post-colonialism

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, by Ariella Aisha Azoulay (2019)

Institutionalized violence shapes who people are—victims and perpetrators alike—to an extent that only the recovery of the condition of plurality can undo it. This points to the most basic right immanent to the human condition, which imperialism constantly compromises: the right not to act against others; in its positive formulation: the right to act alongside and with one another. “Accepting this right in its two forms as fundamental is necessary in order to imagine reparations, so the bliss of being active and repairing what was broken can be attained.

Mukanda

11.08.2022 | by Ariella Aisha Azoulay

Europa, je t'aime moi non plus

In the contemporary discussions regarding post-colonial Europe, the concepts of memory and post- memory have taken on growing importance, giving prominence to an insight with great political relevance: colonialism never ends with those who enforced or suffered it. Traces of a colonial mindset impregnate generations to come and it has been passed down through the image of the former coloniser and the former colonised. These characters restage a complex phantasmagoria closely related to the most intimate ghost of the European subconscious: its colonial ghost which manifests itself inter alia in the form of a colonial “transfer of memory” – as racism, segregation, exclusion, subalternity – or in the form of “eruptions of memory”, and thereby questions the very essence of European multicultural societies, shaped by colonial heritage and fed by waves of migration.

To read

31.10.2021 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

Memory work as “radical intervention” and “reparation”: interview with Marita Sturken

Today, I think that the field is challenged more than ever by the increased volatility of debates about what nations remember and consequentially forget. Monuments and memorials are being vandalized, torn down, officially removed. They can no longer be seen as simply part of an historical landscape. Much of this can be understood as battles over the historical narratives of monuments and their power, but it is also about tensions around who the nation mourns and who it sees or does not see as having a “grievable life” in Judith Butler’s term. So I see memory activism as a key site for the production of memory scholarship.