media. In three thematic sections, the book focusses on:

  • African European social and historical formations
  • African European cultural production
  • Decolonial academic practice

Locating African European Studies features innovative transdisciplinary research, and will be of interest to students and scholars of various fields, including Black Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, African American Studies, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, African Studies, History, and Social Sciences.

chapter |28 pages

Introduction

African European studies as a critique of contingent belonging
ByFelipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark U. Stein

part I|1 pages

African European social and historical formations

chapter 1|14 pages

“We have to act. That is what forms collectivity”

Black solidarity beyond identity in contemporary Paris
ByVanessa Eileen Thompson

chapter 3|17 pages

From bokoe bullying to Afrobeats

Or how being African became cool in black Amsterdam
ByMarleen de Witte

chapter 4|13 pages

Involving diaspora communities through action research

A collaborative museum exhibition on the African presence in Finland
ByAnna Rastas

chapter 5|9 pages

The footman’s new clothes*

ByDiran Adebayo

chapter 7|14 pages

Practicing autoethnography

Transnational Afro-German heritage
ByChristel N. Temple

chapter 8|13 pages

“Zog Nit Keyn Mol”

Paul Robeson’s tragic love of Russia
ByMaxim Matusevich

chapter 9|12 pages

Forgotten histories

Recovering the precarious lives of African servants in Imperial Germany
ByRobbie Aitken

part II|1 pages

African European cultural production

chapter 10|12 pages

Opening homes, opening worlds

African European spatial interventions in Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction
ByJennifer Leetsch

chapter 11|10 pages

Afropolitanism and mobility

Constructions of home and belonging in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference
ByEva Rask Knudsen

chapter 12|14 pages

Black British queer intersectionality

From Labi Siffre’s Nigger to Dean Atta’s I am Nobody’s Nigger
ByKanika Batra

chapter 13|20 pages

Voices from the Black diaspora in Spain

On transcultural spaces and Afrospanish identity constructions in poetry
ByJulia Borst

chapter 14|16 pages

Adapting contested histories

The film Belle (2013) and its politics of representation 1
ByEva Ulrike Pirker

chapter 15|12 pages

Returning the colonial gaze

The black female body in Angèle Etoundi Essamba’s photography
ByJeanne Essame

chapter 16|8 pages

The Afropean gaze

Through a decolonial lens
ByJohny Pitts

part III|1 pages

Decolonial academic practice

chapter 17|10 pages

“Why isn’t my professor black?”

A roundtable
ByKarim Fereidooni, Vanessa Eileen Thompson, Emily Ngubia Kessé

chapter 18|21 pages

Structures of dis/empowerment

My year as the UK’s first Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Officer
ByShanell Johnson

chapter 19|16 pages

On the (im)possibility of black British queer studies

ByRonald Cummings

chapter 20|17 pages

Negotiating Afroeuropean literary borders

The inclusion of African Spanish and African British literatures in Spanish universities
ByMaya G. Vinuesa

chapter 21|16 pages

Beyond emergent

Creating, debating, and implementing African European studies
ByElisa Joy White

chapter |2 pages

Afterword

ByJamie Schearer-Udeh