Walls Turned Sideways are Bridges

Abstract

In 1966, Black activist Angela Davis crossed the wall’s boundary into East Berlin as a philosophy graduate student. Davis spent most of her time in East Berlin and later channelled her experiences on both sides of the border toward becoming a leading voice contesting walls in the U.S. prison system. To explore Davis’s own evolution as a writer and activist concerned with dividing walls, this chapter reviews the representations of East and West Berlin in the mid-1960s and beyond. The chapter then looks at how Davis developed and delivered the Wall as a symbol, throughout the course of her writing in multiple projects and culminating in her autobiography. Finally, the chapter looks to both the production and circulation of her autobiography as opportunities to place this reference into a broader framework of Davis’s transitional activism and solidarity through circuits of alternative diplomacy. In her writing, Davis transforms the Berlin Wall into a symbol of Western repression or ignores it entirely. In doing so, she inverts the expected tale of intrigue, danger, and despair in East Berlin toward her own political projects contesting American division.