In 1984 at the Free University of Berlin, the African American poet Audre Lorde asked her Black, German-speaking women students about their identities. The women revealed that they had no common term to describe themselves and had until then lacked a way to identify their shared interests and concerns. Out of Lorde's seminar emerged both the term ""Afro-German"" (or ""Black German"") and the 1986 publication of the volume that appeared in English translation as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. The book launched a movement that has since catalyzed activism and scholarship in Germany.Remapping Black Germany collects fourteen pieces that consider the wide array of issues facing Black German groups and individuals across turbulent periods, spanning the German colonial period, National Socialism, divided Germany, and the enormous outpouring of Black German creativity after 1986. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Robert Bernasconi, Tina Campt, Maria I. Diedrich, Maureen Maisha Eggers, Fatima El-Tayeb, Heide Fehrenbach, Dirk Gottsche, Felicitas Jaima, Katja Kinder, Tobias Nagl, Katharina Oguntoye, Peggy Piesche, Christian Rogowski, Nicola Laure al-Samarai, and Andrew Zimmerman.

Although Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century authors writing in German, her novels and stories have sometimes been viewed narrowly as portraits of women as victims. In this innovative study, Sara Lennox provides a much broader perspective on Bachmann's work, at the same time undertaking an experiment in feminist methodology. Lennox examines Bachmann's poetry and prose in historical context, arguing that the varied feminist interpretations of her writings are the result of shifts in theoretical emphases over a period of more than three decades. Lennox then places her own essays on Bachmann in similar perspective, showing how each piece reflects the historical moment in which it was written. Making use of recent interdisciplinary approaches - Foucauldian theories of sexuality, post-colonial theory, materialist feminism - she explores the extent to which each of her earlier readings was shaped by the methods employed, the questions asked, and the political issues that seemed most germane at the time. Out of this analysis comes a new understanding of the significance of Bachmann's work and new insight into the theory and practice of feminist criticism.

An exploration of why women were singled out as witches in 15th-century in Germany. Sigrid Brauner examines the connections between three central developments in early modern Germany: a shift in gender roles for women; the rise of a new urban ideal of femininity; and the witch hunts that swept across Europe from 1435 to 1750. In mediaeval discourse on witchcraft, Brauner argues, men and women were assumed to become witches in roughly equal numbers. But starting with the notorious ""Malleus Maleficarum"" (1487), witchcraft was reinterpreted as a gender-specific crime: its authors argued contentiously that most witches were women and linked the crime of witchcraft to women's voracious sexual appetites. The work raises questions about the genesis of the modern social problems of race, gender and class oppression, and locates their roots in the early modern period.

"Race relations" are a controversial topic in today's Germany. Have Germans learned from the past? How far back must one go to understand the tensions, prejudices, and strategies that have marked race relations in the recently unified nation? The "Imperialist Imagination" explores the German preoccupation with racial and ethnic differences throughout the past two centuries, in a colonial and "postcolonial" context.
Germany's belated national unification in 1870, its short colonial period (1884-1918), and the loss of its colonies as a consequence of World War I, rather than through wars of liberation, generated very different colonial and postcolonial conditions from those in Britain and France. This volume's sixteen essays investigate how, as a consequence of these conditions, Germans imagined their relationship to racial and ethnic others: how they supported and contested colonization during the colonial period, how their colonial fantasies fed into the Nazis' racial and expansionary policies after the loss of German colonies, and how they represent their relationship to German minorities and "foreigners" within and outside Germany today.
The contributors include scholars in literature, history, art history, political science, philosophy, ethnography, film, popular culture, photography, and theater. The anthology will appeal not only to Germanists but to all those interested in postcolonial and cultural studies.
Sara Friedrichsmeyer is Professor of German, University of Cincinnati. Sara Lennox is Professor of German, University of Massachusetts. Susanne Zantop is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.