Blackening Europe

Traditional Scholars have often looked at African American studies through the lens of European theories, resulting in the secondarization of the African American presence in Europe and its contributions to European culture. Blackening Europe reverses this pattern by using African American culture as the starting point for a discussion of its influences over traditional European structures. Evidence of Europe's blackening abound, form French ministers of Hip-hop and British incarnations of "Shaft" to slavery memorial in the Netherlands and German youth sporting dreadlocks. Collecting essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and fields as diverse as history, literature, politics, social studies, art, film and music, Blackening Europe explores the implications of these cultural hybrids and extends the growing dialogues about Europe's fascination with African America.

Vol. I of 'The Blackening of Europe' provides one of the first thorough analytical critiques of the European Union from the point of view of the rights of indigenous Europeans. The result is an indispensable study for anyone who would understand the foundations of the European Union and its dangerous anti-European trajectory.

Multifaceted analyses of the African diaspora in Europe

Black communities have been making major contributions to Europe's social and cultural life and landscapes for centuries. However, their achievements largely remain unrecognized by the dominant societies, as their perspectives are excluded from traditional modes of marking public memory. For the first time in European history, leading Black scholars and activists examine this issue - with first-hand knowledge of the eight European capitals in which they live. Highlighting existing monuments, memorials, and urban markers they discuss collective narratives, outline community action, and introduce people and places relevant to Black European history, which continues to be obscured today.

This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

While the study of race relations in the United States continues to inspire and influence European thinking, Europeans have yet to confront their own history. To be black in Europe—whether during the sixteenth century or today—means sharing one crucial experience: being part of a small, but visible minority. European slave-owners, company directors, and investors in the distant past maintained an ocean-wide gap between themselves and the enslaved in the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. In the following centuries, this distance persisted. Even today, to be black in Europe often means to be one of a few black persons in a group. A racial pattern of exclusion has characterized European policy for more than four centuries. Dienke Hondius identifies ideas and attitudes toward "blackness," the concept of race as visible difference, developed in western Europe. She argues that racial discourses are generally dominated by paternalism—a concept usually used to explain power structures that is often applied to the nineteenth century. Hondius identifies five patterns of paternalism that influenced Europe much earlier and iniated trends of imagery and perception. Taking a chronological and thematic approach, Hondius first focuses on southern European societies in the Early Modern period and moves to northwest European societies in the Modern period. Addressing religion, law, and science, she concludes with a synthesis of developments from the twentieth century to the present.