Forging Transnational Ties: Afro-German Women and the Cross-Cultural Black Women’s Studies Summer Institute

In 1991, for the first time, the Annual Cross-Cultural Black Women’s Studies Summer Institute took place in Germany, where it brought together women of color from diverse countries to explore the theme of “Black Women and the European community.”  Founded in the late 1980s in New York by Andrée-Nicola McLaughlin, Gloria I. Joseph, Audre Lorde, and others, the Institute, from the beginning, promoted an African diasporic and feminist perspective.  As the Institute grew in numbers, its leaders and other women of color scholars and activists organized annual conferences throughout the globe that addressed “black” women’s civil rights.  Marion Kraft, an Afro-German educator and activist committed to fostering connections between black women, undertook the role of program director of the Institute, and along with other Afro-German activists coordinated events in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Bielefeld. 

This paper argues that these Afro-German women’s involvement with the 1991 Institute enabled them to cultivate transnational bonds that remained critical to their continuing efforts to retain social recognition in Germany.  Through these bonds, Afro-German women bridged their cultural, national, and linguistic differences and created a global network of “black” women that confronted instances of everyday racism and promoted solidarity.  As a result of the Institute, the participants and organizers produced the 1994 volume, Schwarze Frauen der Welt: Europa und Migration (Black Women of the World: Europe and Migration), representing the perceived commonalities that these women discovered about each other.  Using programs and the published volume, I contend that these newly forged kinships helped Afro-German women refashion the self and the collective and to address and challenge racial discrimination in a newly reunified country.