Cover of the book „Stadt der Kolonien“: Wie Bremen den deutschen Kolonialismus prägte. You can see the stone elephant in front of the Bremen train station.

Die Überseestadt: Spiegel kolonialer Verhältnisse

Contribution

Lilli Hasche & Janne Jensen

2024

The Bremen Überseestadt, constructed as a new harbor between 1875 and 1913, reflects the close connections between harbor infrastructure and European colonialism. The increase in cargo handling, particularly of colonial commodities, necessitated new port facilities and the deepening of the Weser River. Despite its transformation into a modern urban area, the colonial past remains inadequately addressed to this day. The text calls for making the colonial entanglements visible as an integral part of Bremen’s trade history.

In Aselmeyer, Norman & Virginie Kamche (eds.) „Stadt der Kolonien“: Wie Bremen den deutschen Kolonialismus prägte, 50-54. Freiburg/Breisgau: Herder.

print
ISBN: 978-3-451-39923-7

ebook
ISBN: 978-3-451-83389-2

Back to overview
l’illusion d’une unité

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

Ingo H. Warnke
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
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
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
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht