Telling about yourself instead of being talked about
The significance of Black Austrian history

“It is not that we were not always here ever since there has been a here. It is just that the letters of our names have been muddled up and thrown together where they have not been completely erased; our fingerprints on the levers of history have been called the fleeting touch of birds.”

 
Exclusion, expulsion and repression. These are the methods with a tradition in relation to the provable presence and history of Black people in Austria for far longer than just Mozart’s time. Our freedom of movement is still restricted; our sphere of action and our survival are permanently at stake. Dehumanising violence is present in many Austrian public spaces: “N_* out!” on the walls of houses, brutal attacks, distorted, racist images in the media. These acts are silently “blessed” by the authorities who are, at times, themselves directly responsible. The message is clear: Go away! There is no room for you here!

This pattern of exclusion is part of a tradition of “non-remembrance” (Nicola Lauré al Samarai). Historical traces of Black women, men and children that reach back in history, here in this country, are blurred and eradicated. What remains is a miserable remnant of exoticising, foreign depictions of black people reduced to curious (research) objects. The historic (and contemporary) rootedness of the African diaspora in Austria is almost unknown and many of the members of the Black community here were not aware of it either. Through the establishment of a Black research group as a constituent part of the project Hidden Hi/stories—remapping Mozart, we are in the process of salvaging suppressed knowledge about Black Austrian history, creating new space for it and, as a consequence, relocating ourselves as Black people in this country. A Black perspective in a counter-narrative of history in which we try to reconstruct these hidden hi/stories is crucial—a visionary writing of history divorced from voyeuristic depictions of the “exotic Other” and liberated from commonplace racisms and sexisms. This project seeks to understand our predecessors in the African diaspora in Austria, not as objects but as the active subjects of their/our own histories—as people with their own life realities, special survival strategies and their own, as Nicola Lauré al Samarai put it, Eigen-Sinn (self-assertion). And even though the Black history of this country will remain fragmentary, we Black researchers neither shy away from asking questions about aspects that cannot be reconstructed nor from sketching potential counter-histories.

Talking back from the margins (bell hooks) is an emancipatory approach to writing Black history that has a radical political dimension at its disposal. Simply the fact that we, as marginalised Black people, occupy a space together, that we allow ourselves neither to be driven out nor broken but create an independent space (mentally and physically), implies resistance. Our Dasein (existence) and our self-determined emancipatory activity is a rebellion against an omnipresent white dominance, and not least against the white historical establishment in Austria. Without permission from anyone, we are making ourselves the authors of and experts in our own history, narrating it ourselves instead of having someone else tell it for us, winning back space—both in the public sphere and in the media and making it recognisable for what it (also) is: the site of Black Austrian history and the present. We are here to stay.

Against this background the establishment of an independent research group on Black Austrian history within the exhibition project Hidden Hi/stories—remapping Mozart represents something like a structural realisation and basis for writing Black counter-histories in the present. At a time when Black and Austrian still represents a contradiction in terms, the existence of Black Austrian histories in Mozart’s time—Vienna of the 18^th century—is regarded, generally speaking, as impossible. Here, the goal of the research group is to break open the invisible and to undertake new ways of writing history—therefore, inseparable from the processes of self-definition and related to self-determination. By making visible and audible Black Austrian experience and presence, we present a way of writing history that no longer treats Black people as exotic objects and exceptional phenomena but relocates them both as subjects and as a part of Austrian history.

In doing so, historical processes, with far wider implications than local Austrian history, provide a perspective on the present, make connections and develop a vision of the future. For example, it is precisely the 18^th century that sees a change with regard to the definition of the foreignness of Black people throughout the entire German-speaking context. Idiomatic expressions with the M_* word—” …the M_* has done his duty and may go…” (Schiller)—in the world of sweets, pastries, fairytales and prominent Austrian and German company emblems, has stubbornly persisted to the present; and this was increasingly replaced by the N_* word which was inscribed in history in association with the bloody history of slavery and the construction of a racialised inferiority. Alongside the examination of the Austrian tradition of gender-specific representation of black people using Monostatos, the black figure in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, as a starting point, emancipatory perspectives will be created looking at the little-known histories of the African diaspora during Mozart’s lifetime. In the process the research group unified artistic and scientific positions and placed very different experiential and knowledge contexts in relationship to one another. The diverse knowledge about Black Austrian history that, among other things, was also applied in the artistic works, runs through the whole project as a central theme.

The two extrinsically ascribed terms, [Mohr] and [Neger]— inscribed in a largely downplayed history of colonialism and slavery and an Austrian tradition of stereotypical representation—are designated in an emancipatory orthography as M. and N. words.