Season 3, Episode 6: Mobilizing Black Germany

Sep 23

Season 3, Episode 6: Mobilizing Black Germany

edna bonhomme interviews Tiffany Florvil and they discuss Black-led social movements in Germany, the history of German colonialism, and transforming academic institutions.

Transcriptions for all episodes are available upon request.

Biography

Links: Website

Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil

Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African/Black diaspora, social movements, feminism, Black internationalism, gender and sexuality, and emotions. She received her PhD in Modern European History from the University of South Carolina and her MA in European Women’s and Gender History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and The German Quarterly. Dr. Florvil has co-edited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies, and has published chapters in To Turn this Whole World Over, Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora, and Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies. Her forthcoming manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement with the University of Illinois Press, offers the first full-length study of the history of the Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s.

Dr. Florvil is a Network Editor of H-Emotions and a Network Editor and an Advisory Board member of H-Black-Europe. She serves on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for the German Studies Association, the Editorial Board for Central European History, the Executive Board for the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Advisory Board of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH). She is also an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe,” book series at Peter Lang Press. Her next projects include a volume on Black Europe, examining the experiences of Shirley Graham Du Bois in Central Europe, and analyzing the activism of Black diasporic women in 20th-century Europe.

Dr. Florvil has wide-ranging interdisciplinary and intersectional interests and training in Modern European History, Black German Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Emotion/Affect Studies, Black Cultural Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include Black Europe, Black internationalism, Black intellectualism, global 1960s and the Cold War, space/Black geography, social movements, transnational feminisms, and African diasporic literature and culture. She works to excavate the narratives of Black Europeans, expanding our understanding of identity, belonging, and space. Her Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement focuses on the birth and evolution of the modern Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. In it, she demonstrates how Black German women’s efforts at political activism involved intellectual, cultural, internationalist, and queer practices and strategies that shaped their larger diasporic movement. Using an array of sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Mobilizing Black Germany is one of the first books to provide a detailed history of the modern Black German movement.

Co-founder and Series Editor of “Imagining Black Europe,” Peter Lang Press
Co-founder and Co-chair, Black Diaspora Studies Network, German Studies Association, 2016–2021
Co-founder, Advisory Board Member, and Network Editor, H-Black-Europe
Co-founder and Network Editor, H-Emotions

Bibliography

Ayim, May. Weitergehen. Gedichte (orlanda, 2018)

Ayim, May, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (orlanda, [1986] 2020, 2nd edition)

Florvil, Tiffany N., Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, December 2020, forthcoming)

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Anti-Racism Protests and Black Lives in Europe,” (Historianspeaks, June 28, 2020)

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Distant Ties: May Ayim’s Transnational Solidarity and Activism,” in Keisha Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds. To Turn this Whole World Over: Black Women's Internationalism during the Twentieth Century (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019)

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Black German Women and the Fifth Cross-Cultural Black Women’s Studies Summer Institute,” Black Perspectives (2018)

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Black German Feminists and their Transnational Connections of the 1980s and 1990s,” in Friederike Bruehoefener, Karen Hagemann, and Donna Harsch, eds. Gendering Post-1945 Germany History: Entanglements (New York: Berghahn, 2018), chapter 10

Florvil, Tiffany N. and Vanessa Plumly, eds. Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories (London: Peter Lang, 2018)

Florvil, Tiffany N., Guest Editor, “Introduction: Traversing the Borders of Anti-Racist and Civil Rights Activism,” Special issue, Journal of Civil and Human Rights (Summer 2018): 1–4

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Race and Intersectionality,” Forum: Feminism and German Studies, The German Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 2 (April 2018)

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Transnational Feminist Solidarity, Black German Women, and the Politics of Belonging,” in Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, eds. Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora: Contesting History and Power (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 87–110

Florvil, Tiffany N., “Emotional Connections: Audre Lorde and Black German Women,” in Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, eds. Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 135–147

Kelly, Natasha A., ed., The Comet – Afrofuturism 2.0 (2020, forthcoming), based on the symposium she curated “Contemporary Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts Symposium I THE COMET – 150 years W.E.B. Du Bois” (HAU Berlin, 2018)

Kelly, Natasha A., Schwarzer Feminismus. Grundlagentexte (2019)

Kelly, Natasha A., Millis Erwachen. Schwarze Frauen, Kunst und Widerstand (2018)

Kelly, Natasha A., Afrokultur (2018)

Kelly, Natasha A., ed., Sisters and Souls. Inspirationen von May Ayim (2016)

Kraft, Marion, and Rukhsana Shamim Ashraf-Khan, eds. Schwarze Frauen der Welt - Europa und Migration (Berlin: Orlanda, 1994; cited in Florvil, “Transnational Feminist Solidarity, Black German Women, and the Politics of Belonging,” 2017)

Kraft, Marion. “Cross-Cultural Sisterhood: Audre Lorde’s Living Legacy in Germany,” The Feminist Wire (February 20, 2014; cited in Florvil, “Transnational Feminist Solidarity, Black German Women, and the Politics of Belonging,” in Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, eds. Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora: Contesting History and Power [2017])

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003 (cited in Florvil, “Transnational Feminist Solidarity, Black German Women, and the Politics of Belonging,” 2017)

Neiman, Susan, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)