#kakfa

I just wish Genius could give them a sequel.

Tyler - A Kiss from Death

Could you talk a bit about how Kafka's perspective of blackness was formed and shaped?

The most common understanding would have come through music and popular culture. One automatically thinks of jazz, but the turn-of-the-century moment is too early for that. There may have been some reckoning of blackness via ragtime in the arts, and via aesthetic primitivism. And already, by the mid-19th century, there is exposure in Bohemia to spirituals and work songs and touring groups of African-Americans moving through Europe. That's part of the entire equation.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was also a huge, huge novel in German-speaking lands. You can never underestimate the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was translated the year it was published, 1852. There was no lag time at all, and it's never been out of print in Germany since then. Also popular were Völkerschauen, which were shows in which Africans, and sometimes African-Americans, were displayed, as in human zoos.

Kafka knew all of this, but he was also intimately familiar with cabarets and night clubs. He would also think in terms of the anti-Semitism of his day. And some of what may seem outlandish to us today, but nevertheless was for Kafka very real, were connections made between Jews and Africans, Jews as Africans, Africans as Jews, and so on, by way of a common origin theory which assumed some type of essential connection between blacks and Jews that went back to Africa.

As you write, musicians as early as Antonín Dvořák were being exposed to African-American music and bringing it back to Bohemia.

No Czech or German-speaking Czech or Czech-speaking German in Prague would have been unfamiliar with Dvořák at the turn of the century. The symphony From the New World is a product of that inspiration and that time in which Dvořák consciously scoured the United States for folk music, Native American music, and African-American music. He incorporated some allusions to African-American music within the symphony itself, which one magazine at the time, the Pall Mall Budget out of London, called Dvořák's "Negro Symphony" in 1894.

So there was already a precedent being set for Czech culture and Czech nationalism, that type of concentration on folk productions that goes into nationalism, as well as looking to the United States and seeing minority groups and minority struggles and finding, or imagining, common cause with them. I wouldn't push that too far. I would just simply say that there is already a tradition of it in place.

Once you had an idea of what you were looking for, how did your research of Kafka proceed?

The use of that word, "Negro," specifically in English, and the subtle identification "I am Negro"—that to me was a bombshell. I know it wasn't one for traditional Kafka studies, but to me, when I read it, my immediate thought was that no one drops that and isn't somehow invested in appropriating that identity for some important, sustained purpose. So I started reading and I quickly realized that this was a constituent factor of Kafka's aesthetic. In fact, this became a lasting developmental aspect of his career, in which it kept transforming and evolving into something else. It reflected his overall aesthetic achievement at any given time.

I tried to put it into context because I think it is erroneous to think that Kafka couldn't be concerned about these things because he's the writer of existential angst. He's a modernist, and modernism is thoroughly shot through with primitivism. Kafka spent some time in Paris, not as an expatriate, but he visited, he participated in the culture in a European climate that was very much invested in looking at African art and, after World War I, African-American expressive culture.

Your thesis is that, for Kafka, blackness is associated with this state of becoming an artist, a transformative process.