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.
“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
“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”
Kerstin Knopf
“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”
Ingo H. Warnke
“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
“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”
Martin Nonhoff