New Research Project on African American Thought and the German Colonial Imagination
Transatlantic project based at Freie Universität Berlin will explore contested geographies of race, empire, and freedom
№ 035/2026 from Mar 30, 2026
A new research project, based at Freie Universität Berlin and funded by the Foundation on German-American Academic Relations (SDAW), is centering Germany as an important and understudied place in African American intellectual history. From April 2026, researchers from Germany and the US will be investigating African American intellectual responses to German colonialism and its culture of remembrance.
Audre Lorde in Berlin – at a cafe on Winterfeldtplatz, 1992
Image Credit: Freie Universität Berlin, Universitäts-Archiv, NL Lorde, Sig. 176 | Dagmar Schultz.
The project, “Between Empire and Exile: African American Thought and the German Colonial Imagination,” questions how African American intellectual engagements in Germany informed and influenced new interpretations of empire, race, and colonialism – and how they continue to inspire debates surrounding racism and memory politics to this day. Germany’s role in Black internationalism is little known, but evident in the lives and works of people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis.
One focus of the project will be on writer and feminist Audre Lorde, who taught at Freie Universität Berlin from 1984 to 1992 and inspired a generation of Afro-German activists. The lectures she gave during this time are housed at Freie Universität in the form of audio recordings. The researchers will transcribe and analyze these recordings as part of the project.
The principal investigators of the project are Dr. Helen A. Gibson (John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität) and Dr. K. Bailey Thomas (University of Rhode Island, USA).
Highlighting Black Intellectual History in Germany
The joint research project inaugurates a German axis in Black transatlantic intellectual history. In this framing, Germany serves not as a backdrop, but as a deliberative site of Black philosophical and political invention. In Germany, scholars like Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Fatima El-Tayeb have shaped the field of Black studies. Historical figures like William Pickens have promoted Black internationalism and anti-imperialism, influencing early Frankfurt School theorists and Weimar Republic politicians. Through interactions between African American and Afro-German scholars, this project exposes how Germany’s selective forgetting of its colonial past and its memory politics have influenced, and been influenced by, African American thought.
The project asks three main questions: First, how did African American intellectual engagements in Germany inform and influence new interpretations of empire, race, and colonialism? Second, what do people’s recorded stories and other primary sources from archives in Berlin tell us about exchanges between African American thinkers and Afro-German communities? And third, how does decolonial Africana knowledge inform memory, identity, and political resistance in Germany’s memory culture?
Strengthening International Ties
In the first phase of the project in the spring of 2026, project participants will discuss some of the central works of African American thought – from W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, to Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake.
A highlight of the project will be a three-day, international workshop hosted at Freie Universität Berlin in the fall of 2026. The workshop will entail presentations by early-career scholars, dialogue with Afro-German intellectuals and public historians, a public-facing part of the event to bring together scholarly and community discourses, and a collaborative writing session aimed at preparing a joint publication.
Dr. Helen Gibson, historian at Freie Universität Berlin and joint principal investigator, says “Our project will strengthen transatlantic collaboration in the field of Black critical theory and send a clear signal when it comes to international research surrounding colonialism, racism, and memory politics.”
Further Information