Stefanie Affeldt

• Dr. rer. pol.
• Researcher at Independent Researcher

The "white Australia policy" has so far largely been discussed with regard only to its political-ideological perspective. No account was taken of the central problem of racist societalization, i.e. the everyday production and reproduction of "race" as a social relation ("doing race") supported by broad sections of the population. This comprehensive...

This historical chapter investigates two examples of racist political consumerism in early-twentieth-century Australia. It found expression in a locally particular form known as the White Sugar campaign, which declared consumption of cane sugar a moral duty for everyone in support of White Australia. Meanwhile, the Buy Australian-Made campaign call...

This study examines the character of racism as a social relation. As such, racism is continuously produced and modified, not only culturally and ideologically but also in social interaction. Understanding racism and its repercussions demands close investigation of all the processes involved. An instructive example is an incident that unfolded in th...

Born near Frankfurt in September 1808, the painter and naturalist Ludwig Becker is suspected to have been one of the 1848 democrats in Mainz. He also may have had this mindset when he arrived in Tasmania in March 1851. Springing from this suspicion of revolutionary background is the thesis of Becker’s compassion for the indigenous people of Austral...

In the early twentieth century, Broome attracted nationwide attention when the local Japanese Club exacted the employment of a medical doctor of their own cultural background. This incident was part of a broader discord in the relationship between the remote north-western town and the ultimate principle of a racially homogeneous society. The migrat...

Amalie Dietrich in the context of German colonialism, scientific racism, and feminist narration

A short article on Amalie Dietrich and her relation to colonialism and desecration of human remains published in ›junge Welt‹, 26 May 2021, pp. 12 f.

Hamburg als Kolonialmetropole: Spurensuche und Forschungsbilanz. Als wichtigster Hafen Deutschlands war Hamburg auch zentrale Kolonialmetropole. Das »Tor zur Welt« war über Jahrhunderte ein Tor zur kolonialen Welt. Man hatte Handelsbeziehungen zu Kolonialmächten und Kolonien, man handelte mit Kolonialwaren und auch mit Menschen. Diese Geschichte ha...

In the context of her bicentenary in 2021, Amalie Dietrich will again be celebrated as a feminist paragon or condemned as a racist culprit. Her stay in Australia will be central to these contrasting approaches to her biography. There, she gathered a remarkable amount of native plants, animals, ethnological everyday objects – and human remains. In t...

In the context of her bicentenary in 2021, Amalie Dietrich will again be celebrated as a feminist paragon or condemned as a racist culprit. Her stay in Australia will be central to these contrasting approaches to her biography. There, she gathered a remarkable amount of native plants, animals, ethnological everyday objects-and human remains. In thi...

The conceptual history of ‘racism’ is hitherto underdeveloped. One of its assertions is that the term ‘racism’ originated from a German-centric critique of völkisch and fascist ide-ology. A closer look at the early international usage of the categories ‘racialism’ and ‘racism’ shows that the circumstances were much more complex. Australia lends its...

With the Federation of Australia, aspiration for racial homogeneity was firmly established as being fundamental to national identity. Therefore, increasing criticism was directed against Asian employment in the pearl-shelling industry of Broome. It was not least against the backdrop of population politics, that several efforts were implemented to d...

This article investigates the history of the Queensland cane sugar industry and its cultural and political relations. It explores the way the sugar industry was transformed from an enterprise drawing on the traditional plantation crop cultivated by an unfree labour force and employing workers into an industry that was an important, symbolical eleme...

My doctoral thesis investigates as a central topic the racist societalization from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in Australia (Affeldt 2014). It looks, in particular, at the processes of everyday ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ of “race” as a social relation. This regards not only the so-called White Australia policy but also a comprehens...

Since its first screening in 1933, ›King Kong‹ has been interpreted from a multitude of perspectives. Based on the original movie, this analysis is focussed on the superimposition and conjunction of racism and sexism in the narration and integrates its socio-historical contextualization into the investigation. This makes obvious that the film is fa...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Australians were possessed by two obsessions – the fear of the 'yellow peril' and the desire for a white society. The fear of the 'yellow peril' found expression in science and politics as well as in innumerable invasion novels which depicted the swamping of the European outpost in the Pacific by Asiatic h...

During the first one hundred and fifty years of European settlement in Australia, whiteness as a social construction underlay continuous definition and redefinition with regard to its boundaries of belonging. Initially, the convicts usually dwelled at the social fringes of the early settler society and only experienced symbolical admittance to ›whi...