ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Afro-German-led protests of Berlin productions as an attempt to make visible the failure of the Berlin theatre community to acknowledge and respect their subjectivity, both as people and as artists. The creation of original work is a productive response to a failure of representation on the German stage, while the production of works derived from classical European texts is a response to a failure of participation. The practice of blackface is part of German discourse in the sense that it is a way in which white German theatre practitioners attempt to engage with foreign multicultural subject matter at the same time as they deny the existence of a domestic multiracial population. The use of blackface in Germany participates in a larger cultural and political arena that denies the existence of non-white Germans as a means of strengthening a discourse in which non-whites are increasingly cast as outsiders and intruders.
