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

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

chapter 3|17 pages

From bokoe bullying to Afrobeats

Or how being African became cool in black Amsterdam

chapter 4|13 pages

Involving diaspora communities through action research

A collaborative museum exhibition on the African presence in Finland

chapter 5|9 pages

The footman’s new clothes*

chapter 7|14 pages

Practicing autoethnography

Transnational Afro-German heritage

chapter 8|13 pages

“Zog Nit Keyn Mol”

Paul Robeson’s tragic love of Russia

chapter 9|12 pages

Forgotten histories

Recovering the precarious lives of African servants in Imperial Germany

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

chapter 11|10 pages

Afropolitanism and mobility

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

chapter 12|14 pages

Black British queer intersectionality

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

chapter 13|20 pages

Voices from the Black diaspora in Spain

On transcultural spaces and Afrospanish identity constructions in poetry

chapter 14|16 pages

Adapting contested histories

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

chapter 15|12 pages

Returning the colonial gaze

The black female body in Angèle Etoundi Essamba’s photography

chapter 16|8 pages

The Afropean gaze

Through a decolonial lens

part III|1 pages

Decolonial academic practice

chapter 18|21 pages

Structures of dis/empowerment

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

chapter 20|17 pages

Negotiating Afroeuropean literary borders

The inclusion of African Spanish and African British literatures in Spanish universities

chapter 21|16 pages

Beyond emergent

Creating, debating, and implementing African European studies

chapter |2 pages

Afterword