Andreas Eckert
Biography
Professor of African History at Humboldt University Berlin and Director of the International Research Centre "Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History". Editor of the "Journal of African History"; Chair of the "Working Group of Modern Social History"; Current research interests: Decolonization in Africa, the history of colonialism, Global Labour History
Title of Paper
Varieties of the Black Atlantic: Africans in Europe in the early 20th century
Abstract
Paul Gilroy's groundbreaking study on the 'Black Atlantic' (1993) has revitalized scholarly interest in the connections between Africans, African-Americans and generally people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper builds on Gilroy's analysis by systematically including the ideas and activities of Africans in Europe during the first decades after 1900. It focuses on the UK, France and, to a lesser extent, Germany, and will mainly look at three groups: a) African students in the UK; b) the Négritude movement in Paris; and c) African political activitists in Berlin and Hamburg. The different trajectories represented by these groups stood for the rising mobility of colonized Africans and the emergence of politically active and at least partly well connected African diaspora groups. Especially after World War I, European powers regarded this development as a dangerous threat to their order of the world. The African analysed in this paper often combined a critique of Western politics and culture and European claims to superiority with nationalist and/or Pan-Africanist visions and, more generally, with a modernization project that - although conceptualized as an alternative modernity - included many elements of the dominant Western modernity.