Abstract:
This paper reflects on my work as editor and author of volumes in Black European studies. At the centre of this work is research on Africans in Germany in the twentieth century, whose experience I read specifically as a transnational one (rather than simply a colonial one) because of the circumstances under which Germany lost its colonies after the First World War. I argue for biography as a way of making visible the complexity inherent in transnational processes, whether our primary concern is the (political) history of states and empires or the (social) history of individual experience and subjectivity. Beyond, that biography provides the frame for the close analysis of everyday practice that is the best way of understanding the relationship between the personal and the political in the past. Because biography in the context of transnationalism constitutes one way of narrating complexity, my interest in it reflects a wider interest in the poetics of history writing. As a form it generates its own challenges in terms of accessing and understanding the past, particularly where the lives in question are those of subaltern or colonial subjects. At the same time, it is characteristic both of the historical experience of border-crossing and of the work of scholars who seek to narrate it that they are often characterised by transformative leaps of the imagination and/or the creative struggle to find new ways of telling to match the new way of seeing that transnationalism implies. I end with a short film in which a black British film-maker uses a reworking of a US film genre and draws on the recent historiography on black Germans and French colonial soldiers to produce a commentary in fiction form on his own invisibility in metropolitan culture. Is it only in the Humanities that we can see ‘scholarship’ and ‘art’ in dialogue in this way?