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Darryl Pinckney’s “Black Deutschland” (2016), Paul Beatty’s “Slumberland” (2008), and John A. Williams’ “Clifford’s Blues” (1999) are three recent novels by African American authors and with African American protagonists that are partly set in Germany and that include references to events of German history such as the Holocaust and German Reunification. The research action will take these three novels as points of departure for an investigation that combines an accurate analysis of the images and functions of Germany and German history in African American literature with a transnational, comparative perspective. Drawing on a theoretical framework that connects comparative imagology, black diaspora studies, and the recent academic focus on world literature's “multidirectional memory” and its “cosmopolitan style”, the project will analyze four historically diverse, cross-cultural discourses that have shaped the role of Germany and German history in African American literature: 1) the formation of a ‘canonic’ African American image of postromantic Wilhelminian Germany that can be traced back to Du Bois’ time as a student in Berlin (1892-94); 2) the interwar period and its intertwining sub-discourses of the Old World as “racial haven” for African Americans, and of Berlin as “European capital of sexual libertinage”; 3) National Socialism and its relations and parallels to racism in the U.S.; 4) African American perceptions of Germany as a divided and/or reunified country. The project is based at two institutions in Berlin: the interdisciplinary Zentrum für Literatur- and Kulturforschung (ZfL), where the applicant will be part of the research area on world literature, and the Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the FU Berlin, where a secondment will take place. The project's location in the German capital, which is in itself a major topic of the research action, will be a connecting factor for numerous networking, dissemination and communication activities.
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