I am part of a group of concerned scholars and activists in Bonn who have been putting on events prompted by the attack on academic freedom in Germany. We call ourselves Decolonization in Dialogue, because these words are often thrown around by universities, but are feared in their reality. As part of our activities we put on a seminar series which focuses on colonialism, settler colonialism and genocide, with a special focus on the Middle East. We are invested in showing how past and current events resonate with German history, as well as with other places in the world such as India or Western Sahara.
Today’s talk will be by Munira Khayyat from NYU Abu Dhabi, an anthropologist and political ecologist who uses landscape as a method to humanise war. Her current book A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival aims to dismantle romanticisations or of war and resistance that emphasise the spectacular. Instead, she narrates war as an everyday lived experience that involves human and nonhuman actors. Most recently, she has edited a special issue in Culanth, entitled After the End of the World: Another Season of War in South Lebanon. You can register for her talk here.
New materialist approaches have become prominent in geography. They have highlighted formerly under-researched aspects of studied phenomena and pointed to the physical-material dimension of processes and developments. At the same time, ‘speculative’ or ‘creative’ approaches common in new materialist approaches are promoted as novel tools for analysing, imagining and co-creating developments underway and possible futures.
Scholars have celebrated this turn to creative, speculative or experimental methods to knowledge generation and governance for its potential to create new human-non-human assemblages (Latour 2011, Braun 2015), to overcome modernist or Western conceptions of knowledge generation (Bennett, 2001; Stengers 2010), or for being more apt to emerging challenges of increasingly unpredictable, non-linear changes, where ‘traditional’ forms of research and governance reach their limits.
However, new materialisms constitute a very diverse field covering sometimes contradictory perspectives. Speculative and experimental approaches are not necessarily emancipatory, and many questions regarding the political implications of a ‘speculative’ turn remain.
Over the last years, scholars have pointed to the conservative turn in new materialism and an increasing adoption of theories of thinkers associated with the far right, like Schmitt, Heidegger, or Renan (Latour 2017, Harmann 2018; Noys, 2010; Tompkins, 2016); reflecting earlier debates in sociology about the often highly problematic philosophical sources of part of new materialist thought (Bauer, Heinemann and Lemke 2017; Tellmann, Opitz and Gertenbach 2016; Werber 2016). Empirical studies have related emerging forms of ‘experimentality’ (Petryna 2009; Nguyen 2009) to increased precarity, exploitation and control (Murphy 2017; Engels et al. 2019). The most recent political developments show that governing by disruption and the use (or creation) of ‘shocks’ to limit the possibility for organized resistance is no longer a policy restricted to the Global South (Klein, 2007). This development has been discussed in relation to the spread of new (digital) technologies (Allen et al. 2018) as well as to often ‘experimental’ innovation policies common in the new economy (Daub 2020), raising questions about the role of speculative approaches as either a mean against or a tool used by increasingly authoritarian power regimes.
With this panel we want to contribute to the development of a more nuanced and critical approach to speculative and experimental thinking, taking into account the diversity of speculative and new materialist approaches, the different historical situations they were developed under and the philosophical traditions they relate to. We invite papers on theoretical explorations, comments on recent developments as well as empirical studies to critically explore and discuss the opportunities, challenges and limits of speculative approaches in times of increasingly fragile democratic societies.
Questions may include, but are not limited to:
How can we evaluate and assess the political effects of speculative approaches? Under which conditions and under which criteria can they be emancipative, in which cases do they perpetuate or aggravate existing power relations and forms of exploitation and oppression?
How is the increased interest in speculative, creative and experimental approaches related to recent developments in technology (i.e. digitalization, artificial intelligence), economy (i.e. financialization, neoliberalism) or politics (decline of the welfare state, austerity, ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’, traditionalist or authoritarian turn).
Which political implications does or might it have in the future? How can such approaches support the imagination and creation of alternative worlds? Where can it affect the ability to criticize existing power relations or organise resistance to exploitation or control?
How can we open up the speculative and new materialist thought beyond the current canon of references, what lesser acknowledged works of art-based, speculative or experimental works can serve as inspiration? What are the overlaps and tensions with other liberatory theoretical and practical projects, including critical race, queer and anti-ableist approaches?
[1] Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, [2] University of Bonn
“Knowledge Dependencies and the Un/making of Equitable Futures”
An Interdisciplinary summer conference taking place on July 3rd and 4th, 2025, at the University of Bonn. The two-day event is jointly hosted by the Cluster of Excellence the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
Amid escalating geopolitical instability, authoritarian retrenchments, and the deepening securitisation of knowledge-making, this conference critically examines how entrenched knowledge dependencies continue to shape practices of future-making—and how more equitable futures might still be (re)imagined. From the weaponisation of AI to the erosion of indigenous, activist, and academic freedoms, and the constraints of donor-driven research agendas, we ask: How is knowledge circulation mediated? Under what conditions have alternative epistemic futures emerged—across both the longue durée and within present formations?
Bridging the humanities, critical social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields, we invite scholars, artists, activists, policy practitioners and more to explore how knowledge dependencies—whether structural, relational, or extractive—determine which visions of the future become possible and which remain foreclosed. In particular, the conference interrogates dominant epistemic hierarchies, tracing how methodologies such as co-creation and participatory research may, at times, reinforce rather than dismantle dependencies. Moreover, how might shrinking spaces for decolonial critique, radical imagination, and transnational solidarities shape knowledge futures?
While holding space for deep and reflexive conversations, we are particularly interested in tracing lived experiences through case studies and situated narratives. We seek to weave together themes often examined in isolation, including:
The iterative nature of future-making and knowledge politics;
The epistemic privilege of transnational networks and the mobility of certain knowledge-holders;
Spatio-temporal inequities that determine what counts as “knowledge” and which knowledge practices are deemed necessary and urgent;
Structural pushbacks against diversity and inclusion, including the deepening institutionalisation of knowledge dependencies through multiscalar modes of governance and donor-driven agendas.
Foregrounding the processual, we also seek generative interventions, engaging speculative and experimental approaches that rupture dominant epistemic structures, routines, and practices. How then might we move beyond critique alone to actively enact more plural, just, and transformative knowledge futures? Join us in critically rethinking how knowledge dependencies shape, constrain, and create openings for both dominant and alternative modes of future-making.
Submission Guidelines
We welcome contributions in diverse formats, including traditional papers, panel proposals, performances, interactive dialogues and more, leading to a themed multimodal special issue.
Presentation/paper, performance, and other multimodal abstracts & interventions (150–300 words)
Open or closed panel proposals (500–1,000 words)
Please email submissions, along with a brief bio, to rsiriwar@uni-bonn.de by May 5, 2025.
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Call for Papers – Resisting the Backlash: Defending Intersectional, Decolonial, and Postcolonial Feminisms
1-2 October 2025 at TU Dresden, Germany
We invite submissions for an International Conference that will explore the growing backlash against gender, queer, intersectional, decolonial, and postcolonial studies. This event aims to critically examine the forces undermining these fields and to discuss strategies for countering these challenges in academic, activist, policy, journalistic, and public spheres. We are particularly interested in reflecting on ongoing resistance to anti-gender movements and engaging with strategies for reimagining democracy through the lenses of intersectional, decolonial, and postcolonial feminisms.
We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
The nature and scope of the backlash against gender, queer, intersectional, decolonial, and postcolonial scholarship
The impact of this backlash on academic institutions, teaching, and public discourse
Intersectional responses to these challenges from marginalized communities and scholars
Concrete strategies for resistance and solidarity in the face of institutional and political pressures
The role of extractivism in the gender backlash scenario
Digital and non-digital forms of backlash
The role of international solidarity networks in reimagining democracy through gender lenses
Please submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) by 31 March 2025 to project.pushbacklash@tu-dresden.de. Successful applicants will be notified by 30 April 2025, and full papers will be due by 31 July 2025.
We look forward to your contributions to this important discussion.
Hosted by: The Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University of Dresden, in the context of the EU-funded project Push*Back*Lash: Anti-Gender Backlash and Democratic Pushback (https://pushbacklash.eu/)
A few people have asked me about Nikita Dhawan‘s new book which is not out in English yet. The book’s title can be translated as ‘Saving’ or ‘Rescuing the Enlightenment from Europe’. I bought the book, because I was angry at European, and especially German, journalists and politicians for using the Enlightenment as a justification for racist opinions and policies. The tired old trope of the ‘enlightened West’ against the ‘unenlightened Rest’ seems to die hard. What I like about Nikita Dhawan’s book is that it does not just simply dismiss the Enlightenment in its entirety, as so many postcolonial and decolonial academics have recently done, but contributes to the growing body of work seeks to reclaim the movement through a more complex narration of its history. I read the book following several of David Graeber’s books (one co-authored with David Wengrow) in which the Enlightenment ceases to be unique European phenomenon. Other useful companion pieces include critical literature on the Haitian Revolution e.g. by C.L.R. James, Cedric Robinson or Doris L. Garraway (there seems to be a free PDF of Enlightened Colonialism, for example). While books such as Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment could be seen as going further, I also find it helpful to pursure different forms of contestation, especially given the conservative audiences that Dhawan may have in mind. Having said this, I feel that more progressive/activist scholars can also benefit from Dhawan’s work, as she is good at showing the likely pitfalls of supposedly more radical ideas. Die Aufklärung vor Europa Retten feels very much tailored to the German context, so I am expecting the English edition to be more tailored to an international audience. The book has very dense, long chapters, so it took me a few weeks to read it thoroughly. I will try to give brief chapter summaries, however, these will cover only a fraction of the material.
Chapter 1 begins with an important question: ‘Who financed the Enlightenement?’ I feel that the question of the economics behind/of theory is not often enough addressed, so I really appreciated that Dhawan raises it. However, the chapter does not so much deal with the detailed financial flows behind the Enlightenment, as I was expecting, but seems to situate the Enlightenment in the colonial context more generally. Specifically, the question serves to unpack the apparent contrast between the European claim to progressiveness and the barbaric excesses of colonialism. Dhawan exposes their intersection in the belief in European superiority which then translates into ‘new European values’ whose ‘universality’ needs to be imposed by force. The chapter works well to highlight the Enlightenment’s contradictions and renders the movement more complex, especially by highlighting the antisemitism and racism of key Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder and Kant and by showing how these attitudes were not the norm in their time. It could be argued that the financial flows do not need to be made more explicit, as today’s political dynamics make it obvious how economic interests and racism remain entangled. However, it would have been useful to know the reasons why certain Enlightenment voices became privileged over others, even if it was just due to their capacity to be coopted in the name of colonialism.
An example of the portrayal of postcolonial theory as hostile and foreign to the ‘enlightened West’
The following chapter on the ‘self-barbarisation’ of Europe moves into contentious territory, the relation between postcolonial and Holocaust studies. Germany, in particular, has experienced an aggressive smear campaign against postcolonial theory (e.g. see the latest special section of the CDU/CSU affliiated Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s website), which is portrayed as a devaluation of Jewish suffering and an attack on the purity of Israel. For Dhawan, the two competing discourses are connected through their relation with the Enlightenment. For many scholars, journalists and politician, ‘Enlightenment thinking’ represents a weapon against the ‘irrationality’ of antisemitism and racism, even as it is used in a racist manner. This racism tends to manifest in the perception of the Global South as ‘unenlightened’ and backwards. Dhawan shows how such simplistic framings of ‘Enlightenment rationality’ contribute to the problem rather than to potential solutions. Against this background, she explains how a more critical relationship with the Enlightenment can be achieved. In particular, she criticises the naivety of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and his lack of attention to power relation, but also Theodor W. Adorno, whom she initially singled out as a critical voice. Adorno’s ignorance regarding colonialism and anti-Black racism is contrasted with the analysis and actions of with his fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse who took an active role against such prejudices both inside and outside the academy. At the end of the chapter, Dhawan issues a warning that the German disregard of the genocides in Palestine and Nambia, and the country’s dismissive attitude towards the South African ICJ case continue the Eurocentrism/Eurosupremacy of the Frankfurt School in detrimental ways.
The third chapter responds to radical dismissals of the Enlightenment by considering what Europe can teach us. Despite this focus, the chapter seems continue the issue of prejudices against postcolonial theory, which later becomes expanded through a discussion of differences between postcolonial and decolonial theory, and of paths towards a ‘decolonisation’ of knowledge. How does Dhawan end up there given she set out to talk about Europe’s potential contributions? I think it is through a critique of the assumption that ‘a Eurocentric perspective can easily lead to the conclusion that the problem is not the Enlightenment, but the unfinished project of modernity whose potential is not yet fully realised’. The defence of this perspective leads to an avoidance of any attempts to ‘decolonise’. Against this, Dhawan offers a Marxist perspective, which she portrays as a ‘radical’ manifestation of Enlightenment critique, to both critically reflext on Marx, but also to suggest, if I understand correctly, a ‘critical Enlightenment pathway’ that can improve global and class inequalities, which involves unlearning to be ‘senders’ and ‘receivers’ of Enlightenment knowledge. (I continue to be a bit confused about the relationship between the chapter titles and their content, as it is not always obvious.)
Chapter 4 discusses the ‘non-performativity’ of critique and, again, I was expecting something else in terms of content. Dhawan frames the problem in terms of roles of state and non-state actors in relation to ‘decolonisation’. In less clunky terms, it is about the way in which Western democracies make use of social movements to demonstrate their moral superiority. Given recent waves of oppression, especially when it comes to human rights related protests, it feels as if the West has given up on this strategy. Indeed, as Dhawan explains, many Enlightenment philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Thomas Hobbes denied citizens the right to protest, since this would endanger peace and stability. This sort of thinking, for example, contributed the dismissal of the Haitian Revolution as ‘irrational’ and ‘barbaric’. Even Adorno, despite being a victim of Nazi persecution, dismissed direct action as a superficial moment of satisfaction, and especially condemned the physical implementation of his own theories. (This way of thinking resurfaces in many German commentaries against Palestine protests that are littered with references to Adorno and Kant.) The remainder of the chapter deals with ‘state phobia’ and the pros and cons of the nation state. Here, Dhawan cautions against undifferentiated critiques of the state that ignore its importance for marginalised actors. She illustrates this through the example of homonationalism, a concept she criticises for its tendency to paint all attempts of LGBT+ activists to negotiate with the state as regressive. Dhawan further laments homonationalism’s lack of geographical differentiation and attention to regional histories. Through portraying the state as a product of complex relations, she tries to work against perceptions of state and public as exclusively antagonistic.
The fifth chapter continues the theme of relations with the state, but through the question of violence. This is a very current topic, as politicians, journalists and academics keep debating whether violent protest is acceptable or not, often wheeling out the accusation that postcolonial theory encourages liberatory violence. Dhawan’s chapter explicitly deals with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and how it led to a resurge of the portrayal of postcolonial theorists as vengeful aggressors. While Dhawan takes care to correct wrong assumptions regarding the work of the ‘usual suspects’ – Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said who present violent anticolonial masculinity – she also analyses the essentialist prejudices also of anticolonial actors (e.g. non-violence = feminisation; Hinduism = essentially nonviolent etc). Her examples include the contrasting receptions of Mahatma Gandhi‘s version of nonviolence, as well as the strategies of anti-castist activist B. R. Ambedkar. For me, it was interesting to read this part alongside Mithu Sanyal‘s semi-fictional book Antichristie, set in the the infamous India House in London, in which her characters enact different positionalities towards armed resistance.
Enlightenment themed arms manufacturer advert
At this point, the theme of statephobia returns, as Ghandi is portrayed as an anarchist, while Ambedkhar is shown to long for an improved (national) home. Dhawan extends her argument by looking at the oppressive actions of democratic states and how they mask as ‘legitimate violence’. Drawing on authors such as Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Drucilla Cornell, she alerts her readers to the threat of the fascism that continues to dwell within democracy. To illustrate her point, she draws attention to the strategy of ‘victim blaming‘, through which perpetrators portray those at the sharp end of violence as the ‘actual’ source of violence. At the moment, we see this in the blame shifting of antisemitism onto Muslims, or the portrayal of trans people as the key agents of social destabilisation. This is followed by a discussion of how critique itself can constitute violence, but how attacks on critique, e.g. by authors such as Bruno Latour, can end up reproducing the same violence. The chapter essentially functions as a subversion of the discourse of ‘Rechtstaatlichkeit’ that gets wheeled out even as grave human rights violations are being defended. She shows how the West’s ‘enlightened violence’ contributes to the undermining of international law by Western democracies as they contest the rights of stateless people in particular.
The final chapter on ‘Aesthetic Enlightenment and the Art of Decolonisation’ reflects on the distribution of responsibility between ‘intellectuals, artists and poets as Enlightenment actors’. Dhawan points to the the disciplining function of art under colonialism, and the difficulty of disentangling ‘colonial’ and ‘decolonial’ art. It also problematises the visual ’empathy fatigue’ through the onslaught of distressing images. As someone who started off in the Arts, I am finding the chapter a bit problematic for its disregard of economics and class in the Arts. The chapter is surprisingly short, and I feel it could have benefitted from greater depth, given that Dhawan already touches on academic ‘extractivism’. At least, Dhawan does not place a simplistic hope in art, like too many other texts that equally detach art from economics. Instead, Dhawan turns to the question of voting and how imagination and education can positively influence voting behaviour.
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The take-away message of the book seems to be that it is impossible to avoid the Enlightenment, given how much is weaponised in elite discourse. However, an engagement with the Enlightenment should be more than just defence, as it also contains elements that support decolonisation and that can even be part of a wider discussion of the problematic (imperialist, racist, heterosexist) conditions in which radical theories continue to be produced, and how they sometimes reproduce the issues they are trying to fight against. In this sense, the dynamics of the Enlightenment become a very current phenomenon, which I think is a smart move, if we want to protect radical ideas from their toxic inversion. Dhawan ends by considering theory as a ‘space of healing’, following bell hooks. In this sense, her vision of critique is not one that serves to demonstrate superiority or personal satisfaction, but supports the fight against ‘the denial of rights and dignity’ and against on-going exploitation. In practice Dhawan proposes broad coalitions who recognise each other’s marginalisation. Her key example is LGBTQ+ support for Palestine, a proclamation of solidarity that has been derided as ‘chickens for KFC’, even to my own face. The recognition that the struggles against dehumanisation are connected, as can be seen in the simultaneous persecution of Palestinians, pro-Palestinian protesters and trans people in the US, outweighs the local attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people which are also understood as being historically shaped through colonialism. Both groups face persecution, because they remind Westerners of the violence of their ‘enlightened world’ that not only affects colonial subjects but also them in their very own countries, especially if they do not toe the line.
The book ends on a quote by Audre Lorde, which leaves a bit of an uncomfortable note, given Lorde’s fallout with fellow Black female poet June Jordan over Palestine. But maybe this ending is apt given Dhawan’s desire to re-examine both conservative and radical pos(ition)ing.
‘Don’t you always have to tie historical research to well-known people?’ The question from our Cottbus tour guide took me aback. I’d been thinking about the very same question, especially since my first chat with the local librarians at the Bonn Geography department. Most of the archives that I’d been consulting on or offline were explained to me as being structured around prominent male geographers and their correspondence. While the reality is often more messy, this is how these local archives have come to be understood. In some ways, this is their selling point: the letters (and sometimes maps and models) of these local geographers are a unique source of knowledge, unlike more widely published articles or books. They also contain information about wider networks, events and objects. At the same time, the question of ‘other possible archives’ lingers.
Brandenburg-distilled Humboldt Gin that allows you to make ‘Cosmos’ cocktails
The conversation with the tour guide was prompted by another man with an attached archive: local Cottbus celebrity Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, known as Fürst Pückler. While famous as a landscape gardener, travel writer and hedonist in his time, today, he is mostly known for lending his name to the layered ice cream that can be found in many places around the world (in the Anglosphere, it’s called Neapolitan ice cream, as it initially included pistachio instead of chocolate, and cherry or raspberry instead of strawberry, to symbolise the Italian flag). As I was in Cottbus for a Humboldt Foundation network meeting, which serves as an introduction to the programme and regional university landscapes, I not only became interested in the question of archives, but also in the similarities and contrasts between the two mythologised figures – Pückler and Humboldt – and their relation to Geography. To me, these questions intersected in terms of knowledge valuation and the difficulty to entangle myth from reality: why is one guy (Humboldt) celebrated for his contribution to geographical knowledge, and why is another (Pückler) only known as an ice cream? And why does their image get pushed so much in the first place?
The answer to the second question seems obvious: people want to be associated with their image, be it cosmopolitan ‘polymath’ or ‘eccentric’, especially if it helps gloss over German colonial and World War Two history and promotes investment or tourism (recent examples include the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the cross-border UNESCO World Heritage Site Branitzer Park near Cottbus). Glorification of genius white males also helps justify existing knowledge production structures and hierarchies. This uncritical relation to these structures was also reflected in a reaction to my presentation on my fellowship topic. One of the participants declared that no different vision of history, or teaching of history is needed, and especially not if they emerge from postcolonial, decolonial or critical race theory. His argument was that these theories are really just serve as academic career vehicles and stand in the way of ‘good research’. Essentially, his argument was that ‘traditional research’ is already good research, so any contestation would imply a degradation in quality (recently the CDU-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung even branded postcolonial theory ‘An Attack on the West‘). But what about the function of the much maligned ‘woke’ theories to highlight the blindspots of the research establishment? What about the replication of power dynamics?
When it comes to the difference in reception of the two ‘geographers’, it can be explained through the difference in ambition: we ‘know’ that Humboldt had scholarly ambitions, and we also ‘know’ that Pückler mainly wanted to cover his debt. Pückler, encouraged by his wife Lucie who used to frequent literary salons, published several volumes of geographical narratives that became extremely popular – in fact, so popular that they became the couple’s biggest source of income (they went bankrupt anyway because of Pückler’s landscape gardening ambitions and hedonistic lifestyle). However, in view of recent criticisms of Humboldt’s method by authors such as Mark Terkessidis and others, as well as re-valuations of Pückler’s contributions to Geography, the answer is perhaps not as clear cut as it may be appear. Both men also relied on, and at the same time seem to have ignored, local knowledge in favour of Eurocentric and orientalist projections. The hybrididity of such knowledge continues to be actively suppressed an often difficult to trace, as authors such as Ann Laura Stoler or Saidiya Hartman have argued. This is blurring is further reflected in the myth making around both men, especially Humboldt, who is the subject of many biographies and fictionalisations (one of which was included in the Humboldt Foundation’s welcome package), but also Pückler, where one can find not only biographies but cookery books.
These images from the Cottbus tourist office can be found all over the city
In view of the dominance of icons, there have been attempts to write alternative narratives that de-emphasise singularity and portray these ‘geniuses’ as part of wider social dynamics. In the case of Pückler, authors such as Freya Schwachenwald have tracked his international influences and networks. Before the tour, I had already looked up some academic and non-academic articles, given that the hotel was right next to a ‘Fürst Pückler Passage‘ and posters of him wearing a turban were plastered all over the city, advertising a tourist transport ticket. One of the most discussed international links was a girl called ‘Machbuba‘, most likely of Oromo origin, who was abducted by slavers from an area that now forms part of Ethiopia, and whom Pückler had bought in Cairo. While the relationship between ‘Machbuba’ and Pückler is disputed (there also seems to be a tendency amongst historians to romanticise sexual violence), it seems that she made a deep impression on the locals. Although ‘Machbuba’ (not her real name, but the one given to her by Pückler) was not the only slave, or even female slave, bought by Pückler on his travels, and only lived to the age of about 16 before her death from tuberculosis, her legacy persists, including through her contributions to an Oromo dictionary and song book.
Academics hoping to find out more about her history have found it quite difficult to disentangle ‘Machbuba’ from the strategic orientalisation that has surrounded her since her arrival in Europe. Today, this orientalisation continues for tourism purposes, to render the area more connected to far away places. This has even included the sale of a local ‘Machbuba’ craft beer, which seems to no longer be available due to its controversial ‘nude slave girl’ label (this local scandal even made it into Germany’s biggest tabloid newspaper BILD). As Schwachenwald has noted, Pückler tended to focus on his emotional response to her in his writing, than on any facts, and even amalgamated different female slave narratives, stripping her of individuality. So how does one move away from a focus on people, especially people in positions of power, and their correspondence? Schwachenwald favours a ‘transcultural‘ approach, which involves acknowledging the ‘transcultural’ production of knowledge and the networks of silenced people and objects. She even shows how the (in)famous ice cream embodies Prussian/German colonial ambitions and the trickling down of these ambitions from aristocratic to bourgeois cuisine.
Indeed, historians and anthropologists have been advocated for a stronger emphasis on ‘material culture’ for a long time. I recently found an article entitled ‘But they just sit there!’ which addresses the difficulties of teaching history through objects. Students first found it strange that historians assigned expressive value to objects, but soon experienced a widening of perspective by tracing its owners and locations. A similar approach has been undertaken in relation to animals, as part of the teaching resource Animals As Objects, that explains how apparently unimportant creatures become objects of interest, and how they come to matter more widely in this ‘processed’ form. In my teaching, I find it useful to shuttle between the different modes of presenting knowledge histories, because the dynamics of the past are not dissimilar from the dynamics today. It gives students an insight into the replication of ‘facts’ without them simply learning ‘facts’: they are able to look behind the scenes of and explore why they are learning what they are learning, and also what they might want Geography (or other knowledge structures) to be like.
Timbuktu is a famous case study of multiple attempts of knowledge erasure. The library is part of the Endangered Archives programme.
The year started well with a manuscript submission. I started to make a plan for the year, which looks quite packed, but also involves tying up a lot of loose ends that have been dangling around for a long time. It feels good to finally attend to them. I am also starting the second phase of the fieldwork this year, which will involve some archival work, as well as workshop organisation. The difficult part of my project, so far, has not just been to produce content, but to name the web resource that I am working on in order to set it up. The original proposal stressed ‘re-connections’ as a way of highlighting the erasures that were and keep being performed to produce current geographical histories. In my forthcoming contribution to a roundtable for Professional Geographer, I also talk about ‘re-expansion’. Witnessing the current level of scholasticides, whether in Gaza, Xinjiang or other regions, I have been wondering whether to emphasise ‘erasures’ more strongly. ‘Re-connections’ seems inappropriately optimistic against a long history of destroyed libraries and archives, murdered or incarcarated scholars and the attempted annihilation of entire peoples. At the same time, whenever I hear from scholars who are working on the (re)assembly of knowledges, such as the Institute for Palestine Studies, Saad Eskander at the Iraqi National Archive and Library, Afro German or LGBT+ historians they explicitly work against the perception of erasure and against the associated nihilistic attitudes.
As authors such as Hayden White (many thanks for this reference to Astrid Schwarz) or Ben Pitcher emphasise, history is often not so much about ‘what really happened’ but about what we need from it. That does not necessarily mean that (re)constructed histories are not true, but that any historical investigation has a motivation to provide alternative narratives. As a geographer, I have been interested in narratives that go against the official ones I have encountered in school, in the media and in my studies. In the current political situation, I am particularly invested in narratives that disprove the historical, cultural and geographical claims of far right parties (including those who masquerade as left). It is important for me as an educator to use such examples in my teaching, and to inspire students to research their own. Some of the examples I use include Rolph-Michel Trouillot‘s and Susan Buck-Morss‘ work on Haiti, Lydia Liu’s work on China and modernity, María Lugones‘ work on the ‘coloniality of gender’, and David Graeber‘s work on debt and on the Enlightenment. Trouillot is also important for his concept of ‘unthinkable history’ – the history that feels incomprehensible, even as it happens. Many people feel like this in the moment with the news coming out of the USA, or with the support of the supposedly ‘enlightened’ West for a far right genocidal regime in Israel. How will this ‘unthinkable history’, that is happening as I write, be passed on, especially as media and, increasingly, academia, are being co-opted?
There is a lot to unpack, even for the construction of a small teaching resource. Since I started my fellowship, I keep being asked (most recently at a Humboldt network conference): ‘is this your entire fellowship output’? Implying, that this is neither research nor a big enough project. When I was working on other teaching resources with RACE or Global Social Theory, I was also criticised for being ‘distracted’ from my career and REF output. Teaching resources are treated as if they do not present intellectual challenges or have no wider significance in relation to scholarship: they represent mere description. However, academics should know better from experience. Moreover, that building a teaching resource is not just a simple descriptive task shows in the many debates around what is being taught. Already before the election of Trump, colleagues in Florida were struggling to teach the history of the USA against the imposed Whitewashing by Republican politicians. Similar, governments in the UK and Germany have censored teaching, both at school and university level (e.g. you cannot teach about the Nakba in German schools; the UK Conservatives have tried to suppress teaching on climate change and colonial histories). Some countries have gone as far as entirely banning certain populations from public (or even private) education (e.g. Afghanistan banning women).
Even without such drastic interventions, education has always been a political battleground that validates knowledges selectively. For example, I am very aware that my Thai-German cousins, my Russian-German friends and anyone else not considered ‘German enough’ in my country of origin (even East Germans are reporting erasures of their history) have had, and are having, a very different educational experience in school than myself, even in comparatively progressive schools (my school district was Kaltenmoor in Lüneburg, which keeps being denounced as a violent immigrant ghetto despite evidence to the contrary). I am not sure, however, whether a distinction between habitual and exceptional erasures is productive, as it seems part of the same dynamic, only exacerbated by shifts in power and influence.
What does this mean for the resource in practical terms? Initially, it was focused on teaching geographical history modules, and especially German historical geography, differently (beyond Humboldt, Ratzel et al). Through current events, the growing censorship around the world has necessitated an expansion of making alternative methods work within these new conditions, placing a stronger emphasis on how they can be used to get controversial ideas across. Here, I am learning from the growing number of projects that are emerging from different affected communities, and I am hoping that my research can add to these efforts. It can hopefully also enable connection with other scholars, many of whom are not (or no longer) affliated with universities, in order to jointly process what is happening and to support one another.
The German Allianz für Kritische und Solidarische Wissenschaft (KriSol), of which I am a member, has been working hard to prevent a new ‘Resolution for the Protection of Jewish Life‘. The Resolution prohibits criticism of Israel, and has even been protested against by Jewish organisations, since it also prohibits criticism of Israel by Israelis and Jewish people in Germany. The proposal for the Resolution has been enthusiastically supported by the AfD, the German far right party, who has been quite vocal about its usefulness as a tool against German Muslims. Their rhetoric is already contributing to an intensification of islamophobic attacks. Support from ‘centrist’ parties for the Resolution feels particularly ironice, as they have made no efforts at limiting the power of the AfD overall. On the contrary, they have borrowed from the rhetoric of AfD in order to sway far right voters back to the ‘centre’. As could be seen in the US elections, this method is not just ineffective, but swings a whole country to the far right.
What have people in Germany been doing against the Resolution? A main way of contesting it has been through legal paths. Because of its limiting of freedoms and its danger to minorities, the Resolution sits at odds with the German constitution in many aspects. Moreover, at a moment where the liberal German government is collapsing, and a shift to the far right seems likely, the Resolution paves the way for greater restrictions, not just regarding freedom of speech. Despite such contestations, the resolution has been passed, and the AfD has already started to shift its own antisemitism onto German Muslims (they frame it as the need to get rid of ‘imported antisemitism’). In response to this disastrous decision, a growing number of conferences offer counter discourse, inclusing the KriSol affiliated series Facing the Authoritarian Drift. I will update the list when I become aware of more examples. There has also been a book called ‘trotzdem sprechen’ (speaking regardless) with essays from critical community organisers, journalists, artists, academics and others.
If anyone would like to support the activities of KriSol, please get in touch via the website. There is also an English version in the making.
(Un)Fair Practices: Cultural Policy Between Artistic Freedom and Political Control?
5-7 December 2024 University of Hildesheim. Programme looks excellent and can be found here.
Talking about (the Silencing of) Palestine: On its Epistemological and Political Challenges
16-17th January 2025, originally at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, but the venue had to be moved to Medico International due to censorship. Interdisciplinary and International Conference, organised by Students4Palestine, Frankfurt am Main.
There is still a call for submissions and a call for donations. More information can be found here.
Postcolonial Critiques & Decolonial Perspectives
This lecture series has been put together by KriSol members at the national level:
Decolonization in Dialogue
There is also a local intitiative called Decolonization in Dialoge based at the University of Bonn. Their next talk is on 28 October and features Omer Bartov on ‘Israel, Gaza, and the Eternalization of War: Origins, Reality, and Future Scenarios’. You can register for it here. The speakers for next term will be announced shortly.
On Thursday, I attended a workshop in my department at Bonn on the relationship between postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theory, and teaching practice (part of this conference). A Swiss participant, Claske Dijkema, talked about museum ‘decolonisation’ and the opening that was created in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by Black Lives Matter. This opening closed abruptly with the government and media reactions to the Hamas attack on Israel. But even before this incident, there was criticism of postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theories because of their discruptive demands. Dijkema’s example was a historical school mural that illustrated the ABC with different animals. There was protest from parents and teachers, because racist artist had used a Black person as an illustration for the letter ‘N’, a Southeast Asian person for the letter ‘C’ and a Native American person for the letter ‘I’. The removal or covering of the mural proved intensely difficult, because it was seen as inappropriately ‘politically correct‘ and in conflict with ‘Denkmalschutz’ (heritage preservation/preservation order).
What struck me about the debate was the language around, and envisioned function of, preservation. I have personally experienced perservation as a double-edged sword. When developers threatened to destroy the legendary arts venue The Foundry, ironically by building an ‘art’otel’ in its place that would feature some of the Foundry’s graffitied interior (their slogan is ‘let’s make memories!’), the hopes of protesters like myself lay with preservation societies who opposed the building of yet another corporate skycraper. This was done with mixed feelings, given that preservation is equally (or rather, unequally) instrumentalied to maintain problematic infrastructures. Looking at the German word ‘Denkmalschutz’, I had to laugh. If you take the word apart, you get ‘Denk mal Schutz’ (protection from thought provocations), which remarkably accurately represents the deflection of critical engagement.
Screenshot from art’otel Hoxton website (10 October 2024)
I also had to think about the Berlin Wall, where no one screamed ‘Denkmalschutz’ when people went at it with sledge hammers. Yes, there are a few bits and pieces that are being preserved, but the oppressive object itself could happily be assaulted by anyone. The people who hack pieces off the wall are affectionately called ‘Mauerspechte’ (Specht = woodpecker; Mauer = wall). Similarly, after reunification, the German state encourage the demolition of East German architecture, especially monumental buildings such as the GDR Parliament (it has been replaced with a reconstruction of Germany’s imperial palace). By contrast, if anyone attacks racist monuments that contribute to the degradation and deaths of racialised people today, this is seen as a crime. In the US, the government even sees parallels with the destruction of ‘cultural property‘ by ISIS, in their attempt to classify Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organisation.
For obvious reasons, the two preservation discourses remain disconnected. It feels poignant that the article about the school in Bern uses the term ‘denkmalpflegerisch integral’ (integral to the preservation of a historic monument), which implies care (Pflege) – care for the preservation of racism. Such examples are all around. Walking through Bonn’s city centre for the first time, I noticed a racist figure, embodying multiple colonial stereotypes, prominently displayed on a building. It was accompanied by the house name ‘Im Mohren‘. I was surprised to find it in Germany’s former capital, and especially on a house that belongs to the Beethoven archive, right next to the composer’s birth house. When I looked it up, it turned out to be the house where Beethoven’s grandmother had lived and, later, where a colonial goods shop (Kolonialwarenladen) was located. The racist decoration was put in place, since house numbers were not common. Are any other figures up that replaced house numbers? No! Instead of thinking about this dissonance, the debate follows predictable patterns: the statue needs to be protected! (Even though it’s just a copy from 2003.) More cases around Bonn have been flagged, including street names and businesses, with a chemist eventually renaming themselves as part of a TV show. Mostly, however, there is talk about ‘contextualisation’.
It could be argued that this reluctance to engage with colonial legacies is really a deflection – a deflection that seems less about ‘Erinnerungskulturfatigue’ and more in line with the kind of imperial nostalgia I know from the UK. By this, I don’t mean that Germans have a specific longing for their own imperial past, but for bygone times where everything is imagined to have been easier and clearer, where the colonised did not speak back (they did but who cares). This also showed in a previous workshop on the same topic. Originally, this week’s workshop sought to address the future of the ‘Carl Troll Station‘, which critically engages with the former Bonn geographer. Troll, who even has a street named after him in the vicinity of the geography department, is presented as a supporter of colonialism and white supremacy. The previous workshop on the subject was attended by one of Troll’s former students who could not fathom in what terms his mentor was being discussed: ‘But he was such a great guy!’ It was very hard to find a way to talk to him, to shift him away from the nostalgia he sought in this space. I imagined the monoculture in which he existed/exists that allows for the evacuation of any doubt. Again, I am reminded of ‘Denk mal Schutz’.
There is a further dimension to this ‘Denk mal Schutz’. At the workshop, several participants worried that too much about the academic and public debate saround ‘decolonisation’, especially in Germany, is about the past. Statues of colonisers are singled out, further centering their personas. At the same time, on-going structural inequalities, and especially Germany’s participation in on-going colonial conflicts, are ignored (great work by Fatima El-Tayeb on this). If the kinds of connections that the discourse around coloniality demands were made, not only would calls for removal of such ‘historic monuments’ be much less controversial, but critiques of Germany’s on-going racist foundations and actions as well. Decolonial activists, including in nearby Cologne, have therefore called first and foremost for a ‘decolonisation of thinking‘. This is currently not the case. Instead, there is an aggressive fortification of ‘Denk mal Schutz’ across all official spheres of communication, which contributes to an even greater legalisation of racism.
This call starts with a polemic: that, despite their talk about a common human-nonhuman sociality, the majority of new materialisms have evacuated economics from the idea of the social. This statement is made with two disclaimers: 1) Early new materialist texts, such as Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985), Manuel DeLanda’s One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) or Bruno Latour’s Aramis, Or the Love of Technology (1996), did engage with economics, though this trajectory seems largely abandoned, affirmative of the status quo, or become replaced with an explicitly anti-anticapitalist rhetoric. 2) There are scholars who have been working on the economisation of the nonhuman (Barua, 2016; Clark & Yusoff, 2014; Ferreira da Silva, 2022; Mbembe, 2017; Murphy, 2017; Ouma, 2016; Swyngedouw, 1996; Tallbear, 2015; Tsing, 2015; Verran, 2011; Yusoff, 2017), though not necessarily through an exclusively new materialist framework.
It has been argued that new materialisms comprise a diverse set of theories. At the same time, there is a degree of homogeneity through the shared ambition to contest hegemonic Western thought patterns and related practices (e.g. binaries, anthropocentricity). This quasi decolonial focus on knowledge has also led to critiques of science, its function as part of colonialism, though mostly through the Western canon itself. While many new materialist authors have stressed the relation between science, or knowledge, and economics, it feels as the current form of economics has been too often accepted as given. In the search for improvements, this acceptance has led to problematic intellectual detours. Examples include forays into Malthusianism and environmental determinism, directions of thought to which most new materialisms have explicitly been opposed (Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2024; Lewis, 2017).
At the same time, this turn is not surprising. New materialisms’ theoretical alliances tend to be marked by hostility towards economics (e.g. criticism of Marx as humanist, privileging of Nietzsche who naturalised economic status). Further, there are obvious perils of decolonisation from within. This can be seen in the increasing adoption of far right and nationalist theorists (Schmitt, Heidegger, Péguy, Renan), as well as the seemingly untainted terminology of the ‘nonhuman’. As the current ‘culture wars’ illustrate, far right ideologies misrepresent (political, economic, physical) threats, using fabricated dangers (e.g. Muslims, trans people) to distract from economic issues in particular. There are growing parallels with new materialisms’ economic anxieties.
Against this development, this call represents an appeal for a more thoughtful engagement with new materialisms’ decolonial ambitions and how such reconsiderations might translate into an engagement with economics. As authors such as Zoe Todd (2016) have argued, this needs to entail a greater dialogue with decolonial approaches in the first place. In the recognition of a common desire to expand the social beyond the human, both approaches carry a potential to challenge current economic imaginaries. This does not merely encompass questions about the valuation of ‘nature’ and the boundaries that are drawn around it for this very purpose. It is also, more generally, about the ability to expose the very material foundations of seemingly immaterial processes. Such investigations could, for example, respond to the imaginations of financial flows and other ‘unreal’ economic processes, or uncover historical relations that carry the potential for change.
Format
We invite submissions from any discipline and any interpretation of ‘new materialism’. As a digital open access journal, we also encourage non-traditional formats. Submissions may include standard academic articles, visual essays, audio or audiovisual pieces, creative writing (e.g. poetry).
References
Barua, Maan. ‘Lively Commodities and Encounter Value’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 4 (August 2016): 725–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815626420.
Clark, Nigel, and Kathryn Yusoff. ‘Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use’. Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 5 (September 2014): 203–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414536929.
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Swerve Editions. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. On the Antipolitical, v. 1. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’. Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65–107.
Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. 4. printing. Cambridge, Massachusetts London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Mbembe, Achille, and Laurent Dubois. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Murphy, Michelle. The Economization of Life. Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2017.
Ouma, Stefan. ‘From Financialization to Operations of Capital: Historicizing and Disentangling the Finance–Farmland-Nexus’. Geoforum 72 (June 2016): 82–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003.
Swyngedouw, Erik. ‘The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 7, no. 2 (June 1996): 65–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455759609358679.
TallBear, Kim. ‘An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2 (2015): 230–35. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/581600#sub08.
Todd, Zoe. ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For Colonialism’. Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Verran, Helen. ‘Imagining Nature Politics in the Era of Australia’s Emerging Market in Environmental Services Interventions’. The Sociological Review 59, no. 3 (August 2011): 411–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02017.x.
Yusoff, Kathryn. ‘Indeterminate Subjects, Irreducible Worlds: Two Economies of Indeterminacy’. Body & Society 23, no. 3 (September 2017): 75–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X17716746.
Mutable Matter 