Contradiction Studies

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

Prof. Lewis R. Gordon (U Connecticut)

06/19/2023 6:00 pm

U Bremen CART 067 (Rotunde) & online

Drawing upon ideas from Fear of Black Consciousness (Penguin, 2022) / Angst vor Schwarzem Bewusstsein (Ullstein Verlag, 2022), this talk will offer a portrait
of Black existentialism, summarizing some of its key problematics with emphasis on problems wrought from Euromodern colonization of knowledge. The talk
will conclude with a discussion of what decolonizing knowledge entails.

Podium:

Prof. Lewis R. Gordon (U Connecticut)
Prof. Rozena Maart (U KwaZulu Natal, RTG Contradiction Studies)
Prof. Sabine Broeck (INPUTS)
Lindokuhle Shabane (RTG Contradiction Studies)

Moderation:
Prof. Kerstin Knopf (INPUTS, RTG Contradiction Studies)

Back to overview
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
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
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana
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