RTG Contradiction Studies

Faces of Enslavement: Contradictions, Contestations and Complexities

Prof. Rozena Maart (Mercator Fellow at the RTG Contradiction Studies)

10/15/2024 4:15 pm 5:45 pm

U Bremen GRA2 0030 & online

Within the history of the Cape, the southern most tip of Africa, the period of Enslavement began in 1652 from the East and West of Africa, then from Bengal, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mauritius. The project “Faces of Enslavement” is part of a larger project called HISTORIES OF ENSLAVEMENT, and focus on how the enslaved population were named after the month of their enslavement.

Back to overview
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
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
coherence in thought

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

Yan Suarsana
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