Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed. Blackening Europe: The African American Presence.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed. Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York: Routledge, 2004. 314 pp. $26.95.

Americans who travel to Europe for the first time are sometimes amazed to find that African American music has conquered the continent. One hears it in elevators, on television, in restaurants; white European hip-hoppers frequent Afro boutiques for the latest black fashions, and then shop the CD and DVD stores that have blossomed over the past decade for new rap and video offerings. Black deejays reign over the airwaves, and videos and films featuring African American performers lead the charts. Tickets are hard to find for African American concerts, especially if a superstar like Tina Turner or Beyonce is singing. African American literature is taught in virtually every country; indeed, France has recently required students across the nation to read novels such as Cane and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as part of their national examinations.

The essays included in this volume chart this increasing "blackening" of Europe, and seek to account for it. Paul Gilroy's foreword situates the discussions at the nexus of his "black Atlantic" and the new discourse of diaspora. With his typical acumen, Gilroy, after tracing the irreversible decline of the notion of public good and the practice of politics in Europe, declares that this collection affirms "that the peculiar synonymity of the terms European and white cannot continue" (xii).

All of the essays that follow prove interesting; some fascinate, while providing telling new insights into European culture, which has undergone dramatic change over the past decades, particularly in terms of changing immigrant populations. It hardly surprises that European intellectuals, who have long been intrigued by US racial and ethnic cultures, are now looking to the most studied US ethnic group, African Americans, for answers and examples as new social problems and opportunities arise in Europe.

Indeed, the best essays here excel in finding patterns of convergence between African American and European ethnic cultures, particularly in terms of social protest, structures of resistance, and new forms of cultural expression. Johanna C. Kardux's essay on slavery memorials in the United States and the Netherlands offers a superb example of the possibilities of transnational studies, as she ponders the needs and effects of commemorative projects, which almost always roil social surfaces, but especially when racial memory is involved. Drawing on--but also challenging--the lieux de memoire theories of Pierre Nora, she examines the period of 1981 to 1992, when European unification and postcolonial immigration began to deconstruct existing national identities. Wayne James's US memorial to slavery, a brushed aluminum arch, was submerged in the Atlantic; his talks with Dutch officials about a monument in the Netherlands provides a link to Kardux's description of Afro-Dutch efforts to erect a slavery monument in Holland. When the Dutch government became a factor in the movement, a lively debate ensued, and uncovered unsuspected divisions in Dutch society. Arguments about Holland's colonial history, appropriate sites, design options, and the meaning of symbols ensued and often involved clashes between citizens descended from immigrants and "white" ones. The exclusion of many Afro-Dutch from the actual unveiling led to a protest movement that adopted anthems and strategies from the American Civil Rights movement.

Kardux links these events with the shocking assassination of liberal politician Pim Fortuyn and the ongoing debate in Holland on increasing immigration by people of color and the idea of a multicultural Holland. The essay powerfully demonstrates how the work of memory can unsettle--but also benefit--ongoing social debate and how racial material can be better handled through a "black Atlantic" approach rather than through a more narrowly focused nationalist perspective.

Other strong essays include Cathy Covell Waegner's sweeping and informative survey of the myriad ways that African American culture has affected German youth culture, Ch. Didier Godnola's shrewd analysis of the racial conflict now troubling France, and Eva Miklody's startling revelation of the Hungarian adoption and transformation of American rap music, despite the fact that Hungary has a low percentage of people of color.

The collection also impresses through its interdisciplinary approach. Using the history of slavery as a tool to unpack early European modernism, Sabine Broeck goes back to Locke to interrogate the careless way that scholars have adopted him as a champion of all human freedom when in fact his treatises condone the slavery that was present during his day. Andrew Lepecki and Samir Dayal provide contrasting essays on Josephine Baker as a pioneer of European blackness, while Dorothea Fischer-Hornung concentrates on the choreographer Katherine Dunham's 1954 German tour; P. A. Skantze's interview with Bill T. Jones about his European dance tours attests powerfully to the appeal of African American dance forms in Europe. The music that accompanied these dances forms the core of Jed Rasula's consideration of jazz's centrality for the European avant-garde and Irina Novikova's delineation of jazz countercultures in the old USSR. In one of the most fascinating essays in the volume, Maria Frias shows us the ways that American blues and Spanish flamenco have influenced each other.

Other essays turn to hip-hop culture and style, similarities between mistreated American blacks and Romanian gypsies, unequal treatment of immigrant prostitutes, and the disturbing parallel nihilism that seems to be blighting US ghettoes and East German small towns. This latter subject, explored poignantly and proleptively by Heike Raphael-Hernandez, sends up a red flag of warning for German culture and could profitably be linked to the issues raised by Didier Godnola about the crisis that France is facing with its Islamic citizens and immigrants. If there is a weakness in the collection, it is the slighting of transnational literature. The only substantial essay on specific literary texts is Alan Rice's excellent "Black and White British Fascination with African Americans," which considers work by Afro-British writers Caryl Phillips and Jackie Kay. Overall, however, Blackening Europe informs, provokes, and challenges its readers while powerfully demonstrating the benefits of transnational, multicultural, and interdisciplinary analysis. It is sure to be read, discussed, and debated as we face the new challenges of global culture.

Reviewed by

John Wharton Lowe

Louisiana State University