Voice is Vision

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Notes

1 Fatima El-Tayeb (PhD) is a German historian, author and Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies and Director of the Critical Gender Studies (CGS) programme at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on racism in Europe, queer theory, popular culture, and resistance.

2 The Berlin Conference (1884–5) was a meeting of the major European powers (France, Germany, Great Britain and Portugal) to negotiate and formalize their claims to African territory, mapping to divide resources among them at the expense of the African people.

3 In 1986, the first book by Black German women, Showing our Colours, was published. It was inspired by self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ and activist Audre Lorde (1934–92), who had met some of these women while lecturing at the Free University of Berlin. One of them was German Ghanaian poet May Ayim (1960–1996), who became a founding member of Die Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) (Initiative of Black People in Germany), the first national organization of Black Germans, which is still functioning as a support group for Black people in Germany today. May Ayim’s autobiographical poems, articles, speeches and spoken-word performances lay the foundations for the recovery of a long-lost history and drew attention to the collective and individual difficulties faced by Afro-Germans and the continuity of their experiences in a society where their lives continue to be rooted.

4 DJ, music critic and video essayist Kodwo Eshun first proposed the concept of sonic fiction in his book More Brilliant than the Sun in order to elucidate the diverse connections between Afrofuturism and techno, connecting them to jazz, breakbeat and electronica.

5 Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a French writer, theorist and philosopher from Martinique. He led debates centring on the postcolonial condition to open spaces of what he calls creolization and Relation in which the encounter of different ways of knowing produce the unpredictable.