
A Nation's Undesirables
Mixed-Race Children and Whiteness in the Post-Nazi Era
Tracey Owens Patton(Author)
Ohio State University Press
Published on 15. April 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
268 pages
978-0-8142-5907-8 (ISBN)
Description
An innovative investigation of the entangled histories of race, transnational adoption, and post-Nazi Germany.
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Columbus, OH
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
396 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8142-5907-8 (9780814259078)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Tracey Owens Patton is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and is coauthor of Gender, Whiteness, and Power in Rodeo: Breaking Away from the Ties of Sexism and Racism.