My Volk to Come: Specters of Peoplehood in Diaspora Discourse and Afro-German Popular Music

“My Volk” makes an intervention into the then-central debate in critical Black studies about diaspora and its significance for Black populations in Europe, fusing it with a consideration of how religious discourses were being marshaled by Black German R&B musicians in the early part of this century. In this way, the musical part of this piece offers a continuation of my discussion in the last chapter of Phonographies of how the German group Advanced Chemistry deployed hip-hop to present themselves as both Black and German. Highlighting the complexities of envisaging community, the theoretical and the musical halves of Track 4.0 bring attention to the complexities of being Black and German, both in relation to other Black diasporic populations and within the context of the shifting administrative and ideological borders of the German nation-state.