Abstract
Race remains problematic in the twenty-first century for the reconstruction of historical German Holocaust memory through fictional cinema productions. A case study of black British director Amma Asante’s 2018 British romantic war drama film, Where Hands Touch, suggests the difficulty in adapting national race and race representation discourses for global Afro-diaspora audiences outside the German national and supranational European cinema context. The film caused controversy among transnational black audiences and American pop culture outlets. Even black British viewers flat-out rejected it on Twitter. They alleged that Asante deployed clichéd depictions of neo-romanticised interracial romance and naïve reformulations of historical racism, which were interpreted as an example of self-reproducing Blaxploitation. All this points to under-researched structures of transnational minority representations operating within contemporary Afro-European pop culture cinema. I foreground these relations as interstitial culture space, thus linking transnational German cinema’s racially loaded themes like the Holocaust and hybridity to a larger cinema of diasporic storytelling and questions about transnational film scholarship in the twenty-first century.
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Nickl, B. (2021). Romancing the Reich and What Film Twitter Had to Say About It. In: Herrschner, I., Stevens, K., Nickl, B. (eds) Transnational German Cinema. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72917-2_6
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