Colonialism

La collecte d’objets fut une pratique fréquente dans les territoires occupés par les États européens colonisateurs. À partir de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, les pouvoirs coloniaux encourageaient leurs citoyens implantés dans les colonies à rassembler des objets pour enrichir les collections ethnographiques de la métropole et pour documenter la culture matérielle des sociétés qui – sous l’emprise de la colonisation – se transformaient rapidement. Les objets rassemblés lors de ces collectes se trouvent désormais dans de nombreux musées européens ou entre les mains de collectionneurs privés. Leur présence dans ces collections pose des questions épistémologiques, muséographiques et éthiques qu’il est urgent de soulever.

Ce livre, qui trouve son origine dans une série de tables rondes qui se déroulèrent dans le cadre de la 8e Biennale de Berlin pour l’art contemporain en 2014, engage donc ces problématiques grâce à des contributions de chercheuses et chercheurs, d’artistes ainsi que de commissaires d’expositions internationaux.

Collecting objects was a frequent practice among European colonial states in their occupied territories. From the second half of the nineteenth century, colonial powers encouraged their citizens in the colonies to collect objects that would enrich the ethnographical collections of the mother country and document the material culture of societies that – under the influence of colonialization – were undergoing rapid change. The objects collected ended up in countless European museums or in the hands of private collectors. Their presence in these collections raises epistemological, museographical and ethical questions in urgent need of consideration.

This publication, the fruit of a series of round tables held in 2014 during the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, raises these problematic issues with contributions from scholars, artists and international exhibition curators.

Avec les contributions de/ with contributions by :

Mathieu K. Abonnenc Lotte Arndt Julien Bondaz Candice Lin Françoise Vergès Sammy Baloji Phillip Van den Bossche Patricia Van Schuylenbergh Abraham Cruzvillegas Eduardo Abaroa Spyros Papapetros Catalina Lozano Hanne Loreck Pauline M’barek Ricardo Roque Pratchaya Phinthong Britta Lange

ISBN 9782917855683, 328 p. engl/français, carton, € 24 (2016).

http://editions-b42.com/books/ramper-dedoubler/

This article discusses the critical remarks and comments that Omer Bartov, Eric Katz and Jessica Rapson offered in response to our articles published in the theme issue of the Journal of Genocide Research on "The Environmental History of the Holocaust." In our response, we clarify our understanding of how an environmental perspective can contribute to Holocaust studies. We focus on three issues; firstly: we position our research in the context of critical Holocaust studies, an emerging field in Poland, in order to draw attention to the geographically conditioned global distribution of knowledge and thus undermine convictions that non-Western humanities are necessarily peripheral. Secondly, we emphasize that the comparative perspective we adopt to address different genocides and ecocides neither seeks to undermine the uniqueness of the Holocaust nor deprive victims and survivors of their individual identity. What we do resembles the “experiments in thinking about the Holocaust” proposed by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, demonstrating that new approaches to Holocaust studies do not want to compete with dominant modes of research, but rather supplement and complement them. Thirdly, we argue that transcending the anthropocentric perspective in Holocaust studies can expand the spectrum of testimonies and evidence to also include non-human objects, such as trees. What we propose, then, is an analysis of new kinds of sources in an effort towards developing new approaches and methods for exploring this subject. We show how current ecological debates mean that it is crucial to take into account environmental factors when planning sites of Holocaust commemoration. In light of this, we not only ask how an environmental history of the Holocaust can expand knowledge on the relationship between genocides and ecocides, but also how future-oriented thinking about the legacies of the Holocaust can influence strategies and practices of preserving it. We see potential in posing questions relating to how the Holocaust can provide a point of reference for studying other genocides as well as how an environmental (and also indigenous and postcolonial) perspective can further develop and enrich research on the Shoah.

"Our volume brings together twelve essay, covering a wide period for the perception of Dalmatia -- from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries – and from various perspectives and through various media.... Together, the essays in this volume create a rich collage of fragments, telling a story of the multi-layered heritage of Dalmatia, which only expands and mul- tiplies through further research. These are fragments connected through time, over various disciplines and media; they are linked by a desire for travel, dialogue, and above all for the sightlines and perspectives of the “other” gaze – so that Dalmatia might be experienced as a component in a shared cultural heritage, whose currents and threads touch and intertwine, just like the research of the authors whose work this book brings together." -- Ana Šverko, "Preface: A Collage of Fragments"

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

Lill-Ann Körber & Ebbe Volquardsen (eds.): The Postcolonial North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands (= Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik; 20) Berlin: Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt Universität 2014,  422 p., ISBN 978-3-932406-35-5, € 49,80.  Order your copy here: bbzs@hu-berlin.de //
Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands have in common their history as Danish dependencies within a historically and geographically coherent region. The complex aftermaths of Denmark’s sovereignty over its North Atlantic territories and their ongoing nation building processes lie at the core of this book. Today, we are witnessing region building processes beyond bilateral links to Denmark. How do the countries position themselves, individually and collectively, vis-à-vis the European metropolitan centres, a larger transcontinental North Atlantic region, the »hot« Arctic, and global histories of colonialism and decolonisation? By examining the region from cultural, literary, historical, political, anthropological and linguistic perspectives, the articles in this book shed light on Nordic colonialism and its understanding as »exceptional«, and challenge and modify established notions of postcolonialism. Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands are shown to be both the (former) subjects as well as the producers of cultural hierarchisations in an entangled world.

After a historical overview of migration within Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Minnucci), this collection of essays addresses Mediterranean issues: the case of Ceuta and Melilla (Sagnella), the relationship between Tunisia and the European Union (Gerli), the changes in North Africa from the Arab Spring to the Islamic State (Musso), the Lampedusa case (Strano), some European Models of citizenship (Turco), a focus on female genital mutilation/cutting in the context of migration (Faraca) and another one on the representation of immigrants in Italian Media (Elbreki). This collection of essays by young researchers analyzes, through various innovative approaches, the role of the Mediterranean and migration experiences.