RTG Contradiction Studies

Reading the Present with History. Reading the Past with Anthropology

Andrea Rueda Herrera (Universidad Pablo de Olavide | Doctoral Visitor at RTG 2686)

11/26/2024 2:15 pm 3:45 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

This talk focuses on an afro-diasporic community located in an Andalusian town (Southern Spain). It concerns a series of families whose identity is linked to the early modern slave trade, while Spanish mainstream society tends not to remember this period of its history. During the session, we will reflect on the boundaries between history and social experience in this specific context.

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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
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
idea of democratic critique

“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
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke