[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Yes, stop! I would like to welcome you. Yes
Welcome to the evening. Talk today. The Presidents guest.
And for those who haven't been to an AGS conference yet, just briefly about the format.
It's usually on the first evening. One.
A conversation in which a personality from the public, from culture, from science is invited and with a colleague
a colleague from the host institution who is engaged in a conversation.
And my honorable task until this evening is actually simply to introduce the two interlocutors.
Before I do that, I would like to point out that this event is being filmed this evening.
Good Our guest today is Natasha Kelly.
Natasha Kelly, doctorate in communication and sociologist.
Is an author, editor, artist, and curator.
Her artistic work has been performed, among others, at Carnegie Hall in New York,
at the Goethe Theater Salvador da Bahia and at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
Presented. In 2018, she made her debut as a filmmaker at the tenth Berlin Biennale.
She teaches at numerous universities in Germany, Austria and the USA.
And she is currently a visiting professor at the University of Arts in Berlin.
Her numerous publications include the bestseller.
racism. Structural problems need structural solutions and the Longseller Schwatz German feminine.
Why feminism must demand more than gender equality.
Kelly is an avowed Afrofuturist and is committed to making black German perspectives visible in art,
Science and society one. That deserves a round of applause for now.
And tonight will be led by Kerstin Griese, my colleague here from Oxford.
Her research interests lie in the area of 20th and 21st century German and comparative literature.
And she focuses on the Holocaust, literature, Jewish writing, black and post-colonial literature.
And she also works in the field of circumcision, literature and science.
Her book In ing the Past the Holocaust Novel of the First Generation was published in 2014 and she has also published numerous articles.
Published on topics related to recent contemporary Jewish literature, Post Memory, Kafka, Günter Grass and Sebald.
She is currently working on completing Following Kafka, a monograph on intertextual Kafka supported by the teacher Young Trust,
Edits in literature and theory after the Holocaust, post-colonialism and post-humanism.
In parallel, she is working on a book project about black literature and quantum physics and writes with Jeanette Holly.
The Companion to Contemporary Black was released.
Please also applause for Kerstin. And
And before the conversation starts, maybe just briefly.
I hope you all received this wristband. There is also a text by Natasha Kelly in the wristband.
And the wristband leads through the exhibition, which they can view tomorrow at The In Telorien Institution.
Thank you Bernhard. Natascha, I'm so glad you're with us.
We're about to talk about your book Black German Female Why Feminism Must Demand More Than Gender Equality
which was published by Piper Verlag in 2023.
And you will also read two passages from it to us. In addition, as Bernhard has just mentioned,
You can find three of the first three chapters of the book in your own translation in this exhibition catalog, which we have all just received.
I may therefore be brief in my introduction. Just so much for an overview.
Black female comes from observing how you put it, Natascha,
that white feminism far too often tends to understand feminism one-sidedly and oppression singularly.
This prevents feminism that is open to everyone.
Because understood as an unmarked norm, white feminism often ignores the fact that being a woman is determined by many factors.
Race class, religion, alterability, body, norms, sexual orientation among others the reviews of your book,
who speak of uncomfortable truths and of your words as a requirement
A clear demand for feminists to take care of our blind spots is therefore absolutely right.
However, Schwarz German female provides much more than just a critical
Intervention in feminist theory or in current debates about racism.
In fact, it is also a compendium on the history and stories of black women in Germany since the 17th century
intertwined with insertions on black representatives of feminist practice
worldwide and these in turn are also interwoven with elements of your own biography,
So that from everything together in resistance I now to a one-sidedly understood
Feminism results in a polyphonic and elastic web of texts.
I would like to call this almost a book as a community and how it works in practice now
This is shown very well in a first chapter, from which you will be happy to read a bit to us right away.
Thank you. That was a super nice summary. As a matter of fact
Thank you so much This is actually my first time reading outside of Germany.
Well, it's actually premiering and I'm really excited to share my favorite chapter with you.
In fact, so is my grandma's garden.
I often did not know how to name my experience with power and inequality, let alone the matrix of racism,
To recognize capitalism and the euro patriarchy that surrounded me like a web.
For most people, these things are only occasionally noticeable.
For me, however, they were connected together like the elastic, often invisible silk threads of a spider web.
No matter where I went, I had strings of spiders on my face that wouldn't let me forget that I was in continuity.
Of enslavement and colonization, overseas labor migration and women's work, and the confrontation with
white supremacy and the associated privileges and ideals of beauty.
It wasn't always easy for me to enjoy being a child.
I was light years away from the colorful feminist flower garden,
Which the black American feminist Alles Walker described in 1974 in her essay Looking for the Gardens of Our Mothers.
Her memories of her mother, an enslaved woman who worked in the cotton fields during the day and came home at night
In order to create their own flower garden, they made them forget their poverty.
Everything, Walker everything. Walker was the first black American to win in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple,
In which she addressed facets of her queer sexuality, the Pulitzer Prize.
In the same year, she coined the concept of womanism.
According to her own statements, womanism relates to feminism as purple relates to lavender.
In doing so, she shows that black feminism is not a uniform field,
which only focuses on the fight against black men and places its feminist focus on issues
Which are equally important for blacks, women and men, family, community, and survival strategies that should benefit everyone.
In 1982, she also coined the term colorism
which she defines as adverse or preferential treatment for black people based solely on their skin tone.
My grandma's garden in the working-class district of London was of great importance to me.
My sisters and I spent a lot of time there as kids.
We played catch and competed.
As the youngest and smallest girl, I stumbled across my own feet one day during an imagined world record run and fell while trying to
Catch up with my older sisters on the concrete footpath.
Grandma looked up from the bean vines and watched
How I stood up unharmed and knocked myself off before she continued her gardening work in peace.
She always had an eye on us, was caring, but let us do it.
With every run, the ambition grew stronger. To be faster than my sisters someday.
Until I finally caught up with them and beat them by the length of a toe.
After that, the races were over. It was replaced by a seemingly insurmountable dispute, in which I was accused of
I would have crossed the line at the start and started too early anyway.
So the race didn't count and I was disqualified.
Of course, my oldest sister was a competition opponent, line and referee at the same time.
Since we lived here behind the fence in Germany, we only spent the summer holidays with our grandmother.
When the weather was nice, we played in the garden and fought for a long time about my unsuccessful start.
During the run, in the rain, we played in the bedroom that we shared with each other.
We had just returned from shopping one summer day when it started to rain heavily.
I particularly remember the rain because we had given the children new shoes.
Mine were black, covered in shiny lacquer and fitted with a large golden buckle.
I was so in love with her that I didn't pay attention to my sisters' new shoes.
I would have loved to keep mine on at the store and wear it on the way home.
Grandma convinced me to take them off by assuring me that the paint would come off from the rain.
So I watched with childlike rapture as the saleswoman wrapped the shoes in paper and put them back in the box.
When I got home, I couldn't wait to put them on, but shoes were forbidden in the house.
So I placed them far enough away from the dripping umbrella, the cloakroom and stared at them for hours, believing
I could mirror myself in it. To lure myself away from it, my sister took the empty boxes and said that we could make crafts with them.
We didn't own a lot of toys as children, but there was still no lack of creativity.
So we took scissors, glue and pens and turned the four showcases into a dollhouse in hours of fine work.
Each box formed a different room, living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, which we furnished accordingly with paper furniture.
The shoes were quickly forgotten. I felt safe with my sisters.
They were my best friends. I didn't have any other girlfriends in my childhood and I didn't need them.
We shared our growth lessons and concerns, learned from and with each other.
Look out for each other. When, as is so often the case, no adult was present.
And so I learned very early on the meaning of Sisterhood, which accompanied me throughout my life.
Sisterhood Sisterhood is the deep and lasting socio-political bond between black women who do not have to belong to family first.
In good times, happiness is shared unconditionally.
When times are tough, we find emotional support and comfort in sisterhood.
It allows us
to remain able to act beyond discriminatory structures and to recognize the best in us through the eyes of our sisters.
In this sense, sisterhood is a political space in which black women gain more visibility.
This requires honesty, loyalty, and trust.
When I visited my grandmother again a long time later as a teenager, I realized how small her garden actually was.
After a few steps, I had already reached the other end of the fort, which was bordered by the wall to the neighboring property.
It was just as crumbly as it was when we had laboriously drilled a hole in it with our little fingers and thin sticks.
I bent down to look through. The neighboring garden was now overgrown and no longer as magnificent as it used to be.
I leaned in and reminisced about my early childhood.
When my sisters and I were still able to enjoy our sisterhood.
With the move to Germany, we are soon breaking up.
The foreign country, adolescence and growing up have scattered us in all four directions.
I think I am the furthest away from everything.
While my sisters are less political, I have chosen the path of resistance.
Or rather, he chose me. Because an activist as well as a feminist is not a classic career aspiration.
Just as little girls dream of becoming a firefighter or an astronaut.
Rather, my educational path and my ever deepening political awareness had automatically led me into activism.
But as an African proverb says, knowledge is like a garden.
And if it is not cared for, it cannot be harvested there.
So I set out to get a German school leaving certificate and thus the big,
To order a magnificently blooming garden of my imagination.
If it grew just as beautifully as my grandma's garden, it would enrich the world for me and other people.
Natascha, you introduce the core question of Sisterhood in this chapter and is it only
In a concrete sense, through the biological ties to your sisters?
What does this term mean to you in a wider sense now?
Yes, then for this project, but also for your thinking in general?
Um, I think I'm yikes that I'm without a sisterhood, since I'm the youngest of her,
Sisterhood was always part of my life and so was feminism.
So I was really born into a feminist household, into a, um, a community in a sisterhood.
Especially as the youngest of four, I can't even imagine not having any sisters.
And that idea among many other things, I think, things
You simply have to read that for yourself, for example what community or my community is like.
I was thrown in there too.
It's not something I needed to learn in any way.
It was given. It was already a basic requirement.
At birth. That was already there, it was already there. And that was also how it was translated politically.
Very easy for me. Which is a matter of course for me.
The fact that feminism can only succeed if all women are doing well and men by the way
Also because patriarchy is not good for men either.
So from that point on. Yes, yes.
And it is also interesting how the competition among sisters in the Sisterhood is completely different than it is right now.
This restrictive competitive spirit, which can sometimes shape white feminism.
And there is a wonderful saying we want all you need to make.
I think it's more like that attitude that if one sister makes it, then the next one will too, because me.
Well, I also see that as my task, precisely because I belong to a generation of black Germans
Which now, for example, I don't know whether you know Mayaj or Katharina and Oje, wrote the color confess.
These were the generations that came before me. And they've paved the way for me to even sit here today.
And I see it as my task to continue along the path so that the generations that come after me
We can go much further, go much further than what we have been able to do now.
And that was a matter of course for me. So not something that had to think twice or strategically learn to do for me to do, but something
What is a matter of course for me to pass this on and also to pass it on and also to always watch
Who was there before me, because without the two named Katharina,
who is also really a good friend of mine today, with someone I was unfortunately never able to get to know.
I wouldn't be here without them.
And that is important for me to emphasize, I know that and I always pass this on to everyone else who receives one by one.
So you're really using a one-sided feminism here, specifically in the sense of everything where no comprehensive,
Where you face him, but who also focuses on topics that benefit everyone.
I think criticism wants, as you say, is one thing and that is also justified criticism
Because criticism is as old as black feminism itself.
Almost 200 years old, I'd say. And the other thing is to show that there were black women.
Um So the oldest person who made it into this book is Juliana Rusina from the 17th century.
And which of you actually only knows their cousin? I've heard something about Anton Wilhelm Amu, just by show of hands.
Sergei for a minute. And Juliana.
Rosina. That would be the case if we go back historically, it is usually the men we remember and think of.
And it's great that so many men were upstairs at Amon and we're here in Great Britain in Germany.
Too few hands. What would I really tell you
But Juliana Hosiner lived on the same farm as Amos in Wolfenbüttel and was married to Rudolph Augustus,
An enslaved African from Leipzig, who was bought for 50 thalers on the slave market in Leipzig, as the script says.
And then he also came to Wolfenbüttel, and they lived there together for 17 years as a married couple, which was a rarity in the 17th century
that they were allowed to marry at all and that it was at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century
Around 1704 five, we do not know for sure, other Wilhelm Ammon came to this court as a child.
And my hypothesis The passage until you all prove me wrong is that Amos was actually given in her womb
that she and Rudolph could actually also have been his foster parents at the farm.
So the probability is very high. So appeal to all women historians.
Search. Search! So? I'm not a historian, but it is until proven otherwise.
And she is one for me, one of the one.
This figure, where I find, is the oldest that has made it in here.
Because in addition to all criticism, I also want to open up rooms and show them, as I said, that we haven't just been here since yesterday
We in the sense of black German women, but we have always been here and we helped build this country just like everyone else.
So this country not this but this one too though. About Germany, because you always briefly forget where I am because I speak German here.
But then it gets very very very hot, I don't even want to go into politics
But I always get into this right-wing populist maelstrom, where I then kind of think that's actually the case.
These half-truths, the ones that are being taught right now, are really bad
Because it is verifiable and that is what I just wanted to do with this book.
So not just criticism on the one hand and definitely not on White Women bashing or anything, but it's really about showing
If you understand feminism holistically, understand intersectionally, then so many other women were black women
On which I focus, but also from all other groups, the so important work with regard to feminism or human rights in general,
Equality and equality that never have a word and especially in a German context.
And I'll show them here. And that, for me, was also this empowering, the added value that this book had as it is absolutely not just criticism.
Well, you can tell that very clearly. And this intersectional approach and the interconnectedness of your thinking
That it also so beautifully illustrates a picture of the garden in this chapter,
The fact that you drive in here is also my favorite chapter by the way and the picture of the garden.
Maybe we can say a bit more about that, because you have that too.
At first glance, a word yes garden is the frame in the background.
But that the garden of your imagination goes so far beyond that.
Yes, yes and what is the name of a garden.
It has a bit of this picture of circulation, it has to be sown
Then comes the next generation and irrigates and the next generation
comes and plows and the next generation comes and harvests for us.
And that's how I see it a bit, that this description actually with Katharina May,
With the work I'm doing now, that everyone's coming after me
who can also rely on my work, the work from my generation, which is still very thin, especially in Academia.
But I can tell you
Because I've actually just founded a network of 50 doctoral black Germans in Black Studies right now.
And the next generations look different and I'm really happy about that.
Well then. You can't stop demographic change and it doesn't matter how they want to remigrate.
Very good, then. Yes, but that deserves a round of applause.
It's just like the shoe boxes in your chapter now.
A carton is a carton. But give me four boxes and then I can get an idea and get out of it.
Quite an entire building. Yes, that's right. Yes, yes, in fact I'm going to add one more thing.
There's this one. Because I also do theatre. Yes, and this exact chapter is being adapted for a play.
Or have I already adapted for a play at the Staatstheater in Nuremberg, which premieres on the third, tenth and is it.
It's directed by Jessica Weisskirchen and I've rewritten this one more time.
But that was exactly the idea. We've talked. So that's in someone's what were in Nuremberg yesterday?
Be sure to take a look at the premiere. Yes, and there was the picture of the garden.
That ties in with the past, now also the past, the one that has suffered a terrible score as a result of enslavement.
The one in whose continuity we still live now and who may only be through the gardens
The world of imagination can also be made tolerable somewhere.
But on the other hand, it also ties in with the future, and its chapter ends in this potentiality, in this, this form of possibility.
If my garden only begins to flourish as beautifully words and that then leads to your contribution,
Then I will be on stage on this track, where you will continue to cultivate your garden.
And that brings us to the second passage, to the second chapter, from which you will read something to us right away.
This is found towards the end of the book and presents itself in a certain way as a counterpart to the first reading that we have just heard.
The path that led you away from your grandmother to Germany seems to result in an arrival here
But in an arrival that at the same time opens up in new directions and makes new connections.
Should I go? Yeah, well, that's a bit shorter, I think.
The whole chapter is maybe a bit long, as I became a passport German.
In the course of German history, there have been many foreign names for black people,
who expressed that we did not belong to Germany and were also not seen as Germans.
When justified criticism of the term foreign women arose in the mid-1990s,
Black people and people of color were stylized as immigrants.
Strictly speaking, I did not see myself as such, as my walk through the military base gate was not synonymous with a movement of migration,
because Germany did not see itself as a country of immigration.
This foreign name also quickly came under criticism and we became people with an immigrant background.
In the course of political resistance, this background was identified as the focus of migration,
because our main characteristics skin and/or hair color are always visible.
Today, politics and media talk about stories of migration.
But I can relate to that too. It's hard for me to get used to.
Because it wasn't my story, it was my mother's.
And at some point she stopped migrating and settled down with us children.
From that point on, we started to become German.
Not through birth or lineage, but through socialization.
As a child, I was already migrated and moved away from Great Britain.
That changed me too. That didn't change the fact that I was born in London either.
Back then, we lived involuntarily in a parallel society in east London.
Next door to other Caribbean immigrants and had very little to do with white British women.
It wasn't until I went to school in Germany that I really became aware of my British nationality.
My school friend found it exciting that I had a passport with a crown instead of an eagle on the front.
And as a black girl, in her imagination I came to England better than Germany anyway.
When I turned 18, a British passport took on a different meaning.
At that time, EuAn members were not allowed to participate in local elections or in federal elections in the Bundestag.
I was happy that I didn't have to vote and always hid behind my lack of voting rights.
In any case, there was no party that could have represented my concerns as a black woman.
At the same time, I was relieved that I didn't have to deal with dubious party programs.
I was not represented by German politics. Not from the British either.
I would have had the right to vote there even though I lived in Germany.
Yet I did not vote there either due to a lack of representation.
At that time, however, I did not come up with the idea of handing over my British passport and applying for a German passport.
My mother and grandmother had fought for British nationality for too long when they arrived in England.
However, the longer I lived in Germany, the less I identified myself with my British country of birth.
With every year that Germany that I spent in Germany, I became a bit German.
At some point, especially abroad, I was no longer able to hide my German socialization.
I'm now moving like a German, acting like a German.
I dress like a German. But what is German?
It's much easier for me to explain what black is and what story is connected with it
than to explain what being German means to me.
In my search for an answer to this question of who or what is German, Germany became more important to me than ever before.
In addition, there were the events surrounding George Floyd, which is why I dared to make a second attempt at German politics.
I jumped a bit, but it'll be clear when you read when I tried this for the first time.
I think it's a mistake. Both times. Because party politics were at least as grueling as my volunteer
independent work on the state advisory board and does not make my life more pleasant.
Yet had. For a short time, I had the urge to become a politician and thus change the power structures of society.
So on. To change. At that point, I didn't know that as a politician I would have less influence on change than as an activist.
In order to be able to stand for election in a federal party, I had to be a German citizen.
This requirement and Brexit were two good reasons to naturalize and become a passport German.
I didn't have to take an integration course.
I had finally completed my schooling and education as well as my studies and doctorate in Germany.
I had no criminal record and I was also able to prove my own income.
I therefore met all criteria to become naturalized.
However, it took another whole year before my naturalization was approved.
The reason My Jamaican roots.
Not only in practice, but also in theory, I was prevented from identifying myself as Black and German.
Since both my parents are native Jamaicans, I automatically received American nationality and had
Without knowing it, dual citizenship, British and American citizenship a third.
I was therefore only allowed to accept the German if I decided against one of the other two.
It's not an easy choice. I mean I had to weigh up my options.
On the one hand, Britain had decided against Europe with Brexit.
But I am European and not African.
And if Europe imagines itself white and lets my siblings drown at its external borders?
A German passport not only allowed me to become German on paper, but also to remain European.
My British passport, on the other hand, is just a relic of my past
A keepsake that protects my childhood memories from fading
And after Brexit, it's the only thing that's still British about me.
At the same time, my British passport is also an important part of my identity that connects me to my family.
And I didn't want to give that up easily.
In addition, there was the fear that racism in Germany would reach a point again
Where it wouldn't be possible for black people to live here.
A British passport would give me an escape option in the event of a crisis.
My roots, however, will always be Jamaican, no matter how many passports I have.
Strictly speaking, under American law, I was a Jamaican even without a Jamaican passport.
That wouldn't change the neutralization I had to sign.
So I decided to keep my British passport and add the German one.
I can only accept a Jamaican passport if I relinquish one of them.
That makes me officially a multi-state. A new term that I can add to my glossary of foreign names.
In your book, we encounter this process of being migrating, this racist,
The position of a migrant woman being arrested as a child in Great Britain, continuing in Germany and now in particular again since Brexit.
Such foreign provisions operate normative privative with terms such as you stop them here, such as Pass German Neutralization more starter.
How do you feel about your location there? What What does to be German or to be German mean to you?
That is having so much time. It's a super exciting question about what exactly being German means.
Because I'm still looking for it today.
So for me, it is primarily a cultural identity.
And when I say that, does everybody think that way huh?
So I, I, I defend myself against a national or even nationalistic idea of German
But it's a cultural one that I really always notice when I'm abroad.
So when I was in the USA I was in the USA yes, I taught a lot in the USA
A part of my family lives there and when I'm there in the black communities, I'm the German, not the black one.
Well and there. These were the moments that opened my eyes
That I was influenced by German, that I have a certain, um, structured way of thinking.
I find it very German that I have such a well, I wouldn't say such punctuality, I'm still working on it.
But a certain one, that urge to order, well, that's one of them.
This is something that is typically German for me, which is reflected in my, my school, my school years,
As a result of my studies, I have a certain reluctance that is immediately noticeable when I am in black communities.
And in the beginning, we always thought you were too cool to count with us.
And that was actually only the German, who now kind of like that, you know, we're going to laugh in the basement.
So a bit of the direction like that and for me that is a culture, a culture that is also diverse in mine.
I have to say the same about that. I think we need to move away from the idea that the German is white and blond and blue-eyed.
Which is a colonial idea, by the way, not just about National Socialism,
In other words, it reached its deadly low point in National Socialism.
But this idea, this idea that Germans just like that and German blood And what color should that be?
So it is. I also master dumplings with sauce. Well, I couldn't have grown my child with sauce at all.
Others are with noodles or something, but for us it was dumplings with sauce and chicken fricassee and then always mixed with plantins and yes
So this is the fusion that then occurs, for example.
Um, I don't know. Well I it is always has such a funny aftertaste to say I'm proud to be German
But I've rejected being German for most of my life, especially during adolescence.
I hated it. I wanted to be anything but German.
Because the British, the British, blacks over all but Germans.
And at some point and there I am endlessly grateful to this generation exactly once
Which opened my eyes to the fact that these two things also go together.
Yes, and that being German is an extremely important part of my identity today.
I think German, I dream German. I am so that's mine.
I feel much more comfortable speaking German. Now, as if I speak English, I always feel like I'm the 5-year-old child
Who left England back then and always think do you understand me when I speak English now?
I think everyone is kind of like that, yes, it is such psychological thinking, where I then do my work, my academic work,
Everything in German is much easier for me than explaining some advanced theories in English.
Then I'm always so okay, but do you understand that now? And because I feel it, I feel it differently.
Let's say yes, it's already being German,
But even very embedded in very, I say cumulative and fluid, your location somewhere is.
And then you also bring to other parts of the book do you just bring a
spiritual homeland then also pure and links Germany with Great Britain,
with the USA, but then also with Ghana, for example.
That was for. Extremely important too. To actually be on the African continent for the first time.
I'm not the same in England because the Jamaican community here is as big as the Turkish community in Germany.
Perhaps, as I would rather compare, you are also these immigrant worker contexts.
But when I came north, to Germany, where there are hardly any Jamaicans, I was really completely alienated.
My culture was there, Bob Marley all knew cabbage.
Rommel was also well known, i.e. Usain Bolt.
But what really defines Jamaica in terms of culture was no longer there.
And There has always been the idea that Pan-Africanism is a Caribbean idea.
Well, it comes from there. The idea is that the enslaved people of the Americas of the Caribbean belong to this very continent.
It's something I grew up with for a long time. And when I was actually on the continent for the first time, or for a long time before
Because there are no Jamaicans or very few Jamaicans in Germany, everyone has always written Africa on my body.
I was the African woman. Where are you from? Where is that?
It was kind of okay, now Jamaica is in Africa, so it's really this one commitment to a geopolitical location
What exactly constitutes this, this colonial mentality.
So if it looks like this, it can only come from there, somewhere else.
Not that we exist all over the world. This idea isn't really widespread yet.
So another topic. But I'd rather say that was the whole thing.
Always a companion. Well, this kind of connection on the one hand is attributed to being from Africa
to be or somewhere in Africa or Africa the country far alone that on and on the other side.
That pan-African idea from the Caribbean, to know from Jamaica.
Yes, some of my ancestors definitely come from the continent.
It's just that I'll never know. And when I was there for the first time, it was an inspiration.
Awakening definitely. So there's, um, something completely different happened to me.
So I was in, um, communities where I wasn't visible.
It's an incredibly pleasant feeling not to be seen.
That was the case there but it was the same in Brazil, even when I was there.
Many people have always thought that I am Brasilia Brazilian, I don't know a word of Portuguese.
Then everything always flew up. The same is true in Ghana.
I also can't TUI or, or, or. It was immediately obvious that I wasn't from there.
But from a purely visual point of view, it was a certain quiet area.
And where I was able to deal with myself and my identity in a really different way, with an important part of my identity
Which is, first and foremost, extremely visible to everyone else interpreting something in
It is only from within that you rarely have time and space and peace to define at all.
What is that actually now?
And that was a bit of this experience, which comes home to a completely different home on the continent in that regard as well.
Exactly a yes, spiritually, a returning.
Yes, it is really a political issue.
Just what exactly began in Ghana in the 90s of return, which many African countries are doing now to say no came
It reconnects you with your arms, with your beginnings, spiritually, now, spiritually.
There is no other way I can describe it. I have one very last question before I would like to open up to the audience.
But this, this opposition to the letter and that is enshrined in terms of
Which you illustrate so beautifully in your book as well as. How did that work out?
How are you through the interconnected threads of sisterhood and community, through the rhizome of the garden,
through the shoe boxes and then how did you decide on a structure and procedure for your project,
So that the form also corresponds to your topic? Or speak so that you can also make the form a topic.
It was incredibly difficult.
Well, I've already published a few books, but that was that a long time ago to really get it together, because it wasn't like that
It wasn't at all, because it is a matrix, it is a power matrix and it cannot be written linearly.
And I knew that and that was when I wrote it I realized you can't just get into this linearity
Write this classic Eurocentric linearity.
It won't work that way.
That's why I've always worked with inserts, for example, I think some things have become audible where I really explain blocks.
I also wanted to bring the readers along. After all, it is an audience publisher.
It is not a scientific publisher, where many concepts are not necessarily clear to everyone.
That is why it was important to me that there were no question marks left.
Then I made these inserts and then I wanted to make them visible, what was the difference between structural two.
The previous book Structural Racism, i.e. Racism, is a structural problem.
We've been saying that every day or everyday time since 2001 and no one still understands it.
Feels like yes. And because it is always reduced to an individual problem, to individual action,
Then all of a sudden everyone feels attacked because then they feel like they are.
But that's not just what it's about, let's put it this way, there is also a structural level.
Racism is on the same level as patriarchy, as capitalism.
They are structural powers.
Circumstances that condition them yes or create social structures and we as individuals move in there.
And I also wanted to make these differences clear, i.e. that this is part of the power matrix to understand what is happening on the individual level.
These are then the inserts of my biography, which I put in there, but are structurally located.
You then again in this entire matrix. And then I explained and it was.
Well, it took a long time to find the form, I have to say that honestly.
It was. Well, I don't know who you publish, everyone.
Who starts with the first page and ends with the last page?
Respect anyone who writes that way. So But me?
Me, not really myself. No
I usually start at the back and always notice maybe this is the last page and not the first.
Everything is very familiar to me.
I think we can all understand that and and there really isn't much that can be countered with the closing word now,
But I'd love to take a few more questions from the audience if I may.
No, preferably in German, of course. But I think it's also okay to put them in English if that's easier.
I can't see anything because of the light. But there are several hands up.
Yes, it works for now. Okay, thanks for the interesting insight into your perspective.
I'm interested in your process of becoming German.
You mentioned that you also cook dumplings with sauce and that you prefer to speak German.
You dream in German, you think in German.
I'm interested in how learning the German language, how it contributed to your German language, and played a role in it.
I'll actually describe that in one chapter. Did we already say that the first three chapters are in the catalog?
If we haven't said that yet, let's say it now. In English.
Translate. It played a big part, so as a language has always played a big part in my life.
I have to say that. In other words, in finding identity, in political processes, in anti-racist, in feminist, in intersectional contexts.
Especially in German. The German-German identity is actually inconceivable without language.
In fact, you just have to record that.
And I actually describe in one chapter how I went to elementary school to Germany.
And there were three words I could understand.
And I speak the German language and that was yes no and the answer and that was not yes no,
As I say now, but I've heard yes, so I have and no.
So for me, the German language was a very hard, aggressive language.
That's how I came to these languages then.
That didn't require translation and so I was rather cautious about the language, that I had more of the feeling
I really don't want anything to do with all this language and everything that happens here in my childhood consciousness.
And as a child, you learn faster than I was in elementary school.
And then I learned how precise the German language is.
What I do with the English language, for example, there are 50 words that write the same thing, so you know
And in German I would say a well and then the word, which is then something similar, but that is something else please.
So it's an exact language now. No, no, no, a factual language, where perhaps my structure is also
So a bit more comes through the language for me, because you really have to name things, because you can also name them.
And Francais is a very flowery one. Well yes
With romantically connected and I saw everywhere an English like is such a yes with so
Lots of words for the same things and then and then so and then the pronunciation.
And when I drove here from London, you also come across this word now because it
That is because it somehow does not match at all with what is actually written there.
Yes, like when I understand what you mean. And German is very accurate.
Very accurate, I think. And so it was easy for me to learn.
I think where you can still tell that I've actually just learned German
So that German is not my kind of language, is the article of the that that during this one.
Album Never Now. Well I'll just never do that and there's just no rule.
Well, you always have to learn them with the words and that's where my daughter corrects me.
That means chair. So yes, well then.
But otherwise for me, it was language for me.
I mean, I also became a communication scientist. Well, not without reason, actually.
And that's just how I came through visual communication, which is actually a completely different form of language for me.
Just like theatre, body language. It all plays together for me.
No Yes, thank you very much.
I found the comments on these external attributions extremely exciting and only had one question afterwards.
Excuse me Better now, because there is also this term of post-migration and I find it very interesting.
So close because Brahimi has, for example.
With regard to Masha sen's life with exile, I think she would say for herself it is a life with post-migration.
So this is a German-Iranian context, as I don't know whether you or you are using this term of post-migration for yourself,
In other words, they would work for their own identity or even reject it.
For what reasons. I wouldn't participate myself because I'm not already working with migration.
I think migration requires stations and that is why I reject it.
Station therefore requires the norm. So migration describes more the norm than what is moving and that is
Which is in migration or in post-migrant or in migrant with a foreground without end.
All that stuff and that's not who I am. So that makes sense to me is a long line of third-party operators.
Then we were the foreigners and that's even more terms. At some point I became the national and then I was the education national.
Now I am a multi-state and Germany always has everything ready for me except German.
And that tells you in particular that I had to go through migration experience as a child.
But my daughter says it too. And that's just going to be bad for me, yes, it's always passed on from generation to generation.
And you understand that you don't belong here.
I think post-migrant is completely fair as an analytical term.
I understand that too, especially in the communities, Turkish, German,
Community, etc. how it is negotiated, it is also closely related to post-colonial.
That simply means nothing is over, but it is still ongoing and that's how I understand post-migrant nothing has arrived
Close or static, rather the opposite, but we're still moving because we're being kept moving, in the truest sense of the word.
In other words, the movement only stops when the structures are in such a way that we can calm down.
Well, that's something. Move! Well then. Political movement at least.
I think we just have time for associations.
I'm so sorry We'll have to postpone any more. Here's to drinks and dinner.
And luckily we still have two full days left. But if a short one can still me.
Connect. I would like to know how you feel that you are international.
And I'd like to explain it a bit first.
You mentioned that Miriam, for example, is very important to you in her work.
And when I study with students in the seminary students in the Meier seminar, then we get to it relatively soon
That she, so to speak, if we say so, if you consider yourself the daughter of Maria, then you are the granddaughter of Oilot.
Yes, Odile Pilot was also very important for Meier's beginnings in.
And then you come quickly. When you consider this, you quickly come to the conclusion that Meier's plant is also very international in outlook.
And I would like to know, in what way is it also important for you as a black person to see yourself in an international context?
I don't think that they can be separated from each other at all, i.e. from a black perspective.
I am part of the diaspora, which is why I reject the concept of national.
Or even the topos nation doesn't belong to me at all.
And Audrey clearly puts into perspective, as well as in reality, namely Worker Black Intellectual How Always Traveling Workers
So in a black context, the educator has always been the traveler.
So it was I wandering so to speak, so to speak the Black Knowledge, so to speak, that is because of history or history is yes
when we refer to our story in the various African countries, ethnic groups, cultures.
The best example or a specific example is the Yoruba religion, which has, um, I'll say when he or Yoruba,
Bantu and and and went to Brazil and that's where Cannonball was created with a very clear connection to the Uruguayan roots.
Well Cannonball it is absolutely impossible to imagine Brazilian or Afro-Brazilian culture without it.
So what? That's just like me, what I mean, what my understanding of knowledge is that it has always been migrating and of course that is also
What keeps us moving, actually allows the diaspora to establish a connection to the continent in the first place.
We're always on the move, in the truest sense of the word.
But I wouldn't necessarily want to have it embedded in a Eurocentric context and I think that's important.
Well then. When we then talk about internationalization, that is a European perspective on black studies.
What Black Studies is The Black Intellectual, which has always been on the move Aesthetics, Migration, Migration.
If you want to use the term, then yes, but not as a person who is forced in a political context in any way.
Well then. We are therefore as it is used in the German context, for example.
That is why, before I talk about internationality, I would rather talk about diaspora, about the African diaspora.
That is also a chapter that explains exactly something like African diaspora, which opens up a completely different space.
Yes, where we don't have to fish our way along colonial structures, which in the end they are,
but a space in which being black does not first have to become a subject, but is already a subject.
And those are exactly the people you're naming, so. Or dissident.
Or she always said Y Law Traveling Worker about herself.
She has traveled around the world and has always brought the same message to different places.
Well then. It was and of course it had a different effect in the places where she was.
But the message was always the same. And that was the same for me and it is no different for me.
So I travel to many countries around the world, my work is translated,
I do theatre in Brazil, etc., but the message is always Afro Germans, yes.
Emma and that is, I think, the line I'm standing in.
And I wouldn't do that at all with internationality. Narrows that down a lot for me.
Make it a linear narrative, which it simply isn't.
It is the Matrix that really rotates in a star shape in itself.
That is. We don't need to become intersectional as black women.
We're intersectional. We don't have to be diverse.
We're diverse. And that is something I would like German politics to finally understand.
We don't need to do anything strategically.
We already are. We already are. We already are.
Not anymore. There is nothing more to add.
Unfortunately, we also have to draw a preliminary line. It remains for me to thank you very much for the interview.
Natasha, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
You're very, very welcome. Completely, completely selfish.
In terms of the Web List Maker aspect, this would be possible.
Horse mackerel had been since.