Dekinning, Rekinning, and Enfleshment

Family, Archives, and the Wholistic Work of BGHRA

An interconnected way of thinking

Dekinning, rekinning, and enfleshment help explain connections among family separation, historical records, lived experience, and community formation. In my scholarship and work through the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA), I bring these concepts into conversation to understand how relationships are interrupted, how connections are renewed or created, and how histories become present in people’s lives.

This thinking develops across my writing and community work. In my 2018 article, “From Both Sides of the Atlantic,” I drew explicitly on Silvia Posocco’s account of enfleshment to interpret Black German adoptees’ family searches, digital traces, and participation in public memory (Peña 2018). BGHRA’s 2026 conference, Black Archives, Black Futures: Enfleshment, brought these connections into its organizing theme.

The definitions below explain how I use these concepts in this work. They are interconnected processes, rather than a fixed sequence or a universal account of adoptee experience.

Dekinning: the interruption or denial of relatedness

I use dekinning to describe processes through which existing kin relationships are severed, obscured, delegitimized, or made difficult to sustain. These processes can involve law, institutional practice, physical separation, withheld information, or narratives that deny the continuing significance of earlier relationships.

In adoption, dekinning directs attention to what changes when a child enters a new family: access to relatives, names, language, documents, places, and knowledge of origins. The circumstances and consequences differ. Recognizing those changes allows affection and belonging within an adoptive family to be considered alongside relationships and histories that became less accessible.

Legal severance and lived relatedness can diverge. A sibling may continue to understand an adopted person as family despite decades without contact. Conversely, learning a relative’s identity does not establish an intimate relationship. Dekinning makes these distinctions available for analysis.

Rekinning: renewing and making relationships

I use rekinning to describe the continuing work of renewing, sustaining, or making relationships with kin, community, culture, place, and history following interruption or separation.

Finding a person and building a relationship are distinct processes. Rekinning may involve translation, correspondence, cultural learning, negotiation of expectations, and care over many years. It can also involve grief, boundaries, or a decision against further contact. It does not require reunion, reconciliation, or a particular account of family.

My use extends beyond an individual family search to the formation of Black German relationships across generations and national borders. Community connection can make room for recognition and belonging when family reunion is impossible or unwanted. Such connection has its own value; it does not replace a particular person or restore every loss.

Enfleshment: archives, personhood, and lived relationships

Posocco’s work on transnational adoption archives in Guatemala examines the relationships among records, bodily substance, signs, traces, and personhood. Her account treats enfleshment as a plural process involving the ways people and relationships take form through material and representational practices (Posocco 2015).

Building on that work, I attend to how an archival trace enters a living relationship. A photograph may be recognized, a name spoken, a letter translated, or a record interpreted alongside a person whose life exceeds its categories. Absence can remain part of this encounter: a document may make a missing relationship more palpable without making reunion possible.

In my 2018 analysis, adoptees’ online searches and shared histories participate in enfleshment and community formation. My continuing concern is with how people interpret, contest, and give context to the records through which others have described them.

BGHRA also places this thinking in conversation with Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus, which centers racialization and Black feminist thought in questioning dominant definitions of the human (Weheliye 2014). These intellectual approaches have distinct contexts. Their conversation helps us examine how Black lives exceed institutional classifications and inherited representations.

The wholistic work of BGHRA

By wholistic, I mean attending to the relationships among intellectual, emotional, embodied, cultural, social, and intergenerational life. A person’s history cannot be adequately understood by isolating an adoption decree, a racial category, a reunion photograph, or a conference presentation from the relationships surrounding it.

BGHRA brings scholarship, community connection, archival preservation, creative practice, and public education into sustained conversation. These activities can reinforce one another. A research question may emerge from a family conversation; a film may prompt a disagreement that changes an interpretation; an archive may support cultural learning or a new connection.

This approach includes adoptees, non-adopted Black Germans, descendants, families, artists, educators, and scholars. Adoption provides an important standpoint within BGHRA’s work, while Black German life encompasses many histories and relationships to Germany.

The conference as a space for rekinning and enfleshment

I understand BGHRA’s conference as a place where knowledge and relationships develop together. Presentations, films, performances, workshops, and conversations offer different ways to encounter and interpret history.

Across the conference, a person represented in an archive may participate as an interpreter of that record. An artist may challenge assumptions that a document leaves intact. An older participant and a student may discover questions that neither would have formulated alone. Conversations between scheduled sessions can continue relationships formed across earlier gatherings.

These encounters can support rekinning and enfleshment, but their meanings belong to the participants. Attendance does not establish kinship or guarantee a sense of belonging. A wholistic approach makes room for ambivalence, disagreement, privacy, and different degrees of involvement.

The 2027 conference, Claiming the Record: Black German Lives, Adoption, and the Work of Memory, and the establishment of the Special Collection on Black German and Adoption Studies at Rutgers University–Camden extend this conversation. They connect the preservation of materials with questions about who creates, interprets, and uses historical knowledge.

A continuing conversation across conference themes

From Strengthening Transatlantic Connections in 2011 to Rekinning, Reckoning, and Justice in 2025, Enfleshment in 2026, and Claiming the Record in 2027, I read BGHRA’s conference themes as a continuing inquiry into connection, belonging, justice, and memory.

Explore the conference themes, 2011–2027

2011 · Strengthening Transatlantic Connections

2012 · What Is the Black German Experience?

2013 · Black Germans in Diaspora

2018 · Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany

2022 · All Black Lives Matter: Black Germany & Beyond

2023 · Art as Resistance: Transcultural Expressions

2024 · JOY… and PAIN

2025 · Rekinning, Reckoning, and Justice

2026 · Black Archives, Black Futures: Enfleshment

2027 · Claiming the Record: Black German Lives, Adoption, and the Work of Memory

Explore the conference programs and history.

Family participation: rekinning within the gathering

The participation of my niece Salima Faye and my nephews Malik Nagorsen, Bassirou Camara, and LeLonDoa has particular significance within this history. Our relationships connect my own adoption and reunification journey with younger generations whose lives and perspectives also belong in Black German Studies.

Salima’s 2025 keynote, Rekinning and Mental Health, places emotional life within the conference’s intellectual work. The encounter involving Salima, her daughter Moana, and me makes the intergenerational dimension of rekinning especially meaningful to my interpretation. Here, I am participating in a family relationship while also reflecting on the processes through which such relationships develop.

I understand that encounter as a point at which rekinning and enfleshment meet. Connections pursued through names, records, and family knowledge become present through people encountering one another. Those encounters can then enter a community’s shared memory through conversation and recording. Their significance continues beyond the recorded event, in the relationships themselves.

Malik’s 2025 keynote brings another generation of our family into this shared intellectual space. Bassirou’s contributions connect the conference and BGHRA’s wider conversations with teaching, transnational experience, and activism. I approach their participation as contributions by people with their own knowledge and interpretive authority. Family connection gives these encounters particular meaning for me, while each speaker’s work deserves attention on its own terms.

My nephew LeLonDoa’s conference artwork adds a visual dimension to these connections. His creative contribution brings family participation into the gathering’s visual expression. I understand this as another way in which rekinning can take form through BGHRA: relatives contribute their own creative and intellectual work to a community whose history includes our reconnection. Art becomes part of how that history is interpreted and carried forward.

Explore the recordings: Salima Faye, Rekinning and Mental Health (2025) · Malik Nagorsen, keynote (2025) · BLM in Berlin and Abroad: A Conversation with Bassirou Maxim Camara (2022). The archive identifies the Bassirou recording as part of the BGHRA Conversation Series. Also explore his 2022 Transmigration & Transnationalism panel and a Davidson student’s reflection on learning with Bassirou.

Malick Bauer: rekinning in a wider community conversation

Malick Bauer’s contributions have a distinct place in this history. His 2025 keynote was explicitly titled On Rekinning, moderated by Silke Hackenesch. His participation across the 2024, 2025, and 2026 conferences places this question in continuing conversation with BGHRA’s concerns about emotional life, justice, representation, and archives.

In my reading of this conference history, family encounters and wider community conversations together show the scope of rekinning as a question for BGHRA. The concept can travel across a program while retaining the specificity of each person’s relationships and standpoint.

Watch Malick Bauer, On Rekinning (2025), and consult the 2025 souvenir program for the keynote titles, moderators, and broader conference context.

Connection to scholarly activism and RCTA–TRACE

Scholarly activism names the responsibilities of producing knowledge in accountable relationships. RCTA–TRACE focuses attention on adoption histories and cultural crossings that broad racial categories can obscure. Dekinning, rekinning, and enfleshment help examine the interruption, formation, and lived significance of relationships across those histories.

Taken together, these concepts invite us to ask: What relationships have been obscured? Who has authority to interpret the record? What connections become possible through the work? Whose choices shape what happens next?

References and further exploration

Peña, Rosemarie. 2018. “From Both Sides of the Atlantic: Black German Adoptee Searches in William Gage’s Geborener Deutscher (Born German).” Genealogy 2 (4): 40. Read the article.

Posocco, Silvia. 2015. “Substance, Sign, and Trace: Performative Analogies and Technologies of Enfleshment in the Transnational Adoption Archives in Guatemala.” Social & Cultural Geography 16 (5): 567–584. Article and DOI.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press. Publisher information.

Scholarly Activism: the 2020 keynote · RCTA–TRACE · Black Archives, Black Futures: Enfleshment (2026) · BGHRA 2027 · Digital Archive