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’.
“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”
Gisela Febel
“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”
Ingo H. Warnke
“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”
Julia Lossau
“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
“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”
Kerstin Knopf