The campaign to free Angela Davis was international. There were cards and letters from as far as Australia to Zambia. However, the East Germans had a very different stake in Davis' freedom - a case of "Angelamania" according to Time Magazine. She was a celebrity in a state that supposedly had none, and Davis received thousands of letters from both East and West Germany while in jail.
Dr. Watkins’s talk analyzes the reason behind the state and local support for Davis, and the East German consumption of African American culture. This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies.
Dr. Jamele Watkins is Post-doctoral Fellow in German Studies, where she researches and teaches on issues of race and gender, in particular the intersection of race and gender in 20th and 21st Century German society. She completed her doctoral studies in German at UMass Amherst with a dissertation titled, “The Drama of Race.” She has also studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg.
