Sabine Mohamed

#MustFall: Überlegungen zur Dekolonialisierung und einer postkolonialen Ästhetik an der Universität

Shortlink: https://www.waxmann.com/artikelART104491

Buy article

Abstract

The desire of postcolonial and aesthetic forms of education invokes a complex set of questions: How do we know what we know, how do we excavate ‘gaps’ in our epistemic interrogations, how do we trace the symptoms of systematic erasure of particular forms of knowledge production, and the lack thereof? This essay is situated within ongoing debates about decolonizing the social science canon such as proliferated in the discourse of the South African 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement. In doing so, this essay describes classroom interactions in Eritrea and Germany as spaces of potentiality, transience, and pragmatism, and explores how mobilizations for decolonization and postcolonial approaches have been configured more broadly. Even if statues and social science canons are being deconstructed, there is also the materiality of the archive, which is shaped by what lies outside. And more importantly, if we seek for a decolonization of the canon, what do we replace the canon with? Spivak’s provocation that only through imagination (not through a further gathering of information nor forms of rationalization), can we achieve an epistemic transformation in the classroom, brings us back to Schiller. Yet we find a resonance unfolding with Adorno and Ngũgĩ’s elaboration on aesthetics and decolonization as well as the politics of identity and
authenticity. Thus, this essay is at the intersection of language, (post-)coloniality, and aesthetic education and aims to think of the canon as the outside and a ‘feverish’ potential for new powerful, yet always contested inscriptions.

APA citation
Mohamed S. (2020). #MustFall: Überlegungen zur Dekolonialisierung und einer postkolonialen Ästhetik an der Universität. Tertium Comparationis, 26(1), 22-37. https://www.waxmann.com/artikelART104491