Eine Gruppe von Wissenschaftler*innen appelliert auf ZEIT.de für einem neuen Umgang mit Kolonialgeschichte:
[Announcement] Achille Mbembe on „The Capacity for Truth: Of ‘Restitution’ in African Systems of Thought“
A.W. Amo Lecture
14th November 2018, 18h15, Melanchthonianum XX, MLU, Universitätsplatz 8/9, Halle
Achille Mbembe
WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
The Capacity for Truth: Of ‘Restitution’ in African Systems of Thought
The lecture will explore some of the meanings attached to the concept and practice of restitution in precolonial African systems of thought. It will dwell in particular on those traditions that considered the most damaging wrongs as those causing harm to one’s ‘vital force’. We will elicit the juridical underpinnings of the right to restitution and revisit the relation between ‘persons’ and ‘objects’ it presupposed.
Achille Mbembe is currently Research Professor at WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He obtained his Ph.D. in history at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, France, in 1989. He subsequently obtained a D.E.A. in political science at the Instituts d’études politiques also in Paris. He has held appointments at Columbia University in New York, Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Duke University and at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal. Today, Achille Mbembe figures as the most renown philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual of the African continent and won several outstanding prizes, also in Germany. His most important works are: Les jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985) ; La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920-1960); Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996); De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (2000); Sortir de la grande nuit : Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2003); Critique de la raison nègre (2013); Politique de l’inimitié (2016). Most of his books have been translated into English and German.
Download Announcement here.
Call for reviews of the “Guidelines on Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts” issued by the German Museums Association in May 2018
by Larissa Förster
See for the German version:
https://www.museumsbund.de/publikationen/leitfaden-zum-umgang-mit-sammlungsgut-aus-kolonialen-kontexten
See for the English version:
https://www.museumsbund.de/publikationen/guidelines-on-dealing-with-collections-from-colonial-contexts/
In a multi-step process the draft will be discussed with experts and stakeholders and revised accordingly. As a first step, an internal workshop will be held with experts from the countries where collections originated (Hamburg, October 29-30, 2018). A second and revised version of the guidelines will be published in spring 2019.
Since its release, the draft guidelines can also be reviewed online – by whoever takes an interest and would like to make a comment. To submit your comment or review (in German or English) please e-mail to: office@museumsbund.de or use the comment section of this blog!
All comments received until December 1, 2018, will be read, forwarded to the members of the working group and discussed.
The working group on behalf of the Board of the German Museums Association is chaired by Wiebke Ahrndt. Its members are Hans-Jörg Czech, Jonathan Fine, Larissa Förster, Michael Geißdorf, Matthias Glaubrecht, Katarina Horst, Melanie Kölling, Silke Reuther, Anja Schaluschke, Carola Thielecke, Hilke Thode-Arora, Anne Wesche, Jürgen Zimmerer. Veit Didczuneit and Christoph Grunenberg contributed to the “Guidelines” as external authors.
As a member of the working group I look forward to a lively discussion – this is what is needed in order to explore ways of dealing meaningfully with colonial legacies in German museums!
Larissa Förster is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and member of the editorial board of “Wie weiter mit Humboldts Erbe?”.