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theses

This discourse analysis focuses on two historical adoption documentaries that were released in Germany and the United States in 2011. Regina Griffin's Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story and Michaela Kirst's Brown Babies: Germany's Lost Children each portray life narratives and dramatize reunions of select members of a finite, generational cohort of dual-heritage, Black German transnational adoptees born to local German women and mostly African American GIs in the aftermath of World War II. The documentaries’ debuts coincide with the emergence of Black German adoption as a topic of interest in multiple academic realms. The films also arrive at a time when many adoptees are either searching for their mothers or are actively in reunion with their first families in the US and in Germany making them opportune objects of study for an inquiry into Black German adoption.

Adoption scholar Sylvia Posocco refers to the social apparatus that transfers children from their original families as the “technology of kinning” and suggests that kinning “refers not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, as well as to deeply politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections and enfleshment” (569).

For Black German adoptees, enfleshment is taking place in the re-emerging—in the storytelling— in the interpreting of their life narratives and reunion experiences. Drawing on Posocco’s ideas, this analysis considers the implications of enfleshment on Black German reunification, and the potential impacts on the adoptees’ renegotiations of self and identity, and the social relations that rekinning engenders.

For over two decades, propelled by rapidly advancing internet technologies and broadband communications, Black German adoptees have also been nurturing relationships with those who share their adoption experience and—individually and collectively—with other Black Germans having diverse cultural and family backgrounds and representing multiple generations. At such a time in history, and as Black Germans adoptees are renegotiating their complicated multicultural and transnational identities privately and publicly, this study argues that visual and filmic representation matter.

ETD_10965

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-478g-dn17

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.