
This article engages the question of how Black women in diaspora have come to challenge and redefine what it means to be Black within their particular national communities. The essay contends that in the German context, being Black and German contests a system of binary oppositions ingrained in German cultural and national self-definitions. Through a critical reading of the work of Black German poet and essayist Sheila Mysorekar, Faymonville argues that Black German women's strategic use of blackness as a political tool resists attempts to reify racial and cultural categories of identification, while at the same time leaving open the possibility for the redefinition and recreation of Black German identity in a transnational context.