Panel Discussions

In this bold and provocative new book, Damani Partridge examines the possibilities and limits for a universalized Black politics. German youth of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for racism today. Partridge tracks how these young people take on the expressions of Black Power, acting out the scene from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming “I am Malcolm X,” expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents public school teachers, federal program leaders, and politicians demanding that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state’s commitment to anti-genocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships between European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how Blackness is a concept that energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.

Rozena Maart (U KwaZulu-Natal) and Lewis R. Gordon (UCON), moderated by Katrin Antweiler (IfEK/WoC, U Bremen).

Hegel arguably developed and disseminated racist and pro-colonialist views. At the same time, he has been a source of inspiration for generations of progressive philosophers, incl. thinkers in the Black radical tradition and their accounts of liberation. „Hegel(anti)kolonial“ is a project that aims to examine this ambivalent colonial legacy, both by discussing Hegel’s own texts and thought and by exploring issues of race and colonialism in traditions of post-Hegelian thought. In this talk, we exemplify this approach by focusing on one key instance, the topic of transatlantic slavery. In lectures and publications during his Berlin period, Hegel provides a series of comments on transatlantic slavery that we discuss in the first part of our talk. Constructing the debate on the abolition of slavery as an ‚antinomy‘ between anti- and pro-slavery views, he argues that slavery ultimately has to be overcome, but he also holds that as a tool for ‚disciplining‘ people of African descent (who, on his degrading account, lack the mental preconditions for a life in freedom) slavery is provisionally legitimate, and should not be abolished immediately. Hegel’s partial defense of slavery draws on his famous ‚master-slave‘ dialectic, which later would become a point of reference for various authors in the Black radical tradition. Among them, the second part of our talk singles out Angela Davis, who discusses the master-slave dialectic in her 1970 Lectures on Liberation, through the lens of Frederick Douglass’s account of his liberation. As we will show, Davis separates the ‚master-slave‘ dialectic from its apologetic context and drops the racialist background assumptions that supported Hegel’s partial defense of slavery. Instead, she emphasises the role of struggle (as opposed to ‚discipline‘) in liberating the enslaved. Davis, too, conceptualizes these issues in terms of a contradiction, but she locates it elsewhere than Hegel with his ‚antinomy‘ of slavery − namely, in the ‚paradox‘ of bourgeois philosophy that claims freedom for all humans, while de facto denying it to many.

The dominant understanding of academia assumes that beneficial participation for all involved (students, early career researchers, academic staff…) is based primarily on the ability to make a valuable intellectual contribution to research. In reality, however, universities – and higher education as a whole – are complex social systems in which the agency and access of each individual is determined in multiple ways, including by gender, ethnicity, social class, and health status. These determinations can create powerful cultural and social barriers and inequalities. In the panel discussion “(Breaking) Barriers in Science: Mapping the Field,” we will try to overcome the taboo of not addressing them, identify the most common types of barriers, consider strategies for addressing them, and narrow down the future content of our Navigating Academia series.v

The first discussion in WoC’s new Agora format will focus on the exclusionary effects of contemporary discourses and politics of inclusion. Taking the globalization and mediatization of the Black Lives Matter movement as a starting point, the event will discuss transcultural negotiations of anti-racism against the backdrop of different colonial histories.