• Fri 27 10 2017 / 7 pm •
Perverse Decolonization

with Hans D. Christ, Cosmin Costinas, Ekaterina Degot, Udi Edelmann, David Riff, Jan Sowa

In this panel discussion, participants offer insight into the first discussions and debates around the central ideas of the Academy’s new long-term research project, Perverse Decolonization. Looking at the rhetoric of today’s right-wing movement, resurgent on a global scale, one often recognizes the uncanny return of rhetorical elements from the context of decolonization, which become arguments of new nationalist agendas insisting upon the right to essentialize their ways into a parallel dimension. Now is the time to look more closely at the background of “perverse decolonization”: at how postcolonial identities reproduce colonial violence, how identity politics deny the political dimension to postcolonial subjects, how “silent” majorities rise against cosmopolitan elites, and how alternative colonial projects export non-Western versions of progress no less brutal than the original European prototype. Can alternative notions like statelessness, “subaltern cosmopolitanism,” global socialist modernity, or dirty universalism lead a way forward out of a deadlocked postcolonial field?


Venue: Alte Feuerwache
Free admission
In English

This event is part of the research project Perverse Decolonization. Find more information on this project here.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation