The Decolonial Contradiction: German Proscription and the Necessities of Refusal
In response to efforts to broaden the bounds of Holocaust and genocide memory, German institutions have been pushed to contend with the country’s history of colonial genocide, namely the attempted annihilation of Ovaherero and Nama people in the former colony of South West Africa (present-day Namibia) at the beginning of the 20th century. In this vein, I was invited by the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden (the Dresden State Art Collections) to produce an exhibition engaging the political relationship between East Germany and the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the internationally recognized leader of Namibia’s independence movement and present ruling party, in relation to the history (and present afterlife) of the genocide.Through an analytic of socialist [ethno]statecraft and denialism that sought to understand both a longue durée of German coloniality and the Nama and Ovaherero’s claims for restitution in the present, conflict emerged because of my claim that Germany had not fully recognized the genocide. The contours of the conflict, incidentally, conformed to the existent tensions between the state’s regime of memory as enforced — often repressively — by cultural institutions and movement- and community-facing solidarity politics that challenge that dogma. Thus, this paper attempts an auto-theoretical narration of the breakdown of the process of curatorial collaboration. It attempts to describe the subjective experience of anti-black racial disciplining, the challenge of postcolonial narrations of imperial German genocide against Holocaust exceptionalism, and how one might conclude withdrawal as an ethical imperative.
ARTMargins, Volume 15, Issue 2, pp. 6-28.
doi:10.1162/ARTM.a.373
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/15/2/6/137306/The-Decolonial-Contradiction-German-Proscription
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