ABSTRACT
Despite a long history of transnational entanglements and Black presences, Blackness continues to be mostly addressed as nonbelonging in Europe. Departing from artistic and activist theorizations of Afropeanness, this essay elaborates on the ways in which feminist thinkers and curators of color, predominantly in the German context, challenge the racist white supremacist self-image of Europe. By pointing from the century-long modern/colonial toward alternative esthetics, forms of conviviality, and doing and living decolonial feminism, their claim of always having been part of this process and opting for its overcoming also enables claims for Afropean citizenship on which the essay will elaborate in an introductory part. The essay then delineates the ways in which the project “BE.BOP Black Europe Body Politics” (2012–18), curated by Alanna Lockward, questioned the very conditions of possibility that made the omissions of these positions possible. Her framing the diasporic anew through her notion of “Afropean decolonial esthetics” starts from the concrete experiences and performances of “global Blackness.” Shifting the focus to queer-feminist Global Blackness—and ways of queering categories of nation and racialization, the essay then discusses “Performances of No-thingness,” curated by Nana Adusei-Poku at Akademie der Künste. Focusing on performative art as resistant practice and as criticism of hegemonic concepts of identity by cultural production of the Black diaspora, this project decidedly includes queer, feminist, and queer-feminist perspectives that render hegemonic gendered racialized identities problematic. A similar understanding also resonates with recent practices and theorizations on “postmigrant” experiences and a “postmigrant society” as coined by Shermin Langhoff in the German context.
