Dualla Misipo: “Der Junge aus Duala”. Literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf ein frühes Werk der Schwarzen deutschen Literatur

Dualla Misipo’s Der Junge aus Duala. Ein Regierungsschüler erzählt ... [The Boy from Duala. A Government School Student Tells his Story …] is considered the “first novel by a Black German” and one of the earliest postcolonial literary texts in the German language. The novel, written between the 1920s and 1960s, has occasionally been praised for its analysis of European racism and the psyche of the colonized subject and has received attention for its sophisticated aesthetic strategies. However, the book by the Cameroonian German French author has mostly gone unnoticed within German-language literature and literary studies. Therefore, a more intensive engagement with the text is long overdue—especially when it comes to meeting the demand for literary scholars to render visible the long-standing diverse and polyphonic Black literary tradition in Germany (Otoo/Oholi 2022).

The workshop aims to create a space to collaboratively contextualize Misipo’s Der Junge aus Duala and discuss it from a literary studies perspective. In addition to topics such as the German colonial rule in Cameroon, (post-)colonialism and migration as well as prejudices and forms of racism in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, it is above all the author’s literary strategies that await closer examination. The workshop will thus focus on his play with different genres and stylistic registers, the complex, seemingly modernist treatment of temporality and the nuanced portrayal of subjectivity, the intertextual references to both Cameroonian and Afro-diasporic as well as European literary traditions, and the provocative reversal of colonial dichotomies such as center/periphery or nature/culture.

Fig. above: Klassenfoto Quarta 1914, Herborn, © Geschichtsverein Herborn e.V./Museum Herborn.