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Living with Contradictions as a Mixed-Race Person

Deborah Ekoka, Kwanza Musi Dos Santos & Samia Mohammed

11/16/2023 7:00 pm –9:00 pm

Kukoon Kulturzentrum | Buntentorsteinweg 29-31, 28201 Bremen

Being a black person in Europe can be challenging, but the experience is even more arduous for mixed races. Navigating between multiple cultural identities and belongingness, an interracial individual often confronts conflicting expectations and may feel marginalised in a world that can be inhospitable.

“I am black and I am white; I am not black and I am not white”. This quote comes from Deborah Ekoka, in her article and in the collective book (Metamba Miago) which she coordinated and contributed to as a co-author, the duality and self-contradiction that a person of mixed-race faces in regard to their racial identity is explored. This experience is further complicated when others attempt to categorise and label the individual into a rigid identity box, failing to recognise the intricacies and complexities of their construction as a subject. In a society fixated on binary distinctions, mixed-race individuals must navigate and construct their own identity through the negotiation between various forms of otherness.  This event features a conversation between Deborah Ekoka (Afro-Spanish), Kwanza Musi Dos Santos (Afro-Italian) and Samia Mohammed (Afro-German) who will be sharing their personal insights about the complexities of identity construction and the subjectivation of mixed-race individuals in Europe.

Kukoon Kulturzentrum | Bundentorsteinweg 29-31, 28201 Bremen. Doors open at 18:00.

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Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

Kerstin Knopf
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
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