Refracting the Gaze: A Conversation with Ines Johnson-Spain on Becoming Black (2019)

Abstract:Filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain discusses her personal journey to connect with her African paternal heritage, knowledge of which had been suppressed by her (white) parents throughout her childhood in East Germany. The resulting feature-length documentary sheds light on the GDR’s complex international entanglements as these derived from the recruitment of international students from socialist countries, including those in the Global South. Conversations with family and friends from the GDR and with her paternal relatives in Togo and Benin reveal how the traversal of national borders has, at different stages of German history, reconfigured the social web of attachments. As both the film’s director and its protagonist, Johnson-Spain performatively confronts previously unreworked racisms of the national past that have shaped the terms of her affiliations even into the present. She thereby contributes to the archivalization of Black German history—performing a psychical labor as impactful on a personal level as it is on the scale of national history and that of the Black diaspora.