“Patton’s innovative use of autoethnography highlights how
race and racism in the German and American contexts are intertwined
in historically complex ways, detailing both the establishment of
legal structures to uphold racism and how racism was experienced at
the individual level.” —Nana Osei-Kofi, author of AfroSwedish
Places of Belonging
“A Nation’s
Undesirables makes an invaluable intervention into contemporary
discussions of systemic racism and the roles of memory, postmemory,
and erasure in the construction of identity. Surrounding a poignant
personal narrative is an often-neglected historical account of German
anti-Black racism and the ways it operated around the Second World
War.” —Kendall Phillips, editor of Framing Public Memory
In
a moving blend of family history and cutting-edge scholarship, Tracey
Owens Patton’s A
Nation’s Undesirables
synthesizes work in rhetorical postmemory studies, critical adoption
studies, Afrofuturism, and more to tell the story of her mother and
aunt, Lore and Lilli. Two of thousands of children born to white
German women and Black American men after World War II, the twins
moved to the United States at age seven, where their mother renounced
her parental rights and put them into the adoption system. They did
not see her again for fifty-two years.
Patton
takes up the twins’ story and their reckoning with their
mixed-race, Black German identity to disrupt standard narratives
around World War II, Black experience in Germany, and race and
adoption. Combining family interviews, historical artifacts, and
autoethnographic reflection, Patton composes a new narrative of women
and Black German children in the postwar era. In examining the
systemic racism of Germany’s efforts to move children like Lore and
Lilli out of the country—and the suppression of German women’s
bodily autonomy—Patton amplifies the once unacknowledged identities
of these Black German children to broaden our understanding of
citizenship, racism, and sexism after World War II.
