Redefining Heimat: Exploring the Self, Culture, and Space in Elliot Blue’s Home? and Mo Asumang’s Roots Germania.

Heimat has, over the last several centuries, been used in different contexts to relate to culture, geography, identity, and belonging, among others. The contexts that this term has been used in have, in turn, spawned numerous definitions, but the term remains difficult to define, especially as it deals with the Afrogerman community and their understanding of Heimat. In a bit to investigate Heimat from an Afrogerman point of view, Elliot Blue’s experimental documentary Home? and Mo Asumang’s full-length documentary Roots Germania are analyzed. I offer a new definition of Heimat, derived from the daily lives of the protagonists as well as their relationship with their environment. This new definition combines the Afrogerman understanding of the Self, Culture as a form of Heimat, and an understanding of urban and rural spaces as representations of the German idea of Home. Using Homi Bhabha’s redefinition of Freud's Unheimlich theory, I explore the uncanniness of Heimat for these people who find themselves torn between two Homes: Germany and the African country that contributes to their Afrogerman heritage. This thesis argues that Heimat is not rooted in a fixed location but created by concepts determining its mobility. Heimat is a redistribution of territorial concepts of Home as a mobile and portable thing that is always present.