878744

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CSCXXX10.1177/1532708619878744Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesBurkhard

Original Article
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
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“A New Spelling of My Name”: © 2019 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708619878744
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Autoethnographer Through Zami journals.sagepub.com/home/csc

Tanja Burkhard1

Abstract
In this article, I provide the historical context for the reception of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami’s by Black women
across the African diaspora as a backdrop for my own autoethnographic engagement of the book. I narrate my journey to
claiming space within the field of autoethnography by anchoring my discussion in Zami and its themes. The goal of this work
is to illustrate the crucial nature of autoethnographic work to transnational Black feminism, and its ongoing importance to
women from and in marginalized communities.

Keywords
autoethnography, transnational Black feminism, Black feminism, transnational feminism, Audre Lorde, Black women,
women of color, Afro-Germans, Germany

To Whom do I Owe the Power Behind language to ask for clarification who “children like me”
My Voice? were, though, of course, I knew that they meant children
they deemed “Other” (Diversi & Moreira, 2009).
I picked up Zami, Audre Lorde’s biomythography, a piece Considering the histories of eugenics, ideologies of racial
of art that marries biography, mythology, and history purity and the superiority of Whiteness embedded in
(Lorde, 1982), in the midst of seeking refuge from gradu- Germany’s colonial history and histories of Nazism (Campt,
ate school induced feelings of alienation, isolation, and 2005), this type of Othering was an extension of long-stand-
desperation. I lingered on Zami’s opening questions “To ing discourses about race and subjugation in Germany.
whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength It was not until I engaged in autoethnographic writing,
I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under that I began to understand that the theme of “not having
the bruised skin’s blister?” “To whom do I owe the sym- the language” to describe racialized experiences was an
bols of my survival?” and “To whom do I owe the woman outgrowth of these histories, which continue to shape the
I have become?” Reading and rereading each of these ways race and racism function in the German context and
questions, I recalled images of Audre Lorde speaking to that the discourses about race and racialization about
Afro-German women in the film Audre Lorde: The Berlin German identity also manifest themselves outside of
Years, a film that chronicles Lorde’s feminist organizing Germany. Years before I began to develop this under-
with Afro-German women in Berlin in the 1980s and standing, Audre Lorde had taken up the theme of not hav-
1990s. My experience of the film evoked mixed emotions ing access to language to describe one’s lived experience
of surprise, awe, and anger. during her time in Berlin, which I discuss in more detail
I felt anger, in particular, because I realized that I had later on in this article. After reading the first chapters of
never learned about Lorde’s transnational feminist activ- Zami, I began jotting incoherent journal entries about
ism—or any other histories of women of color organizing— what it means to be a Black feminist (and) autoethnogra-
in my country of origin, Germany, until I came to the United pher (Griffin, 2012), and whether I, a biracial Black
States as a graduate student. Quite obviously, Black wom-
en’s organizing was not deemed worthy of inclusion into
the curricula of southwestern Germany in the 1990s and 1
University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA
early 2000s. There, racism was thought of as an issue of a
Corresponding Author:
dark past, rather than an aspect of everyday life. Thus, when Tanja Burkhard, University of Pittsburgh, 230 S Bouquet Street, 4138C
my teachers both implicitly and explicitly declared that Wesley W. Posvar Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
“children like me” had no place in their school, I had no Email: [email protected]
2 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)

woman from Germany was “allowed” to ascribe either continue to savor for a while longer. “Afro-German.” We
term to myself. Furthermore, I began to question what it had no context for this term, its history, or those who coined
means to learn from critical scholars of color in and from it. Over a decade later, I found it again, in a book in the
the United States, given differences in history, geography, United States, recognizing that we had joked about the term
and social contexts. I recognized that in order to develop and its implications of a shared Black German experience,
my own autoethnographic voice, I had to first understand because we lacked the context and knowledge of the term’s
whose voices were speaking to me and through me—or in emergence.
other words—understand my own epistemology and that In the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years,
of writers like Audre Lorde, whose work impacted me so Audre Lorde can be seen speaking to an Afro-German
profoundly. woman who notes that prior to hearing Lorde speak, she
In this article, I locate my reading of Zami as a turning had never considered that “Afro-German” could be a posi-
point in the development of my own autoethnographic tive label to ascribe to oneself. Rather, according to Lorde,
voice. I understand autoethnography as an approach that the woman was speaking of her experiences “out of the
enables me to look inward at my personal experiences, and pain of having to live a difference that has no name”
outward at the cultural context (Griffin, 2012). Following (Fehrenbach, 2005, p. 181). In the vignette about my own
Choi (2016), I interweave my reading of literature with introduction to the term “Afro-German,” with which I
memories, analysis, and interpretation. Furthermore, I dis- opened this section, I was offered a way to name racial dif-
cuss Zami along with Lorde’s organizing in Germany, by ference (Afro-German), but lacked the knowledge of the
connecting both with narratives about my own experiences. local histories of Black feminist organizing in Berlin to
Historicizing, contextualizing, and illustrating my personal ascribe it to myself, or understand its origins. Audre
connection with Lorde’s work, I show how autoethnogra- Lorde’s work is richly depicted in the film, but never per-
phy as a methodological and epistemological endeavor has meated my reality in southwest Germany. My mother’s
been and continues to be crucial to Black women and other friend, who introduced us to the term, was born and raised
women of color, not only as a means of providing insight in Berlin and therefore had access to a local community
into and resisting the manifestations of globalized White that gifted her the knowledge of the context, as well as the
Supremacy (Allen, 2001), but also to build alliances, edu- term, both of which were absent from public discourses
cate, and empower each other. about the histories of race and racialization in Germany.
The section that follows takes up Audre Lorde’s notion Campt (2005) notes that “[c]ontexts—both discursive and
of “a difference that has no name” (Fehrenbach, 2005), sociohistorical—are the possibility of existence and intel-
which describes the experience of being Othered in a lin- ligibility of our stories as well as the ultimate limit of how
guistic and cultural context, in which there is no language to they are read” (p. 2). My mother and I were unable to read
name difference experienced by people of color. I contextu- our stories through a lens of Afro-German histories and
alize Lorde’s notion of the “difference that has no name” legacies, because we had not been able to access the discur-
within a transnational and localized understanding of racial- sive and sociohistorical context of Afro-German identity.
ization and difference. In so doing, I discuss the context of Moreover, this work was not considered part of the main-
Germany with respect to racialization and identity forma- stream canon of knowledge in Germany, and therefore
tion, as well as Black feminist organizing. Afterward, I excluded from general discussions about feminism and
explore Zami’s larger impact, particularly in the European migration.
context, and take up Lorde’s questions from Zami to discuss Raised by a Black Jamaican mother and White German
my own journey of taking up autoethnography. father, I was intimately familiar with the difference Lorde
references, or what Trinh Minh-Ha (1994) similarly
describes as the “difference that has no name, but too many
Difference Without a Name
names already” (p. 327), the experience of marginalization
The first time I consciously heard the term “Afro-German,” without having access to language to name it, describe it, or
it casually rolled off the lips of one of my mother’s newest explain it. Difference became apparent each time I was told
friends at the time. We stood surrounded by Afrocentric art that I spoke German well (although I was born and raised in
in her small apartment in the southwest of Germany, as she Germany), or asked where I was really from and when, or
pointed at a poster that featured a Black African woman how often, I would return “home.” I had no name for my
and a poem praising the strength, resilience, and creativity racial identity, as the ones that were ascribed to me by oth-
of Black women. She noted, “I love this one. As Afro- ers carried negative connotations and assumptions about
German women, we just have to stick together.” On the way my heritage (e.g., Mischling, which means “halfbreed” or
home, my mother and I burst into laughter, rolling the term “mongrel”; Neger, which means “Negro”; Mohr, which
“Afro-German” around in our mouths like a piece of bulky means “Moor”; and Besatzungskind, which translates to
candy that we could not figure out whether to spit out or “occupation baby”1). Much later, I learned that I was far
Burkhard 3

from alone in this experience, as scholarship by Afro- then, renders Black Germans, some of whom can trace their
Germans reflects the prevalence of these questions and family histories in Germany through numerous generations,
many others intended to mark their difference in their daily in a state of living contradiction, as German identity and
lives. According to Campt (1993), Plumly, (2015), and Whiteness are inextricably linked, rendering non-White
(Viita, 2015), questions by White Germans regarding the Germans as Other.
“real” home of Afro-Germans intentionally or unintention- I understood the concepts of static foreignness and
ally serve the purpose of reiterating an understanding of invisible racialization long before learning the respective
German nationality and citizenship as being inextricably terms. From preschool through high school, I was the only
linked to Whiteness. person of color in my educational spaces, where students
In collaboration with Audre Lorde, feminist organizers and particularly teachers targeted me with dehumanizing
including May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Dagmar Schultz, jokes and practices, constantly questioning my ability and
and Others (Viita, 2015), coined the term Afro-German as reminding me of my “presumed incompetence” (Gutiérrez
an intervention to name a difference that had previously y Muhs, 2012).
been unnamed, or named derogatorily, but had never gone After coming to the United States as an undergraduate
unnoticed. By claiming Afro-German as an identity, the exchange student, I recognized that the idea of Whiteness as
women who coined the term aligned themselves with the an inherent feature of Germanness also manifested itself in
“hyphenated people” of the African diaspora (Rowell & the United States. While teaching German during my
Lorde, 2000, p. 54). Furthermore, the term serves to provide exchange year in the Southern United States, I heard stu-
an alternative to the dehumanizing terms ascribed to those dents and colleagues refer to me as “the Black girl that
with German and African parentage, or African parentage speaks German real good,” after a student described me in
born in Germany (Viita, 2015). this way to one of my colleagues. Due to the dialectal/gram-
Carole Boyce Davies (1994) argues that the names to matical construction of the phrase, the other teaching assis-
describe the identity of African descended peoples, such as tants jokingly used this descriptor to refer to me for the
Afro-German, Black, African, or African American, among remainder of the year. At the time, I laughed along, but also
others, all result from original misnamings and “the simul- had no language to describe how the contradiction of a
taneous constant striving of the dispossessed for full repre- Black/German (speaker) that was center of the joke, pre-
sentation” (p. 5). For this reason, she notes, each naming is sented one manifestation of invisible racialization.
provisional, and requires ongoing analysis, contextualiza- Still, when trying to render my thoughts in German, I
tion, and oftentimes departure. Despite their instability, often realize that I do not have the language to fully speak
namings and misnamings are needed insofar that they make about my experiences. This is primarily the case because I
it possible to describe difference and address the structures received most of my higher education in the United States,
that marginalize and dispossess those who are racialized and because scholars who write in English and French have
through invisible processes (El-Tayeb, 2011). The name, developed a language to name the many ways in which dif-
then, can simultaneously empower and disempower, alien- ference is manifested, whereas German often has no viable
ate, and foster belonging. equivalent. Much of this has to do with the way the German
Although the terms Mischling and Neger were used in language has developed historically with respect to race.
my social environment and used in everyday language For instance, the German word for race, “Rasse” continues
when I was growing up, they were largely absent from the to carry connotations that were manifested during Nazism
media discourses to which I was exposed. In the context (Jurca, 2011), and is therefore rarely used to refer to the
of Europe, El-Tayeb (2011) refers to the absence of a processes of contemporary racialization. The term “race” is
mainstream public discourse on race as “invisible racial- sometimes translated as “Hautfarbe” which translates to
ization” (p. xxiv), through which Europeans who are “skin color,” and reduces issues of race and racialization to
visually and/or phenotypically marked as non-White one phenotypical marker of race, skin color, which is insuf-
inhabit a space of “static foreignness” and an eternal state ficient for capturing the complexities of race and racializa-
of “just arriving” (El-Tayeb, 2011, p. xxv), whether they tion in German and global contexts.2
were born in Europe, have lived there for extended peri- Furthermore, Campt (1993) notes that whereas
ods, or have just arrived. African-Americans have a scholarly and cultural history
Speaking specifically on the Afro-German context, of their cultural legacies, Afro-Germans are largely
Campt (1993) notes the following: “the ‘racial identity’ of excluded from German history. She further points to the
blackness is imposed as a set of socio-ideologically con- absence of Afro-European role models before the emer-
structed meanings, which equate blackness with exteriority gence of the Afro-German women’s movement in the
to German culture, marginality within German society, and 1980s. Audre Lorde’s transnational organizing in partic-
the status of ‘foreign/er’ in social relation” (p. 113). This ular facilitated the development of a critical mass of
permanent status of “foreign/er,” or “static foreignness,” Afro-German women who entered dialogues about their
4 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)

racialized experiences in Germany. Researching Audre women of African descent in Berlin, was coined specifi-
Lorde’s work in Germany, I came across May Ayim’s cally for the purpose of creating language to self-identity
(1985) oft-cited poem Afro-German I, which is presented and, more importantly, to assign a positive connotation,
as one side of a conversation between a White German one that opens avenues for movement building, for under-
person, whose dialect reveals East German origins, and standing differences and claiming a diasporic identity that
herself, whose voice is absent from the exchange. In it, is both, Black and German.
she captures the discursive dissonance between acknowl- The impact of Audre Lorde and activists with whom she
edging Afro-Germans as German, and simultaneously worked during her time in Berlin continues to shape
statically foreign. For example, as the White interlocutor Germany’s conversations about racialization, belonging,
states in the poem: “If you work hard at your studies you and difference. However, it is also through her written work,
can help your people in Africa, see: That’s what you’re particularly the collaborative work Showing Our Colors
predestined to do, I’m sure they’ll listen to you” (Ayim, and Zami, that continue to impact Black women in the dias-
1985, p. 19, cited in Gerlind, 2012). Ayim succinctly pora, particularly in Germany. In the next section, I discuss
shows the ways in which static foreignness is reiterated Zami’s general reception, as well as the ways in which it
in everyday discourses, particularly by noting that her propelled me toward embracing creative autoethnographic
“people,” are not and could not be Germans, or in methods, or in other words becoming an autoethnographer.
Germany, but remain Other, thereby reaffirming the
inextricable linkage of Whiteness and Germanness.
Furthermore, the interlocutor reproduces a vision of Zami—Reception of a Biomythography
Africa as both an essentialized monolith (Plumly, 2015) Zami is hailed as a Black queer feminist manifesto across
and in need of help from those who become educated in the world. In Karla Jay’s (2004) Conversations with Audre,
the West and return. There is no mention, of course, of Lorde discusses how she coined the term “biomythogra-
the centuries of colonialism, and harmful policies, imag- phy” to refer to Zami. She explains the following:
ery, discourses and that have rendered certain parts of
Africa with a perceived need of aid. Zami is not only an autobiography, but mythology, psychology,
Fehrenbach (2005) notes that in postwar Germany, there all the ways in which I think we can see our environment . . . I
was much contention about how to “deal” with Black chil- attempt to create a piece of art, not merely a retelling of things
dren, who at that time were mostly born to White German that happened to me and to other women with whom I shared
women and Allied soldiers. She argues that “[t]heir exis- close ties. (Jay, 2004, p. 110)
tence challenged historical definitions of ethnic German-
ness and sparked heated debates about the social effects of By positioning Zami as fiction, Lorde frees herself of posi-
occupation, as well as the character and consequences of tivist understandings of a singular truth and shifts the focus
democratization” (p. 2). Having been raised in close prox- from discussing particular facts of her life to using her
imity to four major American military bases, the construct thoughts, emotions, and desires to enter a dialogue about
of the “occupation baby,” was also ever-present in my life. race, gender, sexuality, and migration with her readers.
The erroneous assumption that my father was an African According to Weekes (2006), the blend of mythology
American soldier (and likely absent or unknown) was made and realistic storytelling also enables Lorde to present her
quite frequently when people questioned my background. own actualized self and develop a collective voice to high-
However, I also witnessed solidarity among those who did light how culture may hinder or foster self-actualization
have a parent in the U.S. military, and the perceived privi- among women who see themselves reflected in her narra-
lege and prestige of the American identity bestowed by the tive. Certainly, it is this invocation of a collective voice and
American parent, which added complex connotations to the the potentials of self that make Zami not only a piece of art,
term “occupation baby.” but a text that is visceral, evocative, and complex. This is
Due to the terms used to refer to Black and biracial echoed by Sara Ahmed, who remarks that when she read the
Black Germans, many Afro-Germans did not perceive the book in the 1990s, she “reoccupied not only the spaces in
existing ways to name their raced identity as positive or which [she] was living and working but also [her] own
empowering (Opitz, Oguntoye & Schultz, 1986). past” (Ahmed, 2015, p. x). In experiencing Zami, many
Difference, then, oftentimes did not remain without a Black women also noted not only how much it evoked their
name, but received labels that were pejorative, disrespect- own memories of childhood, but also feeling the need to
ful, and dehumanizing. According to El-Tayeb (2003), the share the book with other Black women.
term “Afro-Deutsch” [Afro-German] returned to the Cassandra Ellerbe-Dueck, a Surinamese-Dutch orga-
German mainstream in 2001 with the popularity of the nizer who studied in Germany during Audre Lorde’s time
German hip-hop project “Brothers Keepers.” The term, there describes her reading of Zami as follows: “I was
which had emerged during Lorde’s work with German totally blown away by the book; I passed it around to
Burkhard 5

everybody and their mother. This was the first book by a identities. As a reader and autoethnographer, who works and
black lesbian that I had ever read, and I wanted to share it lives with/in various contexts, Lorde’s construction and inter-
with others” (Ellerbe-Dueck & Wekker, 2015, p. 58). Her action of these multiple identities enabled me to consider the
reflections show the ways Zami functions as a piece of differences and continuities of experiences in the African
transnational literature that has been shared among Black diaspora.
women in various parts of African diaspora. While Audre Lorde’s mother migrated to the United
Dagmar Schultz’s (2012) film Audre Lorde’s the Berlin States in 1924, my own mother migrated to Germany in
Years, not only brings the Afro-German movement of the 1985 and I first came to the United States in 2009. Audre
1980s and early 1990s to the present, but also (re)intro- Lorde, her mother, and countless other women who
duced Zami to Black Germans in the contemporary moment. migrated, were forced to acquire everyday knowledges pro-
On Schultz’ website for the film, Mayra Rodriguez, a visitor duced at the intersections of racialization, gender, and
to Berlin notes migration in various contexts and find ways to reckon with
them in the context of childrearing. In many ways Zami
. . . I heard of Audre before, here in Berlin she has often been presents the knowledges produced by and through Lorde’s
my only company. During my first nights I read from Zami positioning as a lesbian Black woman in relation to her
until sun came out. Then I would call my mother, loving her in mother’s first-generation immigrant experiences, and those
Audre’s words. Like Audre’s work, your film is an of other women with whom she developed relationships. In
acknowledgement of the women who keep us alive, and who
particular, the themes related to childrearing within dehu-
lead us home.3
manizing contexts juxtaposed with idyllic descriptions of
Black life make Zami timeless and relevant even when read
Others on the site discuss how they used translations of
through a contemporary lens. The next section discusses
Zami in conjunction with the film to introduce Lorde’s
some of the themes that resonated with me personally in an
work, particularly her anti-racist, feminist pedagogy to
effort to connect them with larger conversations about
speakers of other languages, thereby extending and continu-
Black women’s storytelling.
ing Lorde’s transnational engagements.
The words and reflections of the women who com- Power, Powerlessness, and Black Immigrant
mented on the site reminded me of my own experience of
reading Zami. When I first bought a worn, used copy of the
Mothers’ Knowledges
book, I had recently relocated to the U.S. Midwest to pursue The beginning of Zami centers Audre Lorde’s childhood
my doctorate, where I found myself in a state of profound experiences and describes some of the ways in which her
solitude. Abandoning the canonical readings of graduate mother, an immigrant woman from Grenada, navigated life
school for one night, I found myself drawn into Lorde’s in the United States of the 1930s. It juxtaposes the crucial
poetic prose. The descriptions of her childhood, her travels, knowledges her mother held in her homeland Grenada
and relationships resonated with me deeply. However, it related to healing, nutrition, and mothering, with the ways
was the carefully crafted language in Zami’s descriptions of these knowledges needed were altered, or even rendered
life in Black households that evoked a sense of home in me. useless in the context of New York in the 1930s and 1940s.
For instance, Lorde’s description of getting her hair combed These transnational implications with respect to Black
by her mother, as she notes “[t]he radio, the scratching women’s knowledges helped me contextualize the com-
comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and plexities of experience within my own life. My mother had
my stinging scalp all fall into-the rhythms of a litany, the often remarked that in childhood in Jamaica, colorism—
rituals of Black women combing their daughters’ hair “the process of discrimination that privileges light skin
(Lorde, 1982, p. 33),” mirrored images, smells, and memo- people of color over their dark skin counterparts” (Hunter,
ries of my own childhood. 2007, p. 239)—prevented her and other darker skinned
Zami is written in a strong first-person voice and critically women from accessing educational and professional oppor-
engages both the self as well as the cultural forces that create tunities. Reflecting on meeting my father, she noted that the
the self. Pearl (2009) posits that Zami is the story of all of knowledge that a darker skin tone would inevitably close
Lorde’s identities. She positions the book as rooted in two doors to her children had played a role when she planned
genres of writing, the lesbian coming out story and the her future. Based on her experience of the Jamaican con-
African American slave narrative; slave narratives and neo- text, she hoped that my lighter skin tone would make my
slave narratives in particular, are marked by self-reflexivity professional life easier.
and the striving to position one’s own narrative and experi- However, my mother’s intimate knowledge of racial
ences in relation to the oppressive conditions of slavery, par- hierarchies, skin tone, and oppression in Jamaica pro-
ticularly for abolitionist causes. Zami’s themes, then, not only duced by histories of colonialism and globalized White
align it with already existing genres of knowledge produc- Supremacy (Allen, 2001) did not apply in the same way
tion, but also demonstrate the multiplicity of Black women’s in Germany, where I was actually raised. As discussed
6 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)

above, my skin tone is often read as a product of American where she went to her theater rehearsals. That day, they
occupation, albeit erroneously, in the German context. were fed up with her presence, her audacity to ignore their
Thus, my mother’s attempt to create a life marked by less slurs and demands and choose whichever parking spot was
racialized pain for her children was based on her contex- available. That day, they left the comfort of their homes and
tual knowledge, but did not translate directly into the waited for her to leave rehearsal in the dark, channeling
German context. Reading Lorde’s descriptions of her their hatred, anger, and feelings of superiority into beating
mother enabled me to also understand this complexity as the power out of this woman. A woman, who was powerful
an attempt to counteract the powerlessness that is often a enough to have learned their language in only a handful of
product of raising children in environments in which years; powerful enough to have learned to drive and navi-
they are marginalized. gate a country that was not her own. After the incident, my
In the context of being a woman, Black, and immigrant parents temporarily moved closer to each other in their rela-
in the 1930s and 1940s, Lorde notes that her mother sought tionship, before breaking apart completely. My father and
to present herself as powerful to her children. She argues, his friends responding by organizing, the town marched
“[m]y mother was invested in this image of herself, also, against “Fremdenhass” (xenophobia), and strived to reject
and took pains, I realize now, to hide from us as children the the image of racism as an everyday practice. My mother
many instances of her powerlessness” (Lorde, 1982, p. 17). received a letter from our town’s mayor, apologizing for the
In my own copy of Zami, the word “powerlessness” is violence, but reminding her that the town’s perception
underlined, because it echoed my emotional response to would suffer if the attacks racial motivation became known.
racial violence, both verbal and physical, in a context that Every year, the town still comes together for a multicultural
not only had no name for these experiences, but also treated festival, celebrating diversity with no official acknowledg-
it a taboo in light of Germany’s processing of Nazism. In ment of the incident that prompted it.4
the opening chapter of Zami, Lorde describes the ways her After the incident I was overtaken by an ever-present
mother tried to shield her from acts of racial violence, such feeling of powerlessness. At the age of six, I had already
as being spit on by White people. Instead of teaching her become intimately familiar with the violence inflicted due
daughters about the racial dimensions of White people spit- to difference, of course, not only through my mother’s
ting on her as a Black child, Lorde’s mother told her that the experience, but also my own. From being pushed out of
people who committed these acts simply lacked home school buses, being taunted for my complexion, to finding
training. gum and glue in my hair, if I wore it down; racial difference
This passage resonated with me in particular, because it shaped my experiences of schooling and all aspects of pub-
reflected some of the similar ways in which White lic life. Reading Zami enabled me to see the patterns of
Supremacist practices are manifested in everyday life across these experiences as connected to larger narrative about
various contexts. My mother told me stories about White Othered experience, caused by diasporic displacement and
American travelers, who would throw candy on the ground globalized White Supremacy (Allen, 2001). Through her
in front of her and other children in 1960s/1970s Jamaica, descriptions of the various ways in which racism was an
encouraging them to scatter to pick up the sweets and call- ever-present factor of her childhood that remained unnamed
ing them little monkeys. It also reminded me of the moment by her parents, Lorde skillfully illustrates the notion that
in which racism in my own life moved from being unnamed our silence will not protect us (Lorde, 2017). Her call to
to becoming painfully obvious. naming the unnamed, propelled me to write about my own
One morning, shortly after my sixth birthday, my father experiences and ultimately to develop autoethnography as a
sat me down and told me that my mother was hospitalized method of filling dangerous silence. The next section
after being badly beaten. Entering the hospital room, I describes in more detail what the development of this voice
remember my already petite mother looking very small; meant for me.
parts of her hair had been pulled out at the root, exposing
her scalp. She motioned for me to come closer and sit on her Becoming a Black, Feminist, (Im)migrant
hospital bed, which seemed impossibly high. “They spit on
me,” she tells my father, as though this was the gravest part
Autoethnographer
of the violence. While Audre Lorde’s mother sought to pro- Following Lorde’s (2001) call to transform silence into lan-
tect her daughter when White people spit on her, by blaming guage and action, my development of an autoethnographic
the perpetrator’s poor upbringing, the violence my family voice not only required naming difference, but also an
experienced left no room for attempts at mitigation. ongoing examination of the identity-based terms I used to
The act was not random, the neo-Nazi couple who describe myself, as well as the contexts in which I did so.
attacked my mother had been yelling at her from the safety Within the liminal, often contested spaces I occupy both in
of their balcony every Tuesday night, demanding that she Germany and the United States, race and gender are con-
stopped parking on the public street across from their house, structed and positioned in different ways. While in Germany,
Burkhard 7

being visibly of color automatically indicates that one is not and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience
considered German and therefore inhabits a space of static (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)”
foreignness (El-Tayeb, 2011), my biracial Black, (im) (p. 273). The idea that personal stories must be analyzed
migrant body, usually does not fit into U.S. discourses, the- systematically for the purposes of understanding of cul-
ories, and considerations about race, immigration, and tural and societal contexts enables researchers to work
Black womanhood. creatively and position the self within larger cultural and
These understandings shaped the way I approached societal contexts.
autoethnography as a method that embraces both narratives For autoethnographers, these understandings of cultural
and the self. I recognized, that my autoethnographic and societal contexts may be ever-shifting, thereby render-
approach would have to be situated both locally and trans- ing their stories in need of constant contextualization.
nationally. Finding continuity in the work of autoethnogra- Drawing on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Diversi and
phers of color enabled me to align myself with them and Moreira (2009) argue that bodies that do not fit into these
helped me develop my own voice. In addition to Audre binaries are considered a threat to the colonial project that
Lorde’s work, Diversi and Moreira’s (2009) Betweener seeks to categorize bodies in binaries and erase those that
Talk, Boylorn’s (2013) Sweetwater, as well as Griffin’s do not fit. They note the following: “The body that does not
(2012) I AM an Angry Black woman, among Others, became fit . . . does not fall in the binaries of colonization” (p. 22),
important milestones in my search for autoethnographic and ultimately threatens colonizing paradigms that rely on
writing that centered voices of color and was also recog- binaries to include and exclude by positioning Othered bod-
nized the local and transnational dimensions that shape our ies as incapable of knowledge production. This notion reso-
racialized and gendered experiences. nated with me deeply, because rather than seeking to claim
I recognized that drawing on theories such as Black my identity within Black/German, or White/Black binaries,
Feminist Thought (Hill Collins, 1991; hooks, 1989) and I sought out the cultural contexts and systems of oppression
transnational feminism (Mohanty, 2003; Swarr & Nagar, that impacted how these identities were fluidly ascribed to
2010) would require a deep reckoning with my own posi- my body depending on the spaces and contexts in which
tionality in shifting contexts. Zami already does this work readings of my body came up for discussion and became a
and invites us to follow suit. As Milatović (2014) notes, site of contention.
Lorde’s “feminist vision in Zami resists reductive label- Compelled by the idea that bodies that inhabit a space of
ling and reinstates the centrality of reflexivity and indi- betweenness do not fit into academic spaces, and inspired
vidual collective accountability” (p. 36). In this context, by the writing presented in Zami, I centered my first auto-
then, Lorde not only offers critiques of White Supremacy, ethnographic project in graduate school on the ways in
but does so through personal narrative and mythologized which my body was racialized and gendered in classrooms
accounts that radically center women and her feminist in which I was teaching. For example, I revisited my experi-
vision and organizing through a creative, authentic voice. ences as a Black German woman teaching English in
Furthermore, it does so by considering the transnational Turkey, and drew on memories, journal articles, and con-
contexts that shape Black women’s experiences, such as versations to craft vignettes that illustrated how my class-
her descriptions of her time in Mexico, thereby decenter- room in Turkey became a space in which I was raced and
ing the United States as the primary cite of analysis. gendered in such a way that I was “presumed incompetent”
Diversi and Moreira (2009) argue that a transnational (Gutiérrez y Muhs, 2012). Moreover, considering complex
and postcolonial analysis that would facilitate the expan- politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, Kannabirān, & Vieten,
sion of the theory, are largely absent from the original 2008) transnational and (im)migrant researchers can engage
edition of Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. in the creation of new “homelands” (Deiri-Rieder, 2018) by
Similarly, Boyce Davies (1994) suggests that if we “. . . reading and engaging each other’s writing.
see Black women’s subjectivity as a migratory subjectiv- Concerned about generalizations that do not apply to
ity existing in multiple locations, then we can see how others, I began developing an autoethnographic method
their work, their presences traverse all of the geographi- rooted in particularity, which was rooted in Moreira’s
cal/national boundaries instituted to keep our dislocations notion “the only way I could write about ‘the Other’ was
in place” (p. 4). Following Diversi and Moreira (2009), to write about my experiences as ‘the Other’” (Moreira,
Lorde (1982), and Boyce Davies (1994), then autoethno- 2011, p. 590). I recognized that the only experience I
graphic writing, then, must reckon with the particular could render with authority was my own situated experi-
local understandings and concepts related to identity, as ence. In this vain, Edwidge Danticat (2010) writes to the
well as the contestations therein, while considering the protagonist in her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory: “And so I
transnational and global contexts that impact them. Ellis, write this to you now, Sophie, as I write it to myself, pray-
Adams, and Bochner (2011) define autoethnography as ing that the singularity of your experience be allowed to
an “approach to research and writing that seeks to describe exist, along with your own peculiarities, inconsistences,
8 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)

your own voice” (p. 34). And indeed, her words returned not only developed to provide insight into phenomena, or
me to Zami and the ways in which Audre Lorde used her to evoke emotions in readers, but also to finally take up
authorial voice to teach powerfully about racism, heter- space in places into which we do not fit, often due to the
opatriarchy, Black women’s knowledges, and belonging, overwhelming Whiteness of the academy. For example,
without claiming universality or generalizability of her April Baker-Bell (2017) uses what she refers to as “Black
work. feminist-womanist storytelling,” a “methodology that
By claiming her own experience and writing in ways weaves together autoethnography, the African American
that evoke a range of emotions, Audre Lorde not only female language and literacy tradition, Black feminist/
determined a new spelling for her name, but invited her womanist theories, and storytelling . . .” (p. 6), and uses
readers to do the same. Therefore, it became less impor- this method to impart knowledge and wisdom onto other
tant, which of her accounts where fact and which were Black women in academia and beyond.
fiction, but rather, her reclamation of power of rewriting Although Zami is not a piece of autoethnography, it
her own self, what could be learned from the stories, and teaches us what this work can look like and what it can
which emotions and memories were evoked in the reader. mean to develop a shared language that enables us to listen
As Denzin (2011) reminds us, all experiences are medi- to each other across difference. In short, when Audre
ated through language, speech, and other forms of dis- Lorde asks the question “To whom do I owe the power
course, which means that “[s]elf stories are interpretations, behind my voice,” we must ultimately ask ourselves “to
made up as the person goes along—performances on the whom do I owe my autoethnographic voice?” I owe this
run—their meanings glimpsed sideways in the rearview voice to the scholars of color who have affirmed me and
mirror” (p.11). Based on this assertion, all writing fiction- shared their wisdom with me, Black women writers such
alizes experiences, as they are mediated by the language as Audre Lorde, who “create dangerously” (Danticat,
and discourse selected by the writer. 2010) and have developed genres of writing that seek to
For Lorde, allowing for artistic self-expression in telling empower, my mother, who has always responded to the
the story of all of her identities over choosing one over the everyday instances of racism and presumed incompetence
other, then, created a space to explore the potentials of the with outrage and resistance, my mentor, Valerie Kinloch,
actualized self (Pearl, 2009). Becoming a Black feminist, who daily demonstrates what Black feminist praxis can
immigrant autoethnographer for me, meant that I had to look like in every aspect of one’s life.
explore the contention, particularities, and inconsistencies Zami in particular enabled me to think and write about
each of these ways to identify held for me, to develop a my racialized and gendered experiences transnationally and
voice I could claim as my own. It further meant thinking see them as connected to the lived experiences of other
about my past experiences, the experiences of my mother, women of color, while simultaneously recognizing them as
and those of other women as connected to larger contexts. deeply connected to the contexts in which they occur. Thus,
Zami facilitated this development, particularly through its Zami not only allowed me to see Audre Lorde sitting
discussions of racialization, gender, and sexual identity between her mother’s legs while getting her hair combed,
across various contexts. but evoked mirror images of myself on the floor between by
mother’s legs, and new reflections of these practices, as I
part, comb, and braid my daughter’s hair every night as she
To Whom do I Owe the Symbols of Survival? sits in front of me. But Zami also brought to the fore that we
For those of us, who face marginalization, oppression, must also follow Audre Lorde’s lead in telling our stories on
and/or erasure in our everyday lives, autoethnographic our own terms, reject the misnamings of our identities
methods are not mere means of describing or seeking imposed on us, and work in solidarity, particularly in light
insight into cultural and societal phenomena. For those of of ongoing racialized and gendered violence, and new man-
us, whose lives and livelihoods, expectations of the future, ifestations of colonial legacies.
fears, and hopes for our children, ourselves, and those we
care about are so deeply bound up with the very phenom- Declaration of Conflicting Interests
ena that we study, autoethnographic writing remains a life-
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
line in the interrogation the structures that shape our respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
experiences. For Black feminist praxis, “fusing Black article.
feminist thought and autoethnography together necessi-
tates an explicit commitment to move from merely look-
ing at life toward a standpoint rooted in interrogation, Funding
resistance, and praxis” (Griffin, 2012, p. 143). Thus, auto- The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
ethnographic writing from a Black feminist perspective is authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Burkhard 9

ORCID iD El-Tayeb, F. (2003). “If you can’t pronounce my name, you can
just call me pride”: Afro-German activism, gender and hip
Tanja Burkhard https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4960-676X
hop. Gender & History, 15, 460-486. doi:10.1111/j.0953-
5233.2003.00316.x.
Notes El-Tayeb, F. (2011). European others: Queering ethnicity in
1. This term remains common due to the context of American postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
postwar occupation in Germany, due to which many biracial Press. doi:10.5749/j.cttttbbx
children were born to White German mothers. Ellerbe-Dueck, C., & Wekker, G. (2015). Naming ourselves as
2. For example, the German translation of Renni Eddo-Lodge’s black women in Europe: An African American-German and
(2017) book Why I’m no longer talking to White People Afro-Dutch conversation. In S. Broeck & S. Bolaki (Eds.),
about Race is titled Warum ich nicht länger mit Weißen über Audre Lorde’s transnational legacies (pp. 55-74). Boston:
Hautfarbe spreche, and “race” translated as ‘Hautfarbe.’ University of Massachusetts Press.
3. Comment retrieved from http://www.audrelorde-theberlin- Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography:
years.com An overview. Historical Social Research/Historische
4. http://www.neustadtgegenfremdenhass.de/?p=838 In the ori- Sozialforschung, 36, 273-290.
gins section of the website, it cites two other incidents of racial Fehrenbach, H. (2005). Race after Hitler: Black occupation
violence that occurred elsewhere, as well as the town’s desire children in postwar Germany and America. Princeton, NJ:
to be welcoming to foreigners as the reason for the festival. Princeton University Press.
Gerlind, M. (2012). May Ayim’s legacy in world language study.
Retrieved from http://www.gerlindinstitute.org/resources/
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oclc.org/stable/40464382 Yuval-Davis, N., Kannabirān, K., & Vieten, U. (2008). The situ-
Plumly, V. D. (2015). BLACK-red-gold in “der bunten Republik”: ated politics of belonging. London, England: SAGE.
Constructions and performances of Heimat/en in Post-
Wende Afro-/Black German cultural productions. Retrieved Author Biography
from http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-pro- Tanja Burkhard is a qualitative researcher and postdoctoral asso-
quest-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1738093340?accoun ciate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work explores the racial-
tid=14709 ized, gendered, and linguistic experiences of Black transnational
Rowell, C. H., & Lorde, A. (2000). Above the wind: An interview women at the intersections of racialization, gender, and (im)
with Audre Lorde. Callaloo, 23, 52-63. migration.