KINGSTON, R.I. – Jan. 20, 2026 – K. Bailey Thomas, the Eleanor M. Carlson Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, spent most of this past December in Germany pursuing research projects examining African-American responses to German colonialism and imperialism.
Thomas was at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin from Dec. 10-26 looking through and reviewing documents within the Audre Lorde archives when the prominent Black feminist American poet taught courses in Germany from 1984 through 1992 for a project called “The Language of Survival: Recovering Audre Lorde’s Berlin Dialogues.” Thomas says Lorde–a scholar who regularly discussed racism, misogyny and racism in the United States when she was most active–while in Berlin gave public lectures, and mentored a generation of Afro-German women who would subsequently establish a movement for racial and gender justice in Germany.
“Lorde going to Berlin was a galvanizing force in getting her work introduced to a European audience,” Thomas said. “She has had a resurgence over the last few years with the public becoming reinvested in her work and politics.”
While Lorde’s published writings have been widely studied, most of her teachings in Berlin are only available via audio recordings housed at Freie Universität Berlin, Thomas says. Thomas was given access to those expansive recordings for their research and hired two graduate assistants to transcribe much of that audio during the winter break.
Those transcriptions will be included in a new scholarly book, as well in a related peer-review article on the ethics of transcribing and translating feminist archival work, that Thomas will produce for this project. They hope the new book will immensely impact both German academia and those seeking to better understand Afro-German culture.
“In preserving these transcripts, it is important to accurately note and understand what those thinkers are saying,” Thomas said. “For Afro-German content, it’s not that texts or teachings don’t exist. It’s because of systematic exclusion and you have to know someone who knows someone that this exists.”
Thomas also hopes this new upcoming book will be useful to expose other Europeans to Lorde’s work. Lorde’s history, Thomas says, is just as much part of European culture as it is within the United States.
Reckoning with Germany’s colonial past
In another project, Thomas will return to Germany three separate times between April and December researching how Black scholars have historically confronted and reimagined European colonial and racial narratives in countries, including Germany, that selectively forget their past.
The project, titled “Between Empire and Exile: African American Thought and the German Colonial Imagination,” is funded in part by a one-year €11,500 ($13,385) Foundation for German-American Academic Relations grant, offers a diasporic take on German memory politics by exploring contested geographies of race, empire and freedom.
Helen Gibson, research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, is partnering with Thomas on the initiatives to explore Black culture within Germany, and demonstrate how connections between racism and colonialism were publicly noted by African Americans who visited the European nation.
Thomas says that the Germany academy welcomes perspective from U.S. practitioners (or faculty) trained in Black studies. The United States is one of the few countries in the world to offer such programs, along with the United Kingdom, so there is a high demand for Black studies scholars, as there are no such programs in Germany. The brain drain on this subject is quite real, they said.
“Afro-Germans in particular have a really hard history of being ignored by German intellectuals,” Thomas said. “Germany also has a specific forgetting of colonial history when it comes to African nations. A lot of people don’t know about continental Africa and the history of colonialism. The colonial amnesia is about the broad forgetting of specific pasts.”
Further complicating matters, Thomas also said several attempts to establish Black studies programs in Germany have failed for a myriad of reasons, including the hiring of all-White faculty to teach the programs.
According to Thomas, Germany’s colonial history shared by scholars in the country primarily focuses on historical periods through World War II. They say Germany’s colonial history also includes the country’s soldiers abusing and discriminating against people residing in African colonies such as Namibia after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85—where European nations claimed African land—has not been discussed much in academic settings in the country.
“Germany is only now starting to reckon with the past and present history it has with African nations,” said Thomas, who is hopeful her work will bring Germany’s past to the forefront, increase understanding, and prevent such treatment from occurring again. “Now, Germans bring in Black Americans like myself to talk about race, and would say ‘why would the U.S. act racist toward others?’ We respond by saying, ‘you did the same thing.’”
Thomas in April will return to Germany to hold virtual reading group sessions discussing works by African American scholars, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Jennifer Morgan and Christina Sharpe, to develop their research trajectories. Then in June, Thomas will host in Germany a workshop including presentations from early-career scholars, dialogue with Afro-German intellectuals and public historians and a collaborative writing session that will help prepare a joint publication for Thomas and Gibson’s project. Lastly, Thomas will co-host a three-day conference with Gibson at Freie Universität Berlin in December to dive further into German colonial history involving Afro-Germans.
The project may also include opportunities for Thomas’ URI students to travel to Berlin to learn about the country’s colonial history and feminist movements.