Dr. Nadja Klopprogge

What is the relationship between race, gender and the history of capitalism? The role of motherhood in racial capitalism and the scientification of the “Ghetto economy” serve as two intersecting lenses in this project that provide new perspectives on the socio-economic shifts in the history of capitalism since the late 1960s. In terms of scale, these perspectives allow us to situate the “Ghetto Economy” of US- metropoles within the broader analytical frame of the ‘global South’.

This book project (Habilitation) retraces the history of the meaning, making, and presentation of ‘Africana’ across the Atlantic from the late 19th to the early 21st century.  I am going to build my analysis along the history of the Encyclopedia Africana. Looking behind the scenes of the making of a compendium of knowledge, I follow the changing settings and objectives of the encyclopedic project tracing such topic as the digitalization and decolonization of knowledge. This is the history of an object of intellectual inquiry that emerges from lived academic, philanthropic and state-making practices as well as from socio-political and economic concerns.

This project deals with the Intimate Histories of African Americans and Germany between 1933 and 1990. Its point of departure are interpersonal constellations that crossed not only the Atlantic but the color line, and at times the fault lines of the Cold War. Tracing such topics as anti-miscegenation laws, forced sterilization, casual sexual cross-racial encounters, marriage, as well as friendship this study opens our perspective for the intimate in African American – German relations in the century of extremes.

• Intimate Histories: African Americans and Germany since 1933, Berghahn, 2024; https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KlopproggeIntimate.

• Intimate Constellations: Photos of African American-German Intimacies in the Long Postwar Period”, Rethinking History, Special Issue: Intimacies on the Move, (forthcoming).

• ‘To Live a Peaceful Life’: African American Defectors in the German Democratic Republic, German History, Volume 42, Issue 1, March 2024, 101–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad069.

• “’The South Had to Reap what She Sowed’ – Scottsboro and the Critique of Motherhood,” Amerikastudien /American Studies, Special Issue: “The Continuity of Change? New Perspectives on U.S. Reform Movements,” (December 2021).

• “The Sexualized Landscape of Post-War Germany and the Politics of Cross-Racial Intimacy in the US Zone,” in: Camilo Erlichman and Christopher Knowles (eds.), Transforming Occupation in the Western Zones of Germany: Politics, Everyday Life and Social Interactions, 1945-1955, (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Tübingen

summer semester 2024

• lecture: Bewegte Geschichte – Die USA im 20. Jahrhundert
• exercise: Umstürzende Denkmäler – Geschichte, Protest und Erinnerungspolitik in den USA
• senior seminar: Examenskolloquium Nordamerikanische Geschichte

winter semester 2023/24

• main seminar: Black Marxism und Black Capitalism im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in den USA"
• proseminar: "Jim Crow: Eine Geschichte der Segregation in den USA, 1865-1967"

Gießen

• 10/2022 – 03/2023    Proseminar: Black History Month: Discovering Black History in Gießen

• 04/2022 – 09/2022    Proseminar: “Belonging” – A History of Slavery since the 17th Century

• 04/2022 – 09/2022     “Once upon a time…” or what is historicizing?

• 10/2021 – 03/2022    Seminar: “Mama’s Baby – Papa’s Maybe” History and Theory of Motherhood in Modernity

• 10/2021 – 03/2022    Proseminar: Speaking about the Unspeakable – Sex und Race since the 19th  Century

• 04/2020 – 10/2020    Seminar: A Question of Scale? The American Civil War and the New South in local, national, and global Perspective

• 04/2020 – 10/2020    Seminar: Black in the GDR – Migration, Difference, and Racism in East Germany

Basel

• 09/2019 – 01/2020    Proseminar: Roots – Kinship and the Question of (Un-)Freedom in the US

• 02/2019 – 07/2019    Proseminar: From the Color Line to the Black Atlantic – Conceptions of Space, Time, and Race since the 19th Century

Berlin

• 10/2018 – 04/2019    Seminar: Of Mammoths and the Nation – The Beginnings of American Paleontology and Archaeology

• 04/2018 – 07/2018    Seminar: Reconstructing Reconstruction – The Many Histories of an Era

• 10/2016 – 04/2017    Seminar: Sexuality, Emotions, and the Body in 20th Century U.S. History