Contradiction Studies

Literature as Colonial Loot? Provenance Stories 1910–2021

Irene Albers, Andreas Schmid & Stefan Schawe (FU Berlin)

10/29/2024 2:15 pm 3:45 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

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’.

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space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
every day

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

Gisela Febel
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
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
articulate

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

Martin Nonhoff