Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures

Dr. Deborah Nyangulu and Dr. Jana Weiss convened the ‚Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures` conference at the University of Texas at Austin from Feb 23 – 25. The event featured a range of speakers who engaged with, among others, questions of Black freedom, memory cultures, , the Black radical tradition, African diaspora, and digital humanities. Prof. Dr. Ashley D. Farmer (UT Austin) and independent researcher, writer, and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola gave the keynote addresses. The conference also featured a roundtable on the topic of ‚Black Atlantic Affordance and Digital Humanities‘ with speakers Kelly Baker Josephs, Justin Dunnavant,  Amani Morrison, and moderated by Deborah Nyangulu.

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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
name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
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
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau