Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History

Abstract

This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the "Rhineland Bastard." Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

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