Following the release of his new book last December, Damani Partridge, professor of anthropology and Afroamerican and African studies, focuses on this research in a new article, "Universality as Blackness (in and from Berlin)," published online by Anthropology News on September 21, 2023. Here's an exerpt:
"In Berlin’s Youth Theater Bureau (now Theater X), Turkish, Arab, and African youth who sometimes have German passports, but who often also came as migrants who had to cross many borders, re-enacted, learned, and invented scenes from the transnational Black Power movement while also standing, at one point, with bowed head and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Blackness, here, is not a stable term (as Theater X’s Ahmed Shah put it at at an event launching Blackness as a Universal Claim), but one that establishes a basis from which to argue for a different kind of possibility of being in the world. In thinking from the positions of Blackness, universality, and citizenship’s failure, it seems important to note that Poles and Eastern Europeans were once on the spectrum toward Blackness in Europe. Jewish Europeans and women’s sexuality, according to Sander Gilman’s reading of Freud, have been marked in this way as well."
Click here to read the full article.
Partridge and his book were also recently featured in a podcast interview by Reighan Gillam, associate professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College, for New Books Network.
