This research project developed infection as a dual conceptual framework for examining Black subjectivity in Afro-German literature and related media. Moving beyond biomedical discourse, infection is understood here as a metaphorical and epistemological structure that articulates both exclusion and transformation. It designates processes of racialization, exile, and social marginalization while simultaneously opening possibilities for poetic resistance, creativity, and epistemic renewal.

The project distinguishes between two interrelated dimensions: (1) Infection as Exile and (2) Infection as Inspiration, drawing on the notions of contaminated subjectivity and W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness. Infection as Exile describes symbolic and social forms of exclusion through contamination and othering, whereas Infection as Inspiration conceptualizes disruption and contamination as generative aesthetic and political forces. Contaminated subjectivity denotes the impossibility of a pure or autonomous self and is examined in relation to Calvin L. Warren’s concept of ontological terror and Frantz Fanon’s zone of non-being. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, as reinterpreted in the Afro-German context by Natasha A. Kelly, further illuminates the ambivalence of visibility and erasure produced by the white gaze.

On this basis, the project theorizes Black subjectivity as a transformative formation within racialized German cultural and medial contexts. It demonstrates how poetic infection can reconfigure (in-)visibility as a mode of resistance and aesthetic survival, while establishing a theoretical basis for its more systematic application to Afro-German literary texts.