Blackness as a Universal Claim. Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures and Black Power in Berlin

Damani Partridge (U Michigan), Rozena Maart (U KwaZulu-Natal) & Lewis R. Gordon (U Connecticut)

06/20/2023 6:00 pm

U Bremen CART 067 (Rotunde)

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.

Professor Damani Partridge (U Michigan) diskutiert sein neues Buch Blackness as a Universal claim. Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Furtures and Black Power in Berlin mit Professor Rozena Maart (U KwaZulu-Natal) und Professor Lewis R. Gordon (UCON). Moderation: Dr. Katrin Antweiler (IfEK/WoC, U Bremen).

Back to overview
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
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
articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff
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