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Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures

Dr. Deborah Nyangulu (RTG Contradiction Studies) & Dr. Jana Weiss (The University of Texas at Austin)

02/23/2024 02/25/2024

U Texas at Austin

Dr. Deborah Nyangulu and Dr. Jana Weiss convened the ‘Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures` conference at the University of Texas at Austin from Feb 23 – 25. The event featured a range of speakers who engaged with, among others, questions of Black freedom, memory cultures, , the Black radical tradition, African diaspora, and digital humanities. Prof. Dr. Ashley D. Farmer (UT Austin) and independent researcher, writer, and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola gave the keynote addresses. The conference also featured a roundtable on the topic of ‘Black Atlantic Affordance and Digital Humanities’ with speakers Kelly Baker Josephs, Justin Dunnavant,  Amani Morrison, and moderated by Deborah Nyangulu.

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ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf