Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery, the contributors demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvements from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the collection brings together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa, thereby seeking to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other. The collection demonstrates that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in the German cultural memory and identity to a much larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aSucceeds at placing blacks and Asians at the center of the Americas, inviting productive dialogue against the notion that interaction between these groups is out of the ordinary.a
--"Journal of American Ethnic History"

"As fresh and exciting as it is important. This crucial book changes the conversation around American Studies and Ethnic Studies in key ways, challenging scholars to light out for previously-uncharted places on our mental maps in which borders are interrogated and challenged, alliances forged through imagined communities, commerce, popular culture, or politics are investigated and probed, and questions that are simultaneously new, and half a century old, are revivified. This volume, the first interdisciplinary anthology dealing with AfroAsian encounters, stands to become a landmark work in the field."
--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

aWhat critical anthologies do best is to present. . . . And AfroAsian Encounters does thata--"Journal of Asian American Studies"

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado," Paul Robeson's support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a "Black Pacific." From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian "buddy films" like "Rush Hour," AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.

Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery, the contributors demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvements from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the collection brings together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa, thereby seeking to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other. The collection demonstrates that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in the German cultural memory and identity to a much larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media-from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels-has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aSucceeds at placing blacks and Asians at the center of the Americas, inviting productive dialogue against the notion that interaction between these groups is out of the ordinary.a
--"Journal of American Ethnic History"

"As fresh and exciting as it is important. This crucial book changes the conversation around American Studies and Ethnic Studies in key ways, challenging scholars to light out for previously-uncharted places on our mental maps in which borders are interrogated and challenged, alliances forged through imagined communities, commerce, popular culture, or politics are investigated and probed, and questions that are simultaneously new, and half a century old, are revivified. This volume, the first interdisciplinary anthology dealing with AfroAsian encounters, stands to become a landmark work in the field."
--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

aWhat critical anthologies do best is to present. . . . And AfroAsian Encounters does thata--"Journal of Asian American Studies"

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado," Paul Robeson's support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a "Black Pacific." From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian "buddy films" like "Rush Hour," AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.