by Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for degree of in in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO Approved: ______________________________________________________________________________ Chair ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ Committee Members ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “I’m as forgetful as I am indebted”: any omissions are not a reflection of my ingratitude, but of my exhaustion and bad memory. In light of a (globally!) disruptive and frustrating final year, I am unspeakably grateful to my committee. Thank you Ian Whitmarsh for seeing and nurturing the potential in the ideas that I shared with you in my very first year, for always reminding me to think beyond disciplinary and imagined constraints. Thank you to Howard Pinderhughes for stepping in as my chair in the 10th hour: for always meeting me with a sense of humor, a protectiveness, and a firm support. And thank you to Tiffany Florvil, who joined the committee in the 11th hour and never missed a single step. Even before she generously came onboard in this last stage of writing, she has been an incredible support in bringing me into the fold of German Studies. Thank you to Dirk Moses, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Leigh Raiford, Adia Benton, Michael Rothberg, and Kim TallBear whose scholarship and advice has been invaluable in the creation of this trans-disciplinary project. Thank you Rochelle Burgess for being as much a mentor from the very beginning of my graduate school days and scholar par excellence as you are a friend. Thank you SA Smythe and Bedour Alagraa for being two of the very best mentor-friends I could possibly ask for. Thank you to Ben Ratskoff, a constant thought partner who shares my disdain for analogy. Thank you always to my beloved Kelly-Jo Bluen, another thought partner and dear friend, who has taught me as much about juridical ethics and criminal courts as she has about iii comradeship and care. Thank you Howie Taylor for sharing the struggle of this work; and thank you to Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja for teaching me to dive headfirst into the archive and struggle with irreverence. Thank you Léopold Lambert for your friendship, and for inviting me to publish in The Funambulist and clarify formative ideas. Thank you Jacklyn Lacey for teaching me how best to confront the ethics of the museum. Thank you to Harutyun Marutyan, director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, for your warmth and hospitality, for your work, and for an incredibly formative conversation when I visited Yerevan back in 2018. Thank you to everyone who spent time reading and writing and thinking together and offering feedback on drafts in all their forms of readiness — Christian Hosam, Miriam Novak, Anamika Misra, Jessica Harrison, and Jimmy Johnson. Thank you to Adeola Oni-Orisan, Mel Jeske, Rashon Lane, and Florencia Rojo for the invaluable upperclassman advice and support. Thank you to my friends who held me together whenever I threatened to burst at the seams; thank you Brian, Ellie, Aman, and Masi. Ndokutenda zvikuru to my dearest Panashe for always pushing the bounds of my thoughts and reminding to recognize the hunhu in everything and everyone, including and especially myself. My deepest solidarity, of course, is with the Ovaherero and Nama and San people whose ceaseless fights for and knowledges about land, reparations, and self-determination are at the heart of this dissertation. iv From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank my parents with whom I unexpectedly spent the year I was meant to spend in Windhoek. Thank you for raising me to be curious, for instilling in me an orientation towards justice, imperfect as it may be. Thank you, mama, for your hours and hours of stories about family; thank you, dad, for listening to me frustratedly ramble about the dissertation process with the patient wisdom of someone who’s endured the same. Thank you to my sekuru, my honey, for teaching me about home (and so, about myself), for your honest demonstrations of the enduring and sometimes contradictory heart of revolutionary struggle. Thank you to my ancestors, without whom life and death and all of the intermediate stages and attendant responsibilities therein could never make sense. v “If science is a ‘commitment to truth’ shall we [c]ite all the historical non-truths perpetuated by scientists? Of course not. It’s not a [S]cience vs. Philosophy … It’s Science + Philosophy. Elevate your Thinking and Consciousness. When you measure, include the measurer.” — MC Hammer “To study history is also, of course, to study death. While death is often considered a tragedy instead of an inevitability, when I am in the midst of feeling my most human, when I am remembering and wondering and imagining, I sometimes think that the most tragic death is the death that is elided over as history is canonized. That elided death doesn’t participate in the process of metaphysical care that creates culture. It is not remembered, studied, imagined. That death is stripped of its humanity, which seems to be, if not a fate worse than death, perhaps a death worse than death. And perhaps, in turn, allowing that elided death to remain unimagined makes us a bit less human.” — We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa , from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury vi “Capturing German South West Africa: Racial Production, Land Claims, and Belonging in the Afterlife of the Herero and Nama Genocide” Abstract Zoe Samudzi Because its geographic reach was not as vast as Britain, France, or Spain's, Imperial Germany is often rendered to the marginalia of colonial historiography. Yet Germany’s colonial endeavors, specifically its genocidal war against the Ovaherero and Nama (1904-1908) in German South West Africa is critically important as an expression of Lebensraum, a geopolitical understanding of ethnic identity and racialized space appropriated from biologist Oscar Peschel’s response to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection. In complementing Ovaherero and Nama efforts for reparations, this dissertation embraces an altercentric historiography — a genealogical materialism guided by ubuntu philosophy — and approach to biological science that narrativizes Germany’s first genocide as a material expression of the colonial biomedical logics that animated the the colonial project and endure in the present. I am using three case studies that tether contemporary scientific and archival practice to colonial- era biomedical harms. First, the collection and ongoing incarceration of Ovaherero and Nama skulls and other skeletal remains in German and American and other archival collections is a feature of a broader regime of race-making and property rights. The the continued capture of these remains has been described by Ovaherero and Nama community members as a continuation of genocide through the linking of expropriative colonial actions to the “post”- colonial present. Secondly, an analysis of Eugen Fischer’s transnational “bastard studies” allows vii for an examination of the genocide continuity thesis. It connects the imperial German study of mixedness in southern Africa to eugenic study in Weimar and then Nazi Germany via the desire to manage perceived impurities to whiteness resulting from race-mixing. This illustration of continuity reveals how desires for racial management in each location yielded both consistent and differential racial structures and fates for the mixed-race communities in question. Finally, the deep interest in the sequencing and tracing of San genomes is inextricably linked to anthropological constructions of “hunter-gatherers” as ancient and primitive, and the Eurocentric compulsion to enclose and define and hierarchize human life with the creation of a “human” that always precludes African indigeneity. The always already racialized genomics projects and nation-state assertions of genomic sovereignty are occurring simultaneously to San communities being dispossessed of their land and turned into an underclass in the nation-states into which they are being forcibly assimilated. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 THE HERERO & NAMA GENOCIDE 3 RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES AND THE “HUMAN” 7 CHAPTER OUTLINE 24 REFERENCES 36 CHAPTER 1 — REWRITING THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 46 GENOCIDAL LAND CLAIMS 47 CONCENTRATION CAMP FORMATION AND GERMAN EUGENIC SCIENCE 52 PROVENANCE AND CONTEMPORARY SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE 58 PRO AND CONTRA THE EPISTEME 72 REFERENCES 83 CHAPTER 2 — THE BLACK[ENED] BASTARD 92 MISCEGENATION AND THE CONTINUITY THESIS 93 THE REHOBOTH BASTERS 99 BASTARD STUDIES IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD 107 ix THE RHINELANDER BASTARDS 114 ANTISEMITISM VIS-À-VIS ANTI-BLACKNESS 120 THE SPECTER OF THE BASTARD 125 REFERENCES 128 CHAPTER 3 — [RE]LOCATING THE SAN 137 MANAGING DEMOGRAPHICS 137 SAN ANCESTRY AND THE EUGENIC BODY POLITIC 143 GENETIC SCIENCE, GENOMIC SOVEREIGNTY 162 THE SAN SPEAK 169 REFERENCES 179 EPILOGUE 190 REFERENCES 204 x LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 2.1: ARCHIVAL IMAGES OF REHOBOTH BASTERS 103 FIGURE 2.2: YOUNG FEMALE STUDENTS AT THE BERLIN SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND 119 FIGURE 3.1: COMPARISON OF 23ANDME RESULTS AT 50% AND 90% CONFIDENCE 155 INTERVALS