Books & Reading
Discover literature, memoir, scholarship, and community voices that deepen conversations about Black German histories, adoption, identity, and belonging.
Explore our growing reading list below. Each book spotlight includes a short description, related reading, and links to book and purchase information.
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Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Race, Flesh, and the Human
Alexander G. Weheliye examines how racial power shapes who is recognized as fully human. Drawing centrally on Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, he brings Black feminist thought into debates about bodies, political violence, and the…
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The Little Book of Big Visions: Art and the Worlds We Can Imagine
The Little Book of Big Visions: How to Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World gathers perspectives on Black artistic practice and the possibilities that art can open. Edited by…
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Peggy Piesche’s Euer Schweigen schützt euch nicht: Black Women’s Organizing in Germany
Peggy Piesche brings writing by Audre Lorde together with the perspectives of Black women engaged in organizing in Germany. Essays, poetry, recollections, and dialogue trace the relationships through which a movement found language, community, and…
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The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies: A Reference Resource
This four-volume encyclopedia introduces the concepts, debates, and research approaches that shape interdisciplinary childhood studies. Its entries span the social and cultural…
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Silke Hackenesch’s A Child from Abroad: Forthcoming Adoption History
Silke Hackenesch examines the adoption of Black German children by African American families after the Second World War. The forthcoming book draws on archives, Black newspapers, military correspondence, and personal testimony to place adoption within…
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Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria’s Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: Black German Childhood after 1945
This study examines how postwar German institutions and welfare organizations approached children born to German mothers and Black American soldiers. It follows the tensions between care, exclusion, institutional separation, and efforts at integration.
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Natasha A. Kelly’s Afrokultur: Black Knowledge Across Generations
Natasha A. Kelly places Black German history and intellectual life in a global conversation through the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, and May Ayim. She examines the conditions under which Black…
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Marion Kraft’s Kinder der Befreiung: Black German Perspectives after 1945
Kinder der Befreiung: Transatlantische Erfahrungen und Perspektiven Schwarzer Deutscher der Nachkriegsgeneration brings together Black German perspectives on the postwar…
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Lena Whooo’s un-fulfilled: Identity, Freedom, and Life
Lena Whooo brings poetry, short prose, and drawings together to explore identity, freedom, and the uneven terrain between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The collection draws on personal reflection and the process of finding an artistic voice.
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Charles M. Huber’s Weltbühne Afrika: Africa, Sovereignty, and Global Relations
Charles M. Huber combines personal experience with an examination of Africa’s relations with Europe and other global powers. He considers sovereignty, changing partnerships, and the narratives through which Africa is discussed outside the continent.
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Charles M. Huber’s Ein Niederbayer im Senegal: A Life Across Two Worlds
Charles M. Huber recounts his Black German childhood in Lower Bavaria and his relationship to his Senegalese heritage. The memoir approaches identity through family, place, and the experience of growing up across cultural expectations.
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International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture
How are international adoption and adoptee lives represented in literature and culture? This edited collection brings literary and cultural analysis to questions of family,…