Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde, who taught in Berlin from 1984 to 1992, recalled that, on the day the Berlin Wall fell, an unnamed Black African male was beaten up on one of the city’s subways. Once again, a glorious moment of freedom and revolution on the world stage coincided with routine violence against a Black body. Lorde was born in New York City but lived and taught in Berlin where she sought the opportunity to build a transnational feminist alliance. What she discovered there is what many have celebrated since: a thriving, culturally rich, politically buoyant community of Afro-German scholars, artists, and writers. She also found a city still struggling to reconcile with legacies of colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and trauma. How do African-Americans and Afro-Germans experience the city today? What has changed? What work is yet to be done?
Speakers include:
Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, co-director/ artistic director at Each One Teach One (EOTO), Berlin
Brittany Hazelwood, Director of Festival Neue Literatur and Editorial Director for STILL Magazine
Darryl Pinckney, novelist and author of Black Deutschland (Picador, 2016)
Christophe A. Koné, Assistant Professor of German, Williams College
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event.
Co-sponsored by NYU Deutsches Haus and the Urban Democracy Lab with generous support from DAAD.