ABSTRACT
The methodology of autoethnography, merged with contemporary critical scholarship on transnational Afro-German experience, enables the mining of new dimensions of Afro-German heritage. The United States is not a traditional site from which a narrative of Afro-German experience with key WWII-era markers emerges. However, this study itemises the ethnography, cultural memory, and identity experiences of a lineage’s distinct Afro-German cultural specificity, which is based on the parallel development of several generations as simultaneously German and African American in a US setting. In expanding the assumptions of Afro-German transnationalism, this chapter acknowledges a different development of Afro-German identity that has heritage, migration, inter- and biracial, and multicultural implications in both the US and the West. In this intergenerational study, cultural memory is relatively stable. However, identity and kinship prove to be more fluid and without the guarantees of heritage stability, which can be a challenge of transnationalism.
