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In 1985, Black German men and women united and created a diasporic movement that connected people from across the nation. But Black women were key figures in the movement who helped determine its cultural, political, and intellectual contours. Florvil examines May Ayim and Ricky Reiser as examples of what she has coined "quotidian intellectuals," intellectuals who stress the everyday in form and content. These two women decolonized German knowledge in ways that made the Black diaspora and Black Germanness legible. Through their intellectual activism, these Black German women also made significant epistemic interventions that allowed them to write themselves into German and diasporic histories.

Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African diaspora, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, APuZ, and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories (2018), as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History (2019) and To Turn this Whole World Over (2019). Her manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020), offers the first full-length study of the history of the Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. The book won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies First Book Prize in 2021. It also received an Honorable mention from the DAAD/GSA Book Prize in Literature and Cultural Studies at the German Studies Association and was a Finalist for the ASWAD Outstanding First Book Prize. She is on the Board of the Journal of Women’s History, on the Advisory Board for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA), and on the Editorial Board for Central European History. She is also the founder and an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press.

This event is co-sponsored by Black Studies Project and European Studies at UC San Diego as part of the year-long series, Black Europe.