Veranstaltungen

On December 7, 2023, Sabine N. Meyer from the University of Bonn will join for a guest lecture. Under the title „Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature,“ she will talk about The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) and Black Indigenous Literature. Please find an abstract of her talk below. The lecture will be held on Zoom from 12 to 2 pm.

If you would like to join, please use this link: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/62362308168

„Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature“

Over the last two decades, Black Indigenous literature, that is, literary works written by authors who identify as Black Indigenous, has emerged as a prominent medium for the negotiation of Black Indigeneity and for carving out a space outside the racial order implemented by North American settler states since the 18^th century. My talk sets out to explore negotiations of Black Indigenous identity and relationality in one of the most recent examples of Black Indigenous fiction, Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021). My close reading demonstrates that the novel, through theme and form, consequently thinks together Blackness and Indigeneity in both past and present and explores the possibilities of shared Black Indigenous futures. Throughout my analysis, I also emphasize why it is important for scholars to engage with Black Indigenous literary production: shedding light on the politics and methodological limits of Western epistemologies and advancing alternative ways of knowing and making known, Black Indigenous literature is useful for confronting the “impasse between Blackness and Indigeneity” (Cheryl Harris) that has come to dominate discourses on Blackness and Indigeneity inside and outside academia.

We are delighted to announce that Hanjo Berressem (Cologne/Colorado Springs) will hold a guest lecture at „Practicing Place“ that we organize in collaboration with the department for American Studies at the University of Munich:

Title: Concrete Ecology: Brutalist Architecture with Félix Guattari
Date: November 28
Time: 6 pm

You can download the poster for the lecture here.

The lecture will take place virtually. Please contact gk-practicingplace@ku.de if you would like to join!

We are delighted to announce that Bernard Geoghegan (Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences) will hold a guest lecture at „Practicing Place“ on November 16:

Title: Poetics of Rendering: How Graphics Format Territories
Date: November 16
Time: 6 pm

The lecture will only be accessible through Zoom:

https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64048402969?pwd=NVF4SUozZ2RiMEE2RE1rQ0JhOUlqUT09

We will be joined on the 21st of July 2022 for a lunchtime guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky. Visiting us from the American Studies department at the University of Augsburg. The lecture will be held at KGA-304.

Narratives of Displacement and Place-Making: Notions of Diaspora in Indigenous literatures

‘Place’ is a central issue in Indigenous literatures and, as numerous Indigenous writers and scholars have highlighted, in Indigenous epistemologies, with communal and political practices, as Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, “reflective of the relationality of the local landscape” (2017, 3). The settler colonial politics of displacement and dispossession over the past centuries thus present a violent disruption of fundamental relations; land rights, accordingly, are crucial to contemporary struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in Canada and the United States, with ‘place’ inextricably interwoven with notions community, its history, its land relations, and its language.
But geographical displacements have also at times led to new land relations and community formations that did not erase memories of the community history and place connections so violently disrupted, but incorporated them into processes of renewed place-making. Some writers, for instance the Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez (2021), use the term ‘diaspora’ to account for community building away from but tied to ancestral lands. For many scholars, ‘diaspora’ is a term antithetical to Indigenous experiences and constellations (e.g., Clifford 1994; Coleman 2017); for others, it offers a potentially productive avenue to capture complexly interlinked processes of place-loss, place-experience, and place-making (e.g., McCall 2010).
In light of these debates, this talk will explore the potential and the limits of ‘diaspora’ in the work of Muscogee poet, musician, playwright, and memoirist Joy Harjo, the incumbent United States Poet Laureate. In her more recent work, Harjo pays increasing attention not only to Muscogee territory of her youth in Oklahoma – a constant in her poetic engagement with place for decades – but also to the lands in Alabama from which the Muscogee were expelled in the 1830s to be forcibly resettled in the ‘Indian Territory’ that was to become Oklahoma. This talk does not seek to make claims regarding the general valence of ‘diaspora’ in Indigenous contexts; rather, I am interested in how this specific poet’s work might help complicate notions of place-making and diaspora.

References:
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994), pp. 302-338.
Coleman, Daniel. “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space: Of Literalism and Abstraction.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2016), pp. 61-76.
McCall, Sophie. „Diasporas, Indigenous Sovereignties, and Metis Writing in Canada.” Canadian Literature, vol. 204 (2010), p. 121.
Perez, Craig Santos. Navigating Chamoru Poetry. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp – Audio Walk Gusen (2007) leads users through three market towns in Upper Austria which during World War II were the sites of concentration camps. Mayer’s artistic sound collage succeeds to visualize a long supressed past in an individual listener’s mind, and establishes an intimate and reflective form of commemoration which leads to critical questioning of neglected or institutionalized practices of commemoration. My talk reflects on how Mayer succeeds to bridge the distance to this past and makes it relevant for us today, and explains in which way his artistic practice can act as a guideline for the creation of other memory works elsewhere – especially in places where most traces of the past were erased and where everyday life goes hand in hand with a will to remember a painful past which happened right there.

 The event is going to be filmed and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel shortly after.

ZOOM: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/8535747861

Everyone is welcome to attend this talk; to receive the Zoom-Link, please send an email to: gk-practicingplace@ku.de

Everyone is welcome to attend this talk; to receive the Zoom-Link, please send an email to: gk-practicingplace@ku.de