Black Life / Schwarz-Sein

Thinking blackness alongside the example of Black Switzerland reveals the way in which black requires a continual exceeding of already given (and policed) categories, terms, discourses, and ways of making relations. Black life and its corollary in the Germanophone world, Schwarz-Sein, propose a refiguring of what “us” may mean and be. The chapter explores the kind of shift in identity, ontology, and appearances, or categories of existence, that these terms and the practices that accompany them propose.