Can literature – similar to stolen art – become colonial loot? The talk addresses the European appropriation of African literatures under colonialism and provides an insight into the research of literary provenance: from the recording situation of oral literatures to their ethnological publication and their avant-garde adaptations to their commodification on the market of ‘world literature’.
“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”
Norman Sieroka
“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”
Gisela Febel
“‘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
“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”
Martin Nonhoff
“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”
Martin Nonhoff