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’.
“‘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
“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”
Kerstin Knopf
“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”
Gisela Febel
“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”
Ingo H. Warnke
“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”
Gisela Febel