‹Where are you from?›, the dreaded question that isn’t one consists of «layers of attenuated meanings» that express the assumption: ‹Not from here.› It is an interpellation that repeatedly throws us back to a subjectivation as non-white. And it is an expression of the policing of our bodies at the external and internal borders of Europe. For some, the outcome of this question (social or real) ends lethally, for others, it robs them of their political rights, and for some—like me—it orphans them within their familiar surroundings.
«Public discussions on this issue regularly result in racism being trivialized as an issue of personal sensitivities,» complains a fellow activist. «They prevent an actual confrontation with the material effects of racism. Best not to get involved anymore.» Not moving forward is a central aspect of anti-black temporality. Being stopped, being immobilized, stepping in place, «people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them». «It is a violent shock that suddenly places the Black subject in a colonial scene, as in a plantation scenario, one is imprisoned as the subordinate and exotic ‹Other›. But what is «moving forward» supposed to mean in times of capitalism? Can we move towards transformation without «moving forward»?
Spectres d'Entremonts (Collage)
Hegemonic «Origin»
‹Origin› is the dispositive in Europe that organizes race: To be white means to be ‹from here›. Whiteness establishes its supremacy based on a historically traceable presence and claims a geographically delimited territory. In this arrangement, all others come from elsewhere, and are frozen as eternal newcomers. This racialized ‹origin› goes hand in hand with the narrative that Europe is a ‹largely homogenous entity, completely self-sufficient [... and] whose development is unaffected by forces from or contacts with other parts of the world.› In such a hegemony, some may decide, under certain conditions, not to engage with this pretend question and to not come up with yet another witty answer. But even we cannot prevent ourselves from being confronted with ‹the question about our origin›. ‹Origin›—and the negotiation of «the freedom to stay» that comes with it—is structural and haunts us in our everyday lives.
History is seminal to constructing ‹origin›. In Switzerland, too, it has established continuity and created cohesion between different languages, religions, cities, and countries across class and gender. This happens again and again through the exclusion of racialized others. The diverse narratives of Switzerland as a ‹Sonderfall› or special case, acountry that, through some magic trick, was neither affected by global projects of subjugation such as slavery and colonialism, nor by European formations of fascism or anti-feminism, have played their part here. The narrative of the ‹Sonderfall› is so powerful that it haunts even those who want to overcome it.
The treatise on Switzerland and slavery by historians Konrad Kuhn and Béatrice Ziegler is an example of this. In 2009, at a time when it was still widely claimed that Switzerland had nothing to do with slavery, they used their existing research to show that Swiss actors and institutions were involved in trade and enslavement. However, they found that this had had no impact on the internal structure of the country:
«Switzerland does not know any affected groups its nationally defined society that could collectively insist on their right to reparation. [...] Activists postulate [...] moral concerns based on abstract ethical principles or invoke an analytically sophisticated understanding of their historical existence as world citizens. [...] Only recently has it been argued that the treatment of immigrants from Africa should be organized in such a way that the involvement of individuals and institutions of the Old Confederacy in slavery is taken into account as a culpable entanglement. Thus, the involvement of Swiss actors in the transatlantic slave trade does not concern the relationship between social groups in Switzerland, but rather Switzerland’s self-conception as part of Europe.»
The «activists» they cite are almost all black. They bring forward their concerns and analyses in a context in which race critical studies (quite unlike historical research) are not institutionalized. They develop their research on the margins or outside the Swiss academy. The moral concerns they articulate are a call for anti-racism directed at a state that seems unreceptive to it. What the two historians present as «an analytically sophisticated understanding of their historical existence as world citizens», the «activists» characterize as a global history of «race» and racism due to European imperialism. So how can transnational, post-migrant, black histories be visualized as history if the European invention of «races» is not understood in Europe?
Villa in the Bain neufs of Yverdon
In my historical research, I deal with «affected groups» that do not exist according to this dominant narrative. They do exist in reality, but not socially and even less historically. They are people who dispute the coordinates of the oxymoron ‹black› and ‹Swiss› on the world map. I am guided by the question of which historical stories I can tell based on existing archives and beyond them. If I draw on historical sources, what can I say about blackness, about being black in Switzerland and what can I say about Switzerland?
Two people I am interested in are Pauline and Samuel Buisson. Pauline Buisson was taken—or perhaps abducted—from Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) to Yverdon around 1770 as an enslaved woman together with François Midas, who was also enslaved. They probably belonged to the Creole Marie Madeleine LeFort or LeTort. She was married to the Chevalier David-Philippe de Treytorrens, a member of a Swiss patrician family and former mercenary to the French army for which he had battled against slave revolts.
Buisson lived and worked on the de Treytorrens family estate in the ‹Bains neufs› near the thermal baths of Yverdon from 1778 until she died unmarried in 1826 at the age of about eighty. She survived several masters: the Chevalier; his brother, the Captain; the cousin of the two brothers, a former Consul General of Canada for the British; the unmarried sister of the two brothers and her housekeeper, who lived by her side for twenty years; as well as the widow of the Chevalier. In 1801, a distant cousin inherited the estate.
Samuel Buisson was her son. He was born in 1790. For a certain period, at least three non-white people lived together in one household in Yverdon. The gentlemen’s cousin, Frédérick Haldimand, had acquired a black valet in Louisiana. The latter accompanied him on at least one of his longer stays at the country estate in Yverdon. How many black people does it take in a household to be able to speak of black sociality?
The Legal File
Shortly before Pauline Buisson’s death, a legal dispute began between the municipality of Yverdon and the family’s heir, Henri de Treytorrens. The former argued that, given Samuel Buisson's status as a foreigner, an application for citizenship needed to be filed and a residence tax needed to be covered. What had preceded the dispute, and what was also part of the legal record, was that at the time of Samuel Buisson’s birth the mistresses Rose Madeleine de Treytorrens and Marie de Treytorrens LeFort had tried to naturalize the boy in Yverdon. Their applications were rejected. They then decreed that the heir should continue their efforts after their deaths. However, the heir’s applications and those of Samuel Buisson’s appointed guardian, which were submitted to Yverdon and other municipalities in the surrounding area over the years, were also rejected. Instead, Yverdon demanded a residence tax for the étranger and, under pressure from the canton, asked the heir to finally take care of the «homesteading» of the now-adult Samuel Buisson. The heir refused because all efforts until then had been unsuccessful and because Samuel was not a «foreigner» by virtue of his place of birth. The legal dispute dragged on for over a decade until it ended in a settlement in 1834. By this time, Samuel had already been dead for two years. He died as an étranger sans patrie in the same place where he was born. He had lived during revolutionary times characterized by several changes of government and power struggles between centralist and federalist understandings of democracy: from the Ancién Régime to the Helvetic Republic to the Mediation Period to the Confederation of States, from the Bernese state to the canton of Vaud. The refus, however, of Buisson’s civil rights was recurrent.
Inheritance and Genealogical Trees
In considering the possibility of naturalization of Samuel Buisson as part of the legal dispute, the status of the mother had been a subject of in-depth discussion. As an illegalized, unmarried, enslaved black woman, she was made the basisof the «problem». Her being black was equated with being foreign and African. The concerns revolved around the fact that what should not be, namely a black or non-white Swiss, could not be.
The Bernese authorities rejected the first application in 1791, fearing that the child probably «retained some of the mother’s face and body color». In an extremely violent tirade in their argument, the municipality of Yverdon linked Pauline Buisson’s blackness to her alleged licentiousness and concluded that she should never have come to Switzerland and should never have birthed a child. Another «African» in Payerne is mentioned, whose naturalization was also rejected due to his alleged licentiousness. Pauline Buisson and François Midas, who were abducted from Haiti, are variously referred to as africains. And concern is expressed several times about Samuel Buisson’s possible non-white offspring and the fact that they would also be entitled to citizenship.
Patrilineal inheritance rules and the associated gender order were white in slave societies. Using the example of the USA, Hortense Spillers shows that being illegitimate was a gendered category that only affected (white) boys. Unlike girls, they were the potential heirs to titles and property. In this context, property often included enslaved people. Black enslaved people, however, were subject to a completely different order. Newborns did not belong to their parents, but to the (male) owner. However, the owner was not the father. Enslaved people did not inherit property from any father, but rather inherited their status as property from their mother. The mother, in turn, possessed no qualities that were associated with the role of a mother.
In the «free country of Switzerland», there was no stipulation on enslavement nor was there a jurisdiction regulating the legal status of the descendants of enslaved people. Samuel Buisson did not inherit his mother’s enslaved status, but because of it he was not granted the right of domicile.
Race, gender and social status were also central to the negotiation of citizenship for other children of non-white mothers in nineteenth-century Switzerland. In the municipality of Thalheim, the merchant Hermann Frei applied for citizenship for his two children Max and Fritz in 1891. He had brought his children from Sumatra to his parents that same year. After this application was rejected, the appeal finally ended up with the Zurich government council. The appeal was rejected in 1892. The council justified its decision with inconsistencies in the application, but also stated that «the origin [...] was sufficiently documented by the appearance of the offspring.» It also feared a precedent and that Frei would return with more «such offspring» and want to «acclimatize» them. In 1893, the government council demanded a deposit, which could be demanded from foreigners without valid identity papers. Perhaps also due to the father’s considerable wealth the two were never placed under official care. In the will of 1911, the two children finally signed with their father’s surname and as citizens of Thalheim, which suggests that their legal status was recognized at a later time.
Things were yet different for Louis Henri Bourgeois (1800–1831) and Alois Wyrsch (1825–1888). Both came to Switzerland with a patrician Swiss father and without their non-white mothers from Surinam and Indonesia respectively. Both were adopted by their fathers’ new white wives and the non-white mothers were virtually obliterated from the biographical narratives. This re-established the racialized reproductive order and the sons were inscribed in a white male, Swiss-bourgeois genealogy. This enabled them to have successful political careers as cantonal and national councillors respectively. In this case, their non-whiteness was silenced in conjunction with gender, status and wealth. The patrilineal family tree could be narrated as a white descendency and thus Bourgeois and Wyrsch could be incorporated into history. Again, non-whiteness and Swissness were constructed as mutually exclusive.
White women enabled the reproduction of the (white) nation and were thus subject to state surveillance of their sexuality. Unlike them, Pauline Buisson was criminalized. As a black, unmarried, child-bearing woman without legal status, she was stylized as a categorical threat to (white) Switzerland.
Epistemic Violence
Historical records of black and other people of color as such are rare. For example, when the existence of enslaved people was registered, recorded and documented, it was usually due to exceptional situations. It was not so much a matter of recording their personal biographies, desires, feelings, relationships or accomplishments, but they were targeted by the authorities because they were not supposed to be here, because they had fled, because «owners» claimed their property or because they had appeared in advertisements to be bought or sold. More rarely, they themselves petitioned for their freedom.
Black people were often marked with the N-word in the registers instead of, or next to, a surname when they were born, baptized or died. This term reduces black people to a status outside the social order, whose existence is limited to serving others. It perpetuates the racial epistemic violence that legitimized colonialism, abduction, enslavement and over-exploitation.
There are exceptions, but for the overwhelming majority of black people mentioned in archives in Europe around 1800, we can merely account for their existence. François Midas, Samuel and Pauline Buisson, as well as the valet or the man from Payerne named in the lawsuit, are cases in point.
The court records are riddled with violence, distortions, slander, sexual fantasies and racist projections. It gives an impression of how race was not only negotiated in academia or overseas at the end of the eighteen century, but also shaped the lives of people in the European hinterland, even if we can hardly make any statements about how these lives were lived. Most of the documents that exist come from the hands of failed witnesses.
The caring words in the wills of the Mistresses de Treytorrens and, not least, their efforts to provide Samuel Buisson with education and citizenship inspire us to imagine that their everyday relationship went beyond the one between mistress and enslaved, citizen and the stateless. The files also show that the attempts of legally mirroring this relationship for Samuel Buisson failed. They further show that there was no interest whatsoever to overcome this inequality more broadly. And yet, the specific quality of these relationships remains a fabulation that takes us to the limits of the historical archive.
There is a tension between the absence of black life and the presence of violence against black people in historical archives. Saidiya Hartman describes a narrative that moves within this tension as critical fabulation. This is also how we fabulate the lives of black people in Switzerland. Critical storytelling does not mean filling in the gaps or recovering the voices of the enslaved, because they have been irrevocably erased. The gaps are themselves an expression of anti-Black violence in the archive. They are also a link to the anti-black racism of the present.
The legal records were not the last fantastic description of Pauline and Samuel Buisson. There would be more, all the way up to the 21st century: from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who subjected Pauline Buisson to his anthropological gaze during a visit to Yverdon and, possibly because of this encounter, rejected his own racial theories; to Hans Werner Debrunner, who asserted as much in his book Africans in Europe; to the Yverdon archives, which spectacularized it as the «Affaire Pauline Buisson» on their website; to Lukas Hartmann, who attempted to create empathy by reimagining Pauline Buisson’s suffering. In his romance he made her the Chevalier’s mistress, who was locked up in a chamber of the manor house because she would no longer requite his affections anymore.
Historians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries repeatedly adopted racist and racialized terminology from legal documents. The N-word is one of them. The M-word is another. And so is «African» in certain contexts. The authors Thomas David, Bouda Etemad and Janik Maria Schaufenbühl, in their chapters on «Africans in Switzerland» in the book Schwarze Geschäfte (Black Business), assemble the stories of the Buissons, Midas and other enslaved people who came to Switzerland from the American and African continents. Being «African» in their case does not refer to a specific geographical area, but creates a racialized family tree genealogy that translates being black into being African and ultimately does not allow non-white people born in Switzerland to be recognized as possibly Swiss.
Critical Fabulation
Critical fabulation exposes the racist and dehumanizing fiction about black people in the archives we use to write history and at the same time allows us to imagine what could have been without ever being able to present it as a meaningful story. I ask questions and point out possibilities, make certain stories and «voices» imaginable, but I don’t recreate them. Rather, the aim is to bring these ideas into conversation along with the «traditional historical evidentiary process».
How did the pressure to strive for naturalization which was then denied affect Samuel’s life, and perhaps also Pauline Buisson’s and their black environments’? Why was no thought given to the possibility of naturalizing François Midas or Pauline Buisson? What were the relationships between the black people in the de Treytorren household like? The valet was sent to prison at least once as punishment by his master. In what way did his relationship with his master differ from that of the others with theirs in the same household? Why did Samuel go to France for eleven years? Why did he return? The municipality writes that he had gotten into a fight at a local tavern, which is why the police prohibited him returning there. What was the backstory behind this? Pauline Buisson is also said to have been a midwife. How did she give birth to her own child? Who accompanied her? Did Pauline tell Samuel bedtime stories about ‹home›, as Lukas Hartmann imagined in his novel? Was she in touch with other black and other people of colour in the region? Did she learn about the Haitian Revolution, the revolution that inspired worldwide liberation struggles and at the same time was epistemologically made to disappear? What did she learn about it? Who told her about it? Did she and Samuel know about the black abolitionists and the free gens de couleur in neighbouring France? Did the so-called age of emancipation have an impact on their everyday lives in Yverdon? Did they think about freedom? What did they imagine it to mean? Did they keep quiet about it? Did Pauline Buisson sing about it when she was heard singing the songs of the blacks in Yverdon, as the family’s biographer recorded in his notes?
How can the almost unrepresentable lives of Pauline and Samuel Buisson and their black surroundings be told? How can they be told as part of history?
When it comes to telling the history and stories of people of color as historical subjects in Switzerland, it is not possible—in the words of Nicola Lauré al-Samarai—to fall back on the «luxury of a historical continuity that creates certainty.» Their emergence as such as well as their structurally shaped agency have hardly been researched. As already mentioned, this is partly due to the untested assumption that there are «no historically affected groups» in the first place.
However, it can be argued that black people are not only made to disappear in the archives, but also erased through the way certain ideas from the archives are adopted by historians and overlap with contemporary forms of racial configurations.
To recognise black people in Switzerland as historical subjects, it is necessary to unlearn notions of family tree-like group affiliations as well as a territorial understanding of continuity. The national historiography that continues to haunt us has helped to create an imaginary group cohesion centred on white, middle-class, male subjects. These subjects of national history are reproduced through heteronormative, bourgeois notions of kinship, with genealogical records of notable ancestors (and successors)—the named father and his son, the father’s father, the grandfather’s father etc. The genealogical trees indicate a belonging to the national territory. People thus prove their familiarity with the territory. Familiar in the double sense of known and related.
Diasporic History
Pauline and Samuel Buisson are not part of such a genealogy. There are no fathers worth mentioning, and in Pauline’s case no mother either (apart from Blumenbach’s suggestion that her parents presumably came from the Congo). Traceable are the deceased owners, including possible female owners who are not named as such in the legal deed, heirs to property, guardians, and authorities. Enslavement therefore means being outside of such a documented genealogy. Patriarchal-heteronormative reproduction was not accessible to Pauline and Samuel Buisson—and, who knows, perhaps also not desirable. Impossible subjects of the nation and subject to its rules nonetheless.
What connects the Buissons with the other Black people and people of color mentioned in this text is their positioning as «im/possible subject», between and beyond what seems to exclude each other, namely being in or from Europe and being non-white. What connects them is this negation, from which they must contend for their existence.
I am also thinking of connections to very differently positioned people, both historically and socially. There is Henriette Alexander, who as a young woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century realized «how difficult it would be for me to find suitable accommodation because of my African origin; for although I was gifted, no one thought of letting me learn a profession.» There is the first black National Councillor, Tilo Frey, in 1971, who wanted to be «white as a lily» and destroyed her estate before her death. There is the writer Kristin T. Schnider, who avoided being portrayed as a black author in order to gain status «by profession and not by skin color», but who then remained just as «defenseless against racial vilification and rejection» when she went public with her work. Then there is this quarter of the permanent Swiss population that has no political rights. And there is Roger Nzoy, who died on 30. August 2021 at Morges train station. He needed help and was shot dead instead. There are his loved ones who cannot presume that this will ever be recognized as murder. There is the traumatized and possibly desperate Iranian refugee who was shot dead by the police in Yverdon-les-Bains on 8 February 2024. He had taken thirteen passengers hostage on a regional train and tried to «debate the injustice of the world» with them. The hostages remained physically unharmed. And there are all those whose Swiss history already came to an end in the «Black Mediterranean».
Blackness, as I fabulate it here, is not an ethnic-identitarian category, even where it has inscribed itself as a supposed essence on the surface of the body. Blackness precedes and conditions black life. It is not based on a common territorial origin from which the ‹group history› evidently unfolds, but it is multi-local and constantly produced anew. It is based on a circulation of thoughts, knowledge, materials, and lives that began with colonial globalization. Blackness is a consequence of and a resistant reaction to racist dehumanization, criminalization, over-exploitation, murder, negation and marginalization.
Writing Black Swiss history therefore means sticking to what is not supposed to be, what is sometimes beyond the realm of representation and yet still present. Black historiography fabulates about strategies of life. Survival strategies. It makes itself felt in fleeting irritations, such as when activists’ concerns are dismissed as «moral concerns», or when during the 2020 Black Live Matters protests the largest-ever gathering of non-white people in public took place and mass media celebrated the many white people marching in solidarity instead. It is an approach that wilfully thwarts historiographical and linear notions of time, space, and distance and confuses scientific notions of what belongs together to enable the imagination of another way of being. It is, in the words of Tavia Nyong’o, «the tactical fictionalization of a world that, from the perspective of black social life, is false anyway». Black Swiss history remains programmatically incomplete, opaque and conditional. It runs along the slash of the im/possible. It creates space for all those who are here, those who are yet to come, and those that have left us.
* This article was originally written in German for the Publication Wissenswertigkeiten?! Kulturanalyse als ästhetische Praxis, edited by Sigrid Adorf, Elke Bippus, Sønke Gau & Ines Kleesattel (Spector Books, forthcoming).
Origins
layers of attenuated meanings
Hortense Spillers, «Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book», Diacritics 17 (2), 1987, pp. 64–81.
The policing of our bodies
«There is no Justice, there is just us!»: Ansätze zu einer postkolonial-feministischen Kritik der Polizei am Beispiel von Racial Profiling, in: D. Loick (Ed.) Kritik der Polizei. Frankfurt a.M. 2018, pp. 197–219.
Complains a fellow activist
Remembering a conversation with Fatima Moumouni immediately after the TV show SRF Arena on June 19th, 2020. Inconnection with the protests against racist police violence and anti-black racism, SRF invited black people to the show under the title: "Now we sit at the roundtable". In this program, the discussion about whether the question of origin was racist took up a considerable amount of time. In the subsequent media discussion of one of the most-watched programs of 2020, the question of origin was taken up as a discussion that trivialized antiracist demands to the point of absurdity.
People are trapped in history
James Baldwin: «Stranger in the Village», in. id. Notes of a Native Son, Boston 2012 [1955], pp. 162–175.
Plantation scenario
Grada Kilomba: Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism
To be white means to be ‹from here›
In 2001, Sivanandan Ambavalaner coined the term xeno-racism as a new form of racism that can also include white migrant workers. I argue somewhat differently that postcolonial racism in Switzerland has always been negotiated through origin, even if those against whom it was directed did not always remain the same. «Poverty is the new black», Race & Class 43 (2), pp. 1–5.
Eternal newcomers
Cf. Fatima El-Tayeb: European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis 2011.
The freedom to stay
Eva von Redecker: Bleibefreiheit. Frankfurt a.M. 2023.
Switzerland does not know any affected groups
Konrad Kuhn & Béatrice Ziegler: «Die Schweiz und die Sklaverei. Zum Spannungsfeld zwischen Geschichtspolitik und Wissenschaft», Traverse 16 (1), 2009, pp. 116–130.
The activists they cite are almost all black
They cite: Farbige Schweiz, Tangram - Bulletin der Eidgenössischen Kommission gegen Rassismus 8, 2007, 45-46; die EKR-Studie von Carmen Fröhlicher-Stines, Kelechi Monika Mennel, Schwarze Menschen in der Schweiz. Ein Leben zwischen Integration und Diskriminierung, Bern 2004, 5.; die EKR-Tagung «Schatten der Vergangenheit und die Last der Bilder. Rassismus gegen Schwarze in der Schweiz» am 20. März 2002; Patrick Harries im Journal of African History 47 (2006), pp. 499–500.
Anti-racism towards a state that seems unreceptive to it
Noémi Michel: Understanding Racial Burden and Tokenism, University of St. Gallen, Diversity and Inclusion Week, September 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJzSWr2mH0 (02.04.2024).
Buisson lived and worked
Caroline Arni: «Pauline Buisson», in. Id.: Lauter Frauen. Zwölf historische Porträts. Basel 2021, pp. 6–78.
A black valet
Daniel de Raemy: «L’ancienne campagne des Bains ou Villa d’Entremonts à Yverdon (XVIIIe – XIXe siècles), in Monuments Vaudois 8 (2), 2018, pp. 53–75.
Before Buisson’s death
Archives d’Yverdon R 90
The mother’s face and body color
Staatsarchiv Bern, B III 734, S. 578-579 = Vortrag des Chorgerichts und Beilagen vom 11. April 1791 (prov. transcribed by Caroline Arni).
Patrilineal inheritance rules … the status of property from their mother
Spillers: «Mama’s Baby».
Citizenship for his two children Max and Fritz
Niklaus Müller: «Familiennachzug um 1900: Eine Familiengeschichte zwischen Zürich und Sumatra», 18.05.2020, https://entropie.ethz.ch/familiennachzug-um-1900-eine-kolonialgeschichte-zwischen-zurich-und-sumatra/ (March 26, 2024).
Without their non-white mothers
Bernhard C. Schär: «Wie eine Frau aus Borneo die Gründung der Schweiz prägte», Republik, 15.12.2020, https://www.republik.ch/2020/12/15/wie-eine-frau-aus-borneo-die-gruendung-der-schweiz-praegte, (March 27, 2024).
They petitioned for their freedom themselves
Rebecca von Malinckrodt: «Verhandelte (Un-)Freiheit. Sklaverei, Leibeigenschaft und innereuropäischer Wissenstransfer am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts», in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43 (3), 2017, pp. 347–380.
When they were born, baptized or died
Archives Cantonales Vaudoises, registres paroissiaux (Eb) und registres de l’état civil cantonal (Ed).
Failed witnesses... fabulate the lives of black people
Saidiya Hartmann, «Venus in two acts», in: Small Axe 26 (2), 2008, pp. 1–14.
Subjected her to his anthropological gaze
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: «Einige naturhistorische Bemerkungen bey Gelegenheit einer Schweizerreise», in Magazin für das Neueste aus der Physik und Naturgeschichte, Gotha, 1787, pp. 1–12.
Who asserted as much
Debrunner, Hans Werner: Presence and Prestige. Africans in Europe. A History of Africans in Europe before 1918, Basel 1979.
Spectacularized it as «Affaire Pauline Buisson»
«Affaire Pauline Buisson (1791 – 1832) : ce que nous disent les archives », https://www.yverdonles-bains.ch/votre-commune/histoire-archives/affaire-buisson (March 27, 2024).
In an attempt to empathize
Hartmann, Lukas: Die Mohrin. Zürich 1995.
Africans in Switzerland
Thomas David / Bouda Etemad / Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl: Schwarze Geschäfte. Die Beteiligung von Schweizern an Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Limmat-Verlag 2005.
Traditional historical evidentiary process
Hershini Bhana Young: Illegible Will: Coercive spectacles of labor in South Africa and the Diaspora, Durham 2017, p. 23.
She was heard singing the songs of the blacks
Arni: Lauter Frauen.
Luxury of a historical continuity that creates certainty
Nicola Lauré Al-Samarai: «Inspirited Topography. Über/Lebensräume, Heim-Suchungen und die Verortung der Erfahrung in Schwarzen deutschen Kultur- und Wissenstraditionen», in: Eggers, Mauren Maisha et al. Hg., Mythen, Masken, Subjekte. Kritische Weissseinsforschung in Deutschland,Münster 2009.
I was gifted
Henriette Alexander: «Mitteilungen aus dem Leben von Henriette Alexander», Monatsblatt von Beuggen 5, 1895, pp. 30–31.
White as a lily
SRF-Kontext: «Tilo Frey – erste schwarze Nationalrätin der Schweiz», https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/tilo-frey-dieschwarze-schweizer-polit-pionierin, (March 27, 24).
Defenceless
Kristin T. Schnider: «They’ll be coming round the mountains, when they come», Speech, UCLA, private archives.
No political rights
Cf. «Vierviertel (Demokratie)-Initiative», https://demokratie-volksinitiative.ch/all-news/vierviertel-initiative-ein-wichtigerschritt-fur-mehr-demokratie-in-der-schweiz/ (March 27, 2024.)
He needed help
Cf. Alliance Justice 4 Nzoy: https://justice4nzoy.org/ (March 27, 2024).
Debate the injustice of the world
Serena Dankwa: «Bread and Roses oder das Anrecht auf Sicherheit», Journal B, 23.03.2024,https://journal-b.ch/artikel/bread-and-roses-oder-das-anrecht-auf-sicherheit/; see also: https://migrant-solidarity-network.ch/2024/02/12/vierstunden-ausnahmezustand-auf-der-spitze-des-eisbergs/, (March 27, 2024).
Black Mediterranean
Jeannette Ehrmann: «Schwarzes Mittelmeer, weisses Europa. Kolonialität, Rassismus und die Grenze der Demokratie», Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 8(1), 2021, pp. 419–466.
The tactical fictionalization
Javia Nyong’o: Afro-fabulations: the queer drama of Black life, New York 2019, p. 6.
For all those who are here, those yet to come, and those who left
Adapted post-migrant slogan «for all those who are here and are yet to come», coined in the network around INES - the New Switzerland Institute.