Notes
Contents
Preface
3
Overview
4
Thursday
6
Teachers Workshop
12
Friday
14
Saturday
16
Sunday
22
Exhibitions
24
Abstracts
26
Conference Venues
76
Imprint
79
The Team
80
1
General Information
Conference Office / Registration:
Thursday, Saturday, Sunday
Universität Potsdam
Am Neuen Palais 10
14467 Potsdam
House 8, Foyer 0.60/61
9:00 am till late
Friday
Werkstatt der Kulturen
Wissmannstraße 32
12049 Berlin
Foyer, 1st floor
9:00 am - 3:30 pm
see p. 76 for detailed directions
see p. 76 for detailed directions
Emergency Phone +49 157 37 42 51 10
Travel Advice
Please be advised that May 29 is a public holiday and most shops will
be closed.
This day is celebrated by some in Germany as a so-called 'Herrentag'
(Man's Day). This often alcohol-fuelled celebration can sometimes
take an ugly turn in terms of racist, sexist or misogynist verbal and
physical violence. If possible, avoid groups of revellers and in general
make sure you don’t travel alone on public transport during the evening and night hours.
If you feel threatened or in danger call 110 or 112 for help.
2
Preface
Welcome
Welcome to
Postcolonial Justice!
We are thrilled to welcome you to this joint ASNEL/GASt conference on a topic that has been dear to
us for a while now. Potsdam's English and American Studies Department has undergone significant
changes over the past five years, as four new professors in the fields of literary and cultural studies
took up posts. Sharing a profound interest in postcolonial studies, the four of us decided to organise
this event together with our PhD candidates and students from our new MA programme 'Anglophone
Modernities in Literature and Culture'. In our preparations, we were able to build on two summer
schools, both of which sought to address questions of 'justice' from different angles: In 2012, an international group of students participated in our summer school Minor Cosmopolitanisms and were
taught by an equally international team of lecturers from our Australian, Indian and South African partner universities. And in 2013, our own students followed suit in organising the immensely successful
ASNEL summer school Just Politics: Postcolonial Ecocriticism between Imagination and Occupation;
an event that brought together scholars keen on reconciling socio-political demands for justice with
ecocritical concerns.
In focussing yet again on the issue of justice, we are also hoping to ground the strong concern with
the postcolonial that is shared by both of our associations in the situated locality of the Berlin-Brandenburg region. It is little known, for instance, that the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische Compagnie dominated the
international slave trade for a brief period around 1700; it is also little known that one of Australia's
most famous explorers of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Leichhardt, was born in Brandenburg in
1813 and undertook part of his university education in Berlin. The Berlin Conference of 1884-5,
on the other hand, is common knowledge, for it was here that international agreements on the
regulation of European colonisation and trade in Africa for the closing decades of the nineteenth
century were agreed upon and Germany's role as an imperial power was settled. We invite you to
engage with this legacy in special events dedicated to debates around Berlin's colonial collections in
museums and university archives (→ Thursday, 29 May) and to contemporary perspectives on the
postcolonial from Berlin by academics and writers (→ Friday, 30 May).
This is the first time that ASNEL and GASt have teamed up to organise an international conference,
and we are fortunate that this collaboration coincides with the 25th anniversary of both of our associations.
This should give extra weight, we think, to our conversations over the next couple of days, as it
should give us ample opportunity to celebrate the diversity and strength of scholarship that is produced
by our members and guests. Together with you, we are looking forward to four exciting conference
days filled with keynote lectures, panel discussions, artists' interventions, film screenings, literary
readings, teachers' workshops, exhibitions and hopefully countless stimulating discussions.
Lars Eckstein, Anja Schwarz, Nicole Waller and Dirk Wiemann
3
Wednesday, 28 May - Potsdam, Freundschaftsinsel
Conference Warming
Inselcafé Freundschaftsinsel, Lange Brücke, 14467 Potsdam
7:00 pm
Thursday, 29 May - Potsdam, Neues Palais
9:30 - 10:00 am
Opening
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ratna Kapur
10:00am - 12:30 pm
GASt General Meeting
or Visitor Programme
12:30 - 3:00 pm
ASNEL Annual General Meeting
or Visitor Programme
Lunch
3:00 pm
Poster Session
Panels 2a-g
4:00 pm
Opening
Coffee
4:15 - 5:15 pm
Keynote Paul Gilroy
5:15 - 7:00 pm
Plenary
Post-Colonial Justice and the
City: Reflections from/on
Berlin
Coffee
11:30am - 1:00 pm
Panels 1a-g
2:00 - 3:30 pm
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Friday, 30 May - Berlin. Werkstatt der Kulturen
Panels 3a-g
Reading
Gail Jones
5:45 - 6:15 pm
Dinner
Conversation
R. Raymond & H. Gilbert
6:15 - 7:30 pm
Wine Reception
7:30 - 8:30 pm
Artist Keynote Fiona Foley
8:30 - 10:00 pm
Plenary
Addressing a Difficult
Legacy - Indigenous
Ancestral Remains in
German Collections
Teachers Workshop - Potsdam, Neues Palais
9:30 am
Opening
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ratna Kapur
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Teachers Keynote R. West-Pavlov
Lunch
2:00 - 3:30 pm
Workshop I and II
Coffee
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Workshop III
4
8:00 - 10:00 pm
Reading
Rajeev Balasubramanyam
Priya Basil
Helon Habila
Note: The teachers workshop runs parallel to the first
conference day. Conference participants are invited
to attend the Teachers Keynote; participants in the
teachers workshop are welcome to attend all other
events of the first conference day.
Programme
Overview
Saturday, 31 May - Potsdam, Neues Palais
Sunday, 01 June - Potsdam, Neues Palais
9:30 - 10:30 am
Keynote Benita Parry
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ann Curthoys
Coffee
11:15am - 12:45 pm
Panels 6 a-d
11:00am - 12:30 pm
Panels 4 a-f
Film Screening
Cracks in the Mask
(Frances Calvert, 1997)
Sumugan Sinavesan
Visual Lecture 'Alex & I'
Lunch
1:30 - 2:30 pm
Awards Ceremony / Celebrating
25 years of ASNEL and GASt
2:30 - 3:30 pm
Keynote Suvendrini Perera
Coffee & Light Lunch
1:30 - 2:15 pm
Closing Discussion
Coffee
4:00 - 5:15 pm
Panels 5 a-g
5:30 - 6:45 pm
Round Table
Postcolonial American Studies
Film Screening
Dhakiyarr vs the King
(Tom Murray, 2004)
7:10 / 7:30 pm
Departure
Conference Dinner & Party
10:00 pm
Concert
Il Civetto (Balkan Swing)
5
Reading: Gail Jones
Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black
Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry and Five Bells. Three times shortlisted in Australia for
the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble
Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for
Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal. She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including
the IMPAC and the Prix Femina. Her fiction has been translated into thirteen languages.
Rosanna Raymond in Conversation with Helen Gilbert
Putting the Va in ConserVAtion: Art and Access in Museum Spaces
Though discussion, spoken word performance and video-art, London-based Pasifikan artist Rosanna
Raymond explores issues of ownership and responsibility in the modern ethnographic museum, in
dialogue with scholar and dramaturg Helen Gilbert. What is the role of indigenous knowledge and
practice in museum spaces? How is it read and valued? Where can it lead us in terms of thinking
about heritage and the politics of justice?
Rosanna Raymond is a multi-media artist, storyteller, poet, and body-adornment artist. A New Zealand-born Pacific Islander of Samoan descent, she currently lives and works in London, UK. With art
works held in museum and private collections around the world, Raymond has established a role for
herself over the past 20 years as a producer and commentator on contemporary Pacific Island culture
in Aotearoa NZ, the UK and the USA.
Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she currently
runs a 5-year project on contemporary indigenous performance in the Americas, the Pacific, Australia
and South Africa, funded by the European Research Council. She curated the exhibition EcoCentrix:
Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts in 2013 and has recently run artist residencies at ethnological museums in London and Berlin.
Artist Keynote: Fiona Foley
Just Little Bits of History Re-repeating
From an early age, when looking across to Fraser Island (the largest sand island in the world), I felt
an immense sense of loss. For a young child it was a deep incomprehension of a past that was not
quite right but devoid of answers. My loss was for a past that had been removed from Badtjala
people through a process of successive waves of colonisation, occupation and Christianisation. As
a race we did not go unscathed. The first intrusion came in the form of the shipwrecked survivors
from the Stirling Castle in 1836. My forebears speared Captain James Fraser and other male crew,
his wife Eliza survived and was rescued some weeks later. Following on from this, as in the British
tradition, the renaming of the island from K'gari to Fraser was another layer in our displacement
as a sovereign people.
6
Programme
Thursday
Thursday, 29 May
Potsdam, Neues Palais
Venue
9:30 - 10:00 am
Opening
House 8, Audimax 1.45
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ratna Kapur
Precarious Desires and Postcolonial Justice:
Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Coffee
11:30am - 1:00 pm
Panels 1a-g
see p. 9
Lunch
2:00 - 3:30 pm
Panels 2a-g
see p. 10
Coffee
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Panels 3a-f
see p. 11
5:45 - 6:15 pm
Reading
Gail Jones
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Conversation
Rosanna Raymond & Helen Gilbert
House 9, 1.12
6:15 - 7:30 pm
Wine Reception
Address by His Excellency Ambassador David Ritchie,
the Ambassador of Australia
7:30 - 8:30 pm
Artist Keynote Fiona Foley
Just Little Bits of History Re-repeating
House 8, Audimax 1.45
8:30 - 10:00 pm
Plenary
Addressing a Difficult Legacy Indigenous Ancestral Remains
in German Collections
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Keynote: Ratna Kapur
Precarious Desires and Postcolonial Justice: Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights
Against the backdrop of claims to justice by women's human rights and queer advocacy groups,
I discuss the issue of postcolonial justice in relation to precarious desires and how justice interventions operate within and against already established normative and material frameworks.
I examine the impact of human rights and legal pursuits for justice on precarious desires and
how they reproduce the normative framework in which precarity is addressed. As these justice
interventions function within racial, cultural, sexual and civilisational differences that inform the
international and postcolonial legal apparatus, they do not play a counter-hegemonic role nor
open up radical political possibilities for the human subject. I conclude by tentatively discussing
the possibilities that open up in a turn away from normative understandings of justice.
7
Addressing a Difficult Legacy – Indigenous
Ancestral Remains in German Museums and
Scientific Collections
House 8, Audimax 1.45
A plenary with Fiona Foley (Artist, Curator, Writer and Academic; a Badtjala woman from Fraser
Island), Larissa Förster (Ethnology, University of Cologne), Hilary Howes (Historian and Executive
Assistant to the Ambassador, Australian Embassy Berlin), Richard Lane (Independent Consultant
in Science Policy and former Director of Science, Natural History Museum London), Michael
Pickering (Anthropologist and Curator, ANU and National Museum of Australia) and Andreas
Winkelmann (Anatomist and Co-chair of Charité's Human Remains Project)
Chaired by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz
In April 2013, the first ancestral remains of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were repatriated from the substantial collections of human remains stemming from the colonial era held
by the Berlin Charité. Another handover ceremony is scheduled for mid-July 2014. These restitutions are taking place against the backdrop of intensifying public debates around human remains
in German museum and university collections. While these debates have resulted, among other
things, in the publication of a new code of ethics for museums on how to handle human remains
by the German Museums Association in 2013, they have also exposed significant disagreement
between researchers in the 'two cultures' of university disciplines: the humanities, particularly
historians and cultural anthropologists, on the one hand, and the natural sciences, most notably
physical anthropologists, on the other. While historians and cultural anthropologists frequently
insist on the generic 'injustice' of the colonial 'acquisition' of human remains, researchers in the
natural sciences often stress the validity of collections in the name of disinterested science that
operates beyond questions of politics and historical obligation. What is more, most discussions
are conducted in the striking absence of representatives of the researched 'Other'. In this process, German institutions, it seems, are yet to fully engage with Indigenous stakeholders, whose
concern for these remains includes the call to address and rectify historical injustices, the desire
to re-appropriate the colonial archive and responsibility to their ancestors.
By inviting Indigenous Australian artists, museum practitioners, anthropologists, historians of
science and political stakeholders, we wish to address the following questions: How do we adequately deal with the consequences of colonialism, not least from a German perspective where
the legacy of the country's entanglements in colonial science continues to be marginalised? How
self-reflexive are our scientific disciplines about institutional and individual participation in imperial designs and concomitant regimes of (epistemological and physical) violence? How may we
responsibly decolonise our academic practice? And finally, how can these reflections contribute
to a practice of restitution in the spirit of postcolonial justice?
8
Programme
Thursday
Panels 1
Panels 1a-g / 11:30 - 1:00 pm
1a
Justice After Mabo (I)
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Chairs: Plummer, Althans
House 9, 1.15
Patricia Plummer: 'RIP Terra Nullius': Indigenous Australian Art After Mabo
Kathrin Althans: The Kadaitcha Revisited: Justice and Cultural Identity in a Post-Mabo World the Case of Nicole Watson's The Boundary
1b
Ecological Justice (I)
Gesa Mackenthun: Stephen Muecke: Hanna Straß: 1c
Chair: Manav Ratti
House 9, 2.03
'Postcolonial Justice' and Territorial Dispossession: The Case of North America
Environmental Justice in Goolarabooloo Country: The No Gas Campaign in
Broome, Western Australia
'Destroy Bombs not People. No More War Games on Our Sacred Lands':
Nuclear Colonialism in Kiana Davenport's House of Many Gods (2006)
German Colonial Entanglements
Chair: Johannes Schlegel
House 9, 2.04
Felicity Jensz: Disrupted Mission Histories: Reassessing Historical Perspectives of
Postcolonial Justice
M. Haagen-Wulff: De-cloaking Invisibility: Remembering Colonial South-West-Africa
Ferdinand Mbecha: Postcolonial Justice: Priscilla Manjoh's Snare as a Trickster Narrative of
Atonement in a European Metropolis
1d
The Politics of Reconciliation: RSA
Kai Wiegandt:
Kerry Bystrom: Ana Sobral:
1e
Just Economies?
Melissa Kennedy:
Ole Birk Laursen:
Philip Morrissey:
1f
1g
Chair: Andrew Hurley
Literary Trials
F. Schulze-Engler:
Lotte Kößler: James Tar Tsaaior:
House 9, 2.05
House 9, 2.12
Injustice and Inequality: Structures of Tyranny by the 1%
Reading the Riots: Racism, Justice and Human Rights in the Novels of Courttia Newland and Alex Wheatle
Neo-Liberal Capitalism and the Formation of Aboriginal Subjects
Popular Music and Justice
Timo Müller:
Tobias Schlosser:
Chair: Hanna Teichler
Shame and Guilt in Zoë Wicomb's and Antje Krog's Negotiations of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Literature, Remediation, Remedy (A Case of Transitional Justice)
'Internal Battlegrounds': Self-Othering and (Poetic) Justice in South African
Post-Apartheid Culture
Chair: Dirk Wiemann
House 9, 2.13
'Puerto Rico for Women, Barbados to Shop': U.S. Hip Hop and Economic
Neo-Imperialism
Dead Will Dance on Judgment Day: Apocalyptic Visions of Western Society in the Songs of Native Canadian Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie
Chair: Anne Spaller
House 9, 2.15
Poetic Justice? Christopher Okigbo, Dedan Kimathi and Robert Mugabe on Literary Trial
'The White Man's Justice': A New Reading of Wulf Sachs' Black Hamlet (1937)
After the Drumbeats of War: Telling the Truth, Telling the Nation in
Post-Genocide Rwanda
9
Panels 2a-g / 2:00 - 3:30 pm
2a
Justice After Mabo (II)
Lioba Schreyer:
Geoff Rodoreda:
Peter Kilroy:
2b
2c
2d
2f
Chair: Felicity Jensz
House 9, 2.04
Chair: Jens Temmen
House 9, 2.05
Reconciliation: Aspirin or Amplifier?
'Saying Sorry': A Comparison of the Australian and Canadian Governments' Apologies to Indigenous Peoples for the 'Stolen Generations'
Imagining the Postcolonial Nation: Recognition and Reconciliation in Australia
The Spectres of Marx
Ellen Smith:
H. Athanickal:
Andrew Hurley:
House 9, 2.03
Armour, Mask, Skull & Bones: Postcolonial Justice as Reappropriation & Closure
Ghosts in the Archive, or, the Spectral Repertoire of the Other: Anna Lee Walters's Ghost Singer and the Aesthetics of Survivance
Contemporary Artistic Articulations of Aboriginal Rights: the Work of Daniel Boyd
The Politics of Reconciliation:
Australia
Hanna Teichler:
Jatinder Mann:
Rachel Busbridge:
2e
Chair: Gesa Mackenthun
Amazonian Rainforest, Smart Cities and the Naturalization of Infrastructures: The Global Biopolitics of Environmental (In)Justice
Literary Voice and Postcolonial Justice: Indra Sinha's Animal's People and the Bhopal Disaster
Who Benefits from Sustainability? Analysing the Indian Politics of Electronic
Waste in a Transnational Setting
Human Remains and Sensitive
Objects (I)
Chris Boge:
Florian Tatschner:
Hannah Boettcher:
House 9, 1.15
'Cry for Justice' - Mabo and Poetry
In Search of a Good Yarn: Mabo as Postcolonial Narrative
Postcolonial Justice: Recognition, Redistribution and the 'Mabo Legacy'
Ecological Justice (II)
Aníbal Arregui:
Manav Ratti:
Stefan Laser:
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Chairs: P. Plummer, K. Althans
Chair: Melissa Kennedy
House 9, 2.12
Different Workers: Political Commitment, Social Justice and Subaltern Labour in Katharine Susannah Prichard's Aboriginal Writing
Party Justice: Changing Patterns of Popular Perceptions and the Communist
Party of India
No Fixed Address, but Currently in East Berlin: The Bicentennial, Indigenous
Protest and the Festival des politischen Liedes, 1988
Politics of Representation (I)
Chair: Carly McLaughlin
House 9, 2.13
Jennifer Wawrzinek:Revisioning Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative
C. Vogt-William:
HeLa and The Help: Considering Justice for African American Women in White
Women's Narratives through a Postcolonial Gender Lens
Helen Gilbert:
Diplomacy at Large: Indigenous Aesthetics, Cultural Capital and the International Stage
2g
The Postcolonial Celtic Fringe
Birte Heidemann:
Cordula Lemke: Eva Pérez:
10
Chair: Dirk Wiemann
House 9, 2.15
Post-Agreement Northern Ireland's 'Sorry Business':
Liquid Testimonies of Truth in David Park's The Truth Commissioner
Aesthetic Justice: Scottish Ecopoetics in Mandy Haggith's The Last Bear
Espionage, Literature and Ideological Justice: Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth
Programme
Thursday
Panels 2 & 3
Panels 3a-f / 4:00 - 5:30 pm
3a
A. Bernzen,P. Kristiansen:
F. Sonnenburg, B. Braun:
Chrischona Schmidt:
3b
Chair: Gerhard Stiltz
House 9, 1.15
A Fair Go for Sustainable Agriculture in Australia?
Job Accessibility and Urban Form in Australian Cities
'I Paint for Everyone': The Making of Utopia Art
Ecological Justice (III): Petroculture
Carsten Wergin:
K. Levihn-Kutzler:
P. O. Aghoghovwia:
3c
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Australian Geographies/
Indigenous Art
Chair: Stephen Muecke
House 9, 2.03
Postcolonial Justice from Below: The Fight for James Price Point, Western Australia
(2009-2013)
Climate Justice and Anthropocene Allegory in Susannah Waters' Cold Comfort
Reading Eco-inflections and Petrocultures: The Niger Delta Context
Human Remains and Sensitive
Objects (II)
Chair: Florian Tatschner
House 9, 2.04
Michael Pickering: A Lingering Presence? Museums as Colonial Institutions in a Post-Colonial World
K. Zinnenburg Carroll: Other Hostages: Postcolonial Justice and the Politics of Repatriation in the Case of
Montezuma's Crown
Tom Murray:
'Speaking with': Towards a Collaborative Re-mediation of Cultural Artefacts in Contemporary Audio-visual Narratives
3d
Biopolitics and the Postcolonial
Chair: Ellen Smith
House 9, 2.05
Russell West-Pavlov:Entangled Negative and Affirmative Biopolitics in the Texts of Kim Scott
Andrew McCann: Biopolitics and the Limits of Critique
Mike Griffith:
Artifactualities: Biopolitics and Settler Colonial Liberalism
3e
Modernity and the Colonial
Machine
Chair: Timo Müller
House 9, 2.12
Lianne v. Kralingen: Justice and the Company: Economic Imperatives in The Journal of Jan van
Riebeeck (1652-1662)
Prudence Black:
The Speed of Decolonisation: Travel, Modernisation and the 1955 Bandung
Conference
Anindya Sekhar, Saswat Samay: Shakespeare in Dantewada & Materialist Postcolonial Theory:
Recolonisation, Dissidence & Academic Activism
3f
Politics of Representation (II)
Lisa Bach:
Kerstin Knopf:
Chair: Birte Heidemann
House 9, 2.13
Indigenous Perspectives on the Colonisation of Western Australia in Kim Scott‘s
That Deadman Dance
Jindabyne: Cultures, Ethics, Justice in Australian Cinema
11
Teachers
Workshop
Workshop I:
Teaching Africa, Teaching Justice
with Russell West-Pavlov
The workshop will deal with the topic of justice in the context of English-speaking Africa. At the centre of the workshop is the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. We will
look at prose written by both white and black South African authors, testimonies, poetry, films and
dramatic reconstructions and will also do some creative writing for debating in class.
Workshop II:
From Terra Nullius to Mabo... and beyond: Australian
Cultures of Property and Belonging in the EFL-Classroom
with Jörg Heinke
On the basis of the Australian Mabo case, we will focus on the indigenous struggle for land rights. We
will look at (a) opposing – if not contradicting – concepts of the triad property-land-belonging and
(b) how these concepts can be transferred into an EFL-classroom context. What seems to be most
difficult to achieve is how to convey to students the cultural, legal and political difference between
owning and belonging.
Workshop III:
Vertiefungsworkshop
'Erarbeiten einer Unterrichtssequenz'
with Monika Floyd
This workshop gives participants the opportunity to create lesson plans on the basis or the materials
discussed in workshops I and II. Participants can also choose to visit a regular conference panel.
12
Programme
Thursday
Teachers
Workshop
Thursday, 29 May - Potsdam, Neues Palais
Venue
9:30 am
Opening
House 8, Audimax 1.45
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ratna Kapur
Precarious Desires and Postcolonial Justice:
Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights
House 8, Audimax 1.45
11:30am - 1:00 pm
Teachers Keynote Russell West-Pavlov
Redressing Past Injustice? Trauma and Public
Narrative in South Africa and Australia:
The TRC and the 'Bringing Them Home' Report
House 9, 1.12
Lunch
2:00 - 3:30 pm
Workshop I
Russell West-Pavlov, Teaching Africa, Teaching
Justice
House 9, 2.16
Workshop II
Jörg Heinke, From Terra Nullius to Mabo … and
beyond: Australian Cultures of Property and
Belonging in the EFL-Classroom
House 9, 2.06
Coffee
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Workshop III
Monika Floyd, Vertiefungsworkshop
'Erarbeiten einer Unterrichtssequenz'
or participation in a conference panel (3a-g)
House 9, 2.16
Note: The teachers workshop runs parallel to the first conference day. All conference participants
are invited to attend the Teachers Keynote; participants in the teachers workshop are welcome to
attend all other events of the first conference day.
Teachers Keynote: Russell West-Pavlov
Redressing Past Injustice? Trauma and Public Narrative in South Africa and Australia:
The TRC and the 'Bringing Them Home' Report
Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of English at the University of Tübingen and Research Associate at
the University of Pretoria.
13
Readings:
Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Priya Basil & Helon Habila
Rajeev Balasubramanyam is a British writer whose first novel, In Beautiful Disguises, was published
in 2000 and won a Betty Trask Prize and was nominated for the Guardian First Fiction Prize. His
second novel, The Dreamer, based on the Ian St James Award-winning story of the same title, came
out in 2010. He has lived and taught creative writing in Kathmandu, Berlin, Hong Kong, and London,
and has just finished a book of short-stories about celebrity called Starstruck which will come out as
a free eBook later this year, and a new novel on the subject of Eastern spirituality in the West, which
will be published in 2015.
Priya Basil is a British author. Her first novel, Ishq and Mushq, was published in 2007 and short-listed for
the Commonwealth Writers‘ Prize. Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, was published in
June 2010. Her most recent book is the short novel Strangers on the 16:02 (2011).
Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist, poet and journalist. In 2002 he published his first novel, Waiting for
an Angel. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2006 he co-edited the
British Council‘s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in 2007.
His third novel, Oil on Water, which deals with environmental pollution in the oil rich Niger Delta, was
published in the US in 2011. He is the editor of the anthology The Granta Book of the African Short Story,
which came out September, 2011.
Post-Colonial Justice and the City:
Reflections from/on Berlin
In this panel, academics and activists living and working in Berlin comment upon the theme of
postcolonial justice as understood both through the lens of their experiences as inhabitants of the
city, and from the perspective of their theoretical interests as academics working in the fields of
postcolonial studies in Germany. They collectively debate the relevance of the concept of 'postcolonial justice' for the city of Berlin and its inhabitants.
Chaired by Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Bilgin Ayata is Lecturer at the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at
the Otto-Suhr Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research areas are postcolonial international
relations, migration and politics of memory.
Benjamin Zachariah is Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. His research
focuses on the social and intellectual history of colonial South Asia, and the transition from colonial
rule to the postcolonial Indian state.
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor for Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence Formation
of Normative Orders, Goethe-University Frankfurt. Her research specializations are political philosophy,
feminist postcolonial theory and queer diasporas.
Joshua Kwesi Aikins is a doctoral student at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology.
His is also a political activist for, among other organizations, Berlin Postkolonial e.V.
14
Perspectives from/on Berlin
Programme
Friday
The events on Friday, May 30 are hosted by and organized in cooperation with the Werkstatt der Kulturen
in Berlin. They seek to take our debates on postcolonial justice to ground level – this is both to the level of
academic, activist or artistic practice, and to the situated locality of the city of Berlin. The core programme
on this day is open to the general public. It kicks off with a keynote address by Paul Gilroy, who brings to
Berlin his view of 'The Struggle against Racism in Britain (1976-2012)'. This is followed a podium discussion
with academics and activists who comment upon the theme of postcolonial justice both as inhabitants
of the city, and from their respective theoretical interests and engagements with the world. The day will
close with an evening of readings by three internationally acclaimed writers from Nigeria and the UK who
all presently live in and write from Berlin.
Friday, 30 May - Berlin, Werkstatt der Kulturen
General Meeting
10:00am - 12:30 pm GASt
or Visitor Programme
12:30 - 3:00 pm
ASNEL Annual General Meeting
or Visitor Programme
3:00 pm
Poster Session, see p. 75
4:00 pm
Opening
4:15 - 5:15 pm
Keynote Paul Gilroy
The Struggle Against Racism in Britain (1976-2012):
Its Implications for Justice and Democracy
5:15 - 7:00 pm
Plenary
Post-Colonial Justice and the City: Reflections from/on Berlin
with Joshua Kwesi Aikins, Bilgin Ayata, Nikita Dhawan and Benjamin Zachariah
Dinner
8:00 - 10:00 pm
Readings
Rajeev Balasubramanyam
Priya Basil
Helon Habila
Keynote: Paul Gilroy
The Struggle Against Racism in Britain (1976-2012): Its Implications for Justice and Democracy
Paul Gilroy is known as a path-breaking scholar and historian of the music of the Black Atlantic
diaspora, as a commentator on the politics of race, nation and racism in the UK, and as an
archaeologist of the literary and cultural lives of the African diaspora. According to the US Journal of Blacks in Higher Education he has been consistently among the most frequently cited black
scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
15
Keynote: Benita Parry
The Impossibilities of Postcolonial Justice as Concept and Practice
Benita Parry is Honorary Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
at the University of Warwick. Her many influential contributions to the field of postcolonial studies
include Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination (1972, revised 1998);
Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1983), and Postcolonial
Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004).
Sumugan Sinavesan: Alex & I
'Alex & I' is a performative 'visual lecture' that concerns the media history, present circumstances
and potential future of the Tamil asylum seeker, Sanjeev 'Alex' Kuhendrarajah. Alex gained notoriety
as the self-appointed spokesperson for 254 Tamils caught in a stand-off with Indonesian authorities
at the port of Merak, Java, after attempting to sail to Australia in the aftermath of the war in Sri Lanka
2009. With his raw and defiant charisma and command of English, Alex became a favourite amongst
journalists, sustaining interest for his complex history and criminal past. Alex jumped ship before the
stand-off resolved six months later and lived as a fugitive. In 2012 he re-surfaced as a UNHCR recognised refugee in a detention centre in Bangkok, where he remains incarcerated awaiting resettlement.
'Alex & I' is an ongoing inquiry into post-war Tamil subjectivity and evolving political gesture that
matches the refugee's indeterminate period of detention.
Sumugan Sivanesan is an experimental artist completing a doctorate at the Transforming Cultures
research centre at the University of Technology Sydney. He is part of the experimental documentary
collective theweathergroup_U, the activist art gang boat-people.org and the rogue housing project
Yurt Empire.
Tom Murray: Dhakiyarr vs the King (2004)
Screening and discussion with the director, chaired by Ann Curthoys
The family of the great Yolngu leader Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda is searching for answers. Seventy years after
the controversial murder trial and subsequent disappearance, Dhakiyarr's body has still not been found
and laid to rest. His descendants know that justice was not served. They want to restore what was denied to him: honour. Dhakiyarr vs the King journeys with the Yolngu as they re-trace his footsteps and
finally come face to face with the authorities that let him down and with the descendants of Constable
McColl.
Written and co-directed by Tom Murray - Made in collaboration with Dhuruputjpi and Yilpara communities
of Blue Mud Bay, northeast Arnhem Land - In Aboriginal Australian language and with English subtitles
- Winner of the Rouben Mamoulian Award at the Sydney Film Festival 2004 - Nominated for the Grand
Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 2005.
16
Programme
Saturday
Saturday, 31 May - Potsdam, Neues Palais
09:30 - 10:30 am
Keynote Benita Parry
The Impossibilities of Postcolonial Justice as
Concept and Practice
Venue
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Coffee
11:00am - 12:30 pm Panels 4 a-f
Sumugan Sinavesan
Visual Lecture 'Alex & I'
see p. 19
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Lunch
1:30 - 2:30 pm
Awards Ceremony /
Celebrating 25 Years of ASNEL and GASt
House 8, Audimax 1.45
2:30 - 3:30 pm
Keynote Suvendrini Perera
Visibility, Atrocity and the Subject of
Postcolonial Justice
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Coffee
4:00 - 5:15 pm
Panels 5 a-g
see p. 21
5:30 - 6:45 pm
Round Table
American Studies as Postcolonial Studies
House 9, 1.12
Film Screening
Dhakiyarr vs the King (Tom Murray, 2004)
House 8, Audimax 1.45
7:10 / 7:30 pm
Departure for Conference Dinner & Party
at Braumanufaktur Potsdam
Shuttle Service
10:00 pm
Concert Il Civetto (Balkan Swing)
Keynote: Suvendrini Perera
Visibility, Atrocity and the Subject of Postcolonial Justice
In 2013 the British High Court ordered the government to offer an apology to a group of elderly Mau
Mau fighters for the atrocities committed against them during the brutal suppression of their uprising
against colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. The judgment has been hailed as unprecedented, offering
new opportunities for the recognition of empire's violence and for reflection on the possibilities of
justice and redress. Does this apology by the British High Court represent a moment of rupture with
empire's past and the model of a new form of 'postcolonial justice'? In this context of the Mau Mau
case the paper explores the dynamics that attend the discovery, or making visible, of atrocity, and the
national and international frameworks within which perpetrators are called to account. What are the
ethical and political stakes of this call for accountability and who/what is the subject of justice?
17
Round Table:
American Studies as Postcolonial Studies
House 9, 1.12
The historiographies of American Studies and Post-colonial studies intersect in various and sometimes paradoxical ways. Despite being occupied with the study of a former European colony, American Studies has seldom approached its objects of study from the perspective of and with the critical
apparatus of post-colonialism. Especially with regard to early scholarship in American Studies (myth
and symbol school etc.), the field seems to have built its very foundation on a clear break with its
colonial past. Interestingly, however, in the 20th century questions of post-colonialism have reentered the field through the proxy of Indigenous studies, the study of African-American culture
and the Black Atlantic, the advent of transnationalism, and the critique of US imperialism.
This round table will discuss the cross-sections of both fields focusing on its overlapping legacies
and converging experiences. Among the questions posed, the panel will address past, present and
future of a discipline that is and has always been simultaneously absent and centrally present in the
conundrum of post-coloniality.
Chaired by Dennis Mischke
Rüdiger Kunow is Professor at the American Studies program at Potsdam University. His major research interests and publications focus on cultural constructions of illness and aging, transnational
American Studies and the South Asian diaspora in the U.S.
Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University. Her current research
deals with nineteenth-century travel and archaeology and the scientific construction of American
antiquity.
John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and
American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine
books, more than 150 essays and reviews, and editor or co-editor of ten books across the fields of
transnational American Studies.
Katja Sarkowsky is the current president of ASNEL and Chair of American Studies in Münster. Her
research interests include Indigenous literatures, life writing, urban studies, citizenship studies, and
cultural theory.
Nicole Waller is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Potsdam University. Her areas of
research and publication include Atlantic studies, Caribbean studies, colonial American literature,
postcolonialism, and Arab American literature.
18
Programme
Saturday
Panels 4
Panels 4a-f / 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
4a
Epistemic Justice
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Chair: John Karugia
House 9, 1.15
Mohamed Shafeeq K: Global Justice
James O. Ogone: Epistemic Injustice: African Knowledge and Scholarship in the Global Context
David Turnbull:
Postcolonial Injustice: Rationality, Knowledge and Law in the Face of Multiple Epistemologies and Ontologies – A Spatial Performative Approach
4b
Sexuality and Violence
Daniela Hrzán:
Julia Hoydis:
J. Keshari Pradhan:
4c
The Politics of Globalized Vitality/
Disability
Kateřina Kolářová:
Alyson Patsavas:
Isabelle Garde:
4d
4e
House 9, 2.03
Chair: Christine Vogt-William
House 9, 2.04
'Grandpa Lives in Paradise Now': (Neo)-Colonial Circuits of Vitality and Debility
Dislocating Experience: Postcoloniality, Disability and Authorized Knowledge
Inclusive Development as Crip(dys)topic Promise: Querying Development,
Dis/ability and Human Rights
Justice in the Literary Field
Kirsten Sandrock:
Carola Briese:
Chair: Nicole Waller
Is There Justice for Women? Gendered and Sexual Violence in South Africa and
Their Negotiation in Megan Voysey-Braig's Till We Can Keep an Animal (2008)
Rape, Revenge, and the Aesthetics of Erotic Justice in Nnedi Okorafor's
Who Fears Death
(Un)Writing the Gendered Subaltern: Poetics of Postcolonial Violence and Justice to Come
Chair: B. Schmidt-Haberkamp
House 9, 2.05
The Poetics of Justice in Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton
Postcolonial Justice in the Literary Marketplace:
Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction in the Literary Field
Writing Just Histories
Chair: Mark Stein
House 9, 2.12
Martina Horakova: Ways of Postcolonial Belonging: Writing Spatial History as a Personal Journey
John Docker:
Genocide, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Consciousness:
Thoughts on Histories by Henry Reynolds, James Boyce, and Tom Lawson
4f
Politics of Youth
Chair: Isabelle Hesse
House 9, 2.13
Blanka Grzegorczyk: 'We Don't Want No Exploitation of Third World Situations':
The Postcolonial Exotic in Sarah Mussi's Adventure Stories
Victoria Herche:
'Rights of Passage' - Indigenous Australian Film and the Coming of Age Theme
A. Nandakumar:
'A Generation Awakens': Youth and Politics in a Postcolonial Nation
19
Programme
Saturday
Panels 5
Panels 5a-g / 4:00 - 5: pm
5a
Representations of Slavery
Karin Ikas:
Petra Tournay-Theodotou:
5b
5e
Chair: Aparna Nandakumar
House 9, 2.03
Translating Reluctant Fundamentalisms
Postcolonial Orientalism: A Study of the Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric of Middle Eastern Intellectuals in Diaspora
Chair: Daniela Hrzán
House 9, 2.04
Social Mobility in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)
An Endless Game: Neocolonial Injustice in Zadie Smith's
The Embassy of Cambodia
The In/justices of Israel and
Palestine
Isabelle Hesse:
Katharina Motyl:
House 9, 1.15
Slavery and Resilience in Caryl Phillips' Novel Cambridge
'I Lived to Tell this Story': Britain's Slavery Past in Jackie Kay's Neo-Slave Narrative The Lamplighter (2007)
Representations of Class
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp:
Beatriz Pérez Zapata:
5d
Chair: Isabelle Garde
Middle Eastern Diasporas after 9/11
Mark Stein:
Mahmoud Arghavan:
5c
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Chair: Kerstin Knopf
House 9, 2.05
The Limits of Postcolonial Justice: Israel/Palestine in British Culture
Intersectional Intifada: Anglophone Palestinian Women Writers on
the Quest for Gender Justice in the Occupied Territories
Politics of Representation (III):
Staging the Other
Chair: Martina Horakova
House 9, 2.12
Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole & Oliver Haag: Samson and Delilah in Post-Colonial Europe
5f
A fair go for the disadvantaged?
Donna Coates:
Michael Ackland:
5g
Postcolonial Justice in African
Contexts
Vanessa Borsky:
John N. Karugia:
Chair: Victoria Herche
House 9, 2.13
No Fair Go
Truths from the Dense 'Undergrowth of Poor Lives': Christina Stead's Verdict on Australia's Seminal Role as Social Laboratory and
Working-man's paradise
Chair: James Ogone
House 9, 2.15
Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform in Recent Autobiography & Fiction
Africa Looks East in Search of Postcolonial Justice
21
Panels 6a-d / 11:15 am - 12:45 pm
6a
Citizenship and Unbelonging
John Pugliese:
Carly McLaughlin:
6b
6c
6d
House 9, 2.03
Chair: Florian Schybilski
House 9, 2.04
Indigenous Posthumanism and Justice Beyond the Singularity
The Call of the Wild: Wolves, Dogs and the Colonial Apparatus
Merlinda Bobis's Fish-Hair Woman: An Attempt to Lay the Question of Justice
in Its Place.
Transformations of the Law
Jens Temmen:
Gill H. Boehringer:
Christin Hoene:
Chair: Stefanie Land-Hilbert
Postcolonial Justice in Spatial Practices: The Case of the Swan River Colony
In the Wake of Moby Dick: Whaling, Colonialism and (Trans)national
Remembrance in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance
Dark Matter: Seeking Justice in Settler Colonies
Posthuman Justice
Gigi Adair:
Lindsay Barrett:
Dolores Herrero:
House 9, 1.15
Indigenous Justice, Deaths in Custody and Refugees in the Colonial Present
Exceptional Children: Framing Child Refugees' Agency in Australia's
Detention Centres
Rethinking the Swan River Colony
Alexander Bräuer:
Rosanne Kennedy:
Anna Haebich:
Neues Palais, Potsdam
Chair: James Ogone
Chair: Anna-Maria Reimer
House 9, 2.05
Overwriting and Disavowing Hawaii: Liliuokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen and the Morgan Report
People's Lawyers, People's Tribunals and People's Alternative Justice Systems:
A Report
This Alien Legacy: The Origins of 'Sodomy' Laws in British Colonialism and
their Postcolonial Legacy
Frances Calvert: Cracks in the Mask (1997)
Screening and discussion with the director chaired by Katia Fonsaca & Sebastian Kozlowski
The mysterious and elaborate turtleshell masks collected last century in the Torres Strait in far north
Australia are unique and irreplaceable, yet there are now none left in the Torres Strait. They are all in
foreign museums. Ephraim Bani, a witty and knowledgeable Torres Strait Islander and an expert on
his people's myths and legends, sets out on a voyage of discovery to the great museums of Europe
where his cultural heritage now lies. The film asks: what happens when he encounters and meditates
on his patrimony and secondly, what consequences does this hold for us in the West?
The film shows how museums decontextualize cultures and exclude the very people whose ancestors
created the objects in the first place.
Written and directed by Frances Calvert - Audience Award and Honorable Mention, EthnoFilmFest,
Berlin 1997 - Estonian National Museum's Prize for Best Film, Pärnu Film Festival 1998.
22
Programme
Sunday
Sunday, 01 June - Potsdam, Neues Palais
10:00 - 11:00 am
Keynote Ann Curthoys
What are the Responsibilities of Modern Nations
for Imperial and Settler Colonial Pasts? –
Indigenous Dispossession, Britain, and Australia
11.15am - 12.45 pm Panels 6 a-d
Film Screening
Cracks in the Mask
(Frances Calvert, 1997)
Venue
House 8, Audimax 1.45
see p. 22
House 9, 1.12
Coffee & Light Lunch
1:30 - 2:15 pm
Closing Discussion
House 8, Audimax 1.45
Keynote: Ann Curthoys
What are the Responsibilities of Modern Nations for Imperial and Settler Colonial Pasts? –
Indigenous Dispossession, Britain, and Australia
Government apologies for events that took place some considerable time ago are increasingly
being sought and offered. Yet apologies rest on some agreed understanding of what happened
and who was responsible, and of the connection between modern governments and their predecessors. Such agreements are often hard to find in the worlds of scholarship and public opinion.
In the light of these issues, this talk considers the question of historical responsibility of modern
nations and their diverse populations for the imperial and colonial past. My particular examples
will come from a consideration of the role of the British government and society, and of mainly
British settlers, in the dispossession, exploitation, and institutionalisation of Aboriginal people in
Britain's Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, and of how this history is remembered
and understood today in both Australia and Britain.
Ann Curthoys is a distinguished Australian historian who has made outstanding contributions
to academic and public history. She has published extensively on Aboriginal-European relations,
immigration policies, the media and historical theory.
23
Exhibitions
Identity – A Bloody Romance
An exhibition on German-Mozambican identity, relations and a shared history
Potsdam, Neues Palais
Saturday 31st May - House 8, 1.59 and 1.64
Sunday 1st June - House 8, 0.50 and 0.64
The history of the 'Madgermanes' is one of the unrecognised parts of the German historical heritage.
Just like Germany‘s colonial history in Africa, the GDR‘s relationship with African countries in the
1970s and 1980s receives little attention in today‘s society. However, it has left marks on individual
lives which the theatre and exhibition project ‚IDENTITY: A Bloody Romance‘ investigates. In his
photographs and short videos, theatre director Jens Vilela Neumann portrays witnesses of GermanMozambican history and provides a space for their diverse voices.
One of these stories is that of Elisa Boana, who now works as a maid for a German-Mozambican family, or Beatriz, whose colleague was killed during a demonstration in a police shooting in 2003 and
had to fight hard for the return of the corpse. Petra Wanga tells how she was made into a soldier
when the civil war in Mozambique demanded more and more fighters. There is the tale of the fate
of a German family who had to emigrate because of the Civil War in the 1980s. There are fathers of
Afro-German children who yearn to see their children again.
What all the protagonists share is the experience of being excluded from social representation
beyond all borders, while at the same time searching for recognition, belonging and love. They
fell victim to the political and economic interests of a globalizing capitalist system. As individuals,
they must find their way in a complex international political and economic power structure. Some
demonstrate, some conceal their past in the GDR.
Jens Vilela-Neumann is a German theatre director, actor, author and filmmaker. He works with actors from all walks of life in a wide range of different national and cultural contexts. He has staged
productions in many locations both national and international. The present exhibition results from
his work with professional actors in Maputo on German-Mozambican relations.
24
Programme
Exhibitions
Postcolonial Potsdam
An exhibition on local colonial legacies
Potsdam, Neues Palais
Saturday 31 May and Sunday 1 June - House 9, Ground floor
A group of Potsdam students who are involved in the conference organization have decided to develop
a small exhibition dealing with parts of the colonial history of Prussia and, primarily, the postcolonial
silence in contemporary Potsdam. In the immediate vicinity of the university campus 'Am Neuen Palais'
in Potsdam, a group of sculptures, some paintings exhibited in Sanssouci as well as botanic imports in
the Potsdam landscape of palaces and gardens show a multitude of references to Prussia’s colonial
history. These are mostly willfully or unconsciously ignored by the majority society because this version
of the past does not fit into conceptions of Prussian heritage, and responsibilities vis-a-vis the colonial
past and a reconsideration of it are repressed. We want to contextualize the past and make invisible
parts of history visible. This should serve to open up a discussion of how to deal responsibly with traumatic histories of colonial injustices. For the time being we focused on:
1.) Postcolonial justice and language: why is the naming of the group of statues problematic? What
history does this naming entail and how could the issue be reconsidered?
2.) Postcolonial justice and the media: media coverage of renaming the African statues.
Anti-Humboldt Box
An exhibition in a suitcase to trigger discussion about the Humboldt-Forum
Potsdam, Neues Palais
Thursday 29 May - House 9, Ground floor
The artist/researcher group Artefakte/AFROTAK TV cyberNomads are part of the Alliance Anti-Humboldt
and pursue an interrogation of the politics of the Berlin ethnographic museum by focusing on questions
of the restitution of artefacts. They will exhibit the Anti-Humboldt Box, an exhibition in a suitcase. This
campaign was launched by a number of anti-racist activists and initiatives to halt the reconstruction
of Berlin's city castle and the housing of the Humboldt Forum in this building. The Anti-Humboldt Box
was conceived as a mobile exhibition space – inspired by Marcel Duchamp's boîte-en-valise (box in a
suitcase) – to distribute and transport the critique as well as to trigger discussion about the Humboldt
Forum beyond Berlin.
25
Michael Ackland, James Cook University
Truths from the dense 'undergrowth of poor lives': Christina Stead's verdict on Australia's seminal role as social laboratory and working-man's paradise.
At imperial margins, or in far-flung domains, structures often seem more fluid, reform and innovation
more capable of realisation, the credo of a 'fair go for all' potentially more capable of realisation. That at
least is suggested by such impressive antipodean firsts as embracing women's suffrage, the eight-hour
working-day and, perhaps most radically, channelling the energies of organised labour towards parliamentary reform rather than insurrection and the barricades. These achievements, however, pre-dated the
Bolshevik Revolution and its alternative model for worker empowerment. Thereafter workers, intellectuals, and the young Christina Stead had to decide which program was most appropriate for the antipodes
and, more bluntly, which was more likely to provide the disadvantaged with a 'fair go'. One measure of the
importance of this issue is arguably its prominence in Stead's earliest extant writing: her first published
novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and the contemporaneous ms. 'This Young Man Will Go Far'. In them
she implicitly measures white Australia's proud boast to be at the forefront of progressive social action
against such grim realities of poverty, prejudice and engrained disadvantage. Though many have claimed
that political ideas were not crucial to her creative inspiration, these early works show, in the case of her
unpublished ms., concepts being literally translated into fictional encounters, while her novel focuses on
the social impasse encountered by the urban poor. This paper explores its complex dramatization and in
particular Stead's unrelenting depiction of gender- and class-based injustice, which fully justifies a key
character's claim that 'You should live in an earthly paradise', but instead: 'You might as well be in the
depths of Bulgaria'.
Michael Ackland is the inaugural Colin and Margaret Roderick Professor of English at James Cook
University, Townsville. He has published widely in the field of Australian Studies. Currently he is researching
a projected monograph on Christina Stead and the Socialist Heritage.
Gigi Adair, Freie Universität Berlin
Indigenous Posthumanism and Justice Beyond the Singularity
To what extent does justice rely upon and create the category of the 'human'? Is postcolonial justice any different?
In this paper I offer a reading of The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville (1997), a novel narrated by a
human/non-human shapeshifter 'descended from a group of stones,' which negotiates between an indigenous
posthumanism and 'classic' claims of justice in the face of environmental destruction, neoimperial exploitation,
and conflicting approaches to indigenous survival politics. Echoing, or rather anticipating (and at any rate,
playing havoc with linear time) Giorgio Agamben's call to put a halt to the 'anthropological machine' (The
Open: Man and Animal, 2002/2004), it challenges, rewrites and pokes fun at key dualisms of the anthropological
tradition: human/animal, nature/culture and myth/science, as well as at its drive to define the human and
human culture (often via indigenous peoples). Yet it remains capable of a blistering, if disarmingly lighthearted,
critique of cultural imperialism and also continues to insist upon indigenous peoples as active participants in
a long history of cultural interaction and transformation within colonial, postcolonial and anticolonial contexts.
This paper considers how the text sustains this necessary tension to ask: How are the novel's claims for social
and environmental justice transformed by its quantum configurations of the space-time of the novel and
its indigenous-cyborg characters? What kind of posthumanism might enable justice, and what would that
justice entail?
26
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Philip Aghoghovwia, Rhodes University
Reading Eco-inflections and Petrocultures: The Niger Delta Context
This paper discusses literary representations of Nigeria's Niger Delta within two fields of intellectual enquiry.
Ecocriticism, in which I argue that the forms of critical paradigms that underlie its critique are inadequate to
account for the environmental consciousness which the poetry adumbrates, and thus suggest that the particular environmental concern and its entreaties for justice are mobilised around the representations of the
oil encounter. Therefore, I also situate the writing within petrocultures, a recent field of global studies which
explores the representational and critical domain within which oil is framed and imagined in culture, and
suggest that in projecting an artistic vision that is sensitive to environmental and sociocultural questions, the
poetry we encounter from this region also make critical commentary on the oil encounter. The texts portray
the Delta as the spatial and material template for envisioning and critiquing the essentially globalised sites
of oil extraction. They articulate a place-specific form of petroculture by emphasising that the oil encounter
in the Delta is not the official encounter at the point of extraction, but rather an unofficial encounter with
the side-effects of oil extraction: the spills and flares, the presence of pipelines and signboards, and how all
these intrude on quotidian existence and disrupt notions of justice for the human and the environment. I
conclude that in the projection of these two concatenating forms of environmental consciousness and
petro-imagination, narratives are spawned through lived and imagined experiences, to advance what I call a
literature of 'petro-environmentalism'.
Philip Aghoghovwia is Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University. He received a PhD from
Stellenbosch University in 2014, and his dissertation is titled 'Ecocriticism and the Oil Encounter: Readings
from the Niger Delta'.
Katrin Althans, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
The Kadaitcha Revisited: Justice and Cultural Identity in a Post-Mabo World the case of Nicole Watson's The Boundary
In 1990, two years prior to Mabo v Queensland (No 2), Sam Watson published his novel The Kadaitcha Sung,
in which the issue of land rights is high on the agenda of the titular Kadaitcha man. Some twenty years later,
Sam Watson's daughter Nicole Watson revisits both the Kadaitcha man and land rights, or rather native title,
in her novel The Boundary. Focusing on the aftermath of a failed native title claim by the Corrowa People
and the subsequent murder of the judge who had rejected that claim, The Boundary raises questions of
justice and cultural identity in a mix of crime fiction, maban reality, and Aboriginal Gothic. In my paper, I will
approach the novel from a law-and-literature perspective and show how The Boundary critically examines
native title legislation and thus dissects the Common Law of Australia. Like its literary predecessor, Nicole
Watson's novel centres around the legal and cultural dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal peoples and sets
the Common Law and its ideologies in sharp contrast to Aboriginal Law. A key element here is the figure of
Red Feathers, which links The Boundary with The Kadaitcha Sung and whose development from Kadaitcha to
Red Feathers reflects the legal development of land rights to native title and beyond. As my paper will show,
it is ultimately issues of cultural identity and how these shape notions of justice in a post-Mabo world which
in a number of discursive ways are negotiated through this legal and literary development.
Katrin Althans teaches Anglophone Literatures at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and is currently
working on a postdoctoral project in the field of law and literature.
27
Mahmoud Arghavan, Freie Universität Berlin
Postcolonial Orientalism:
A Study of the Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric of Middle Eastern Intellectuals in Diaspora
Initially conceptualized by Lisa Lowe, postcolonial Orientalism refers to refashioning the Western empires'
Other by leftist intellectuals and postcolonial critics. As Lowe shows, the disillusionment of the leftist
movement around the journal Tel Quel with French nationalism as well as its lack of precise knowledge of the
actual realities in China resulted in its support of Maoist China. Since 9/11, proliferation of Orientalist tropes
by the U.S. government and the mainstream media has in turn given rise to a renaissance of postcolonial
Orientalism. For instance, the topos of 'liberating Muslim women from Muslim men' as one of the driving
forces of the 'War on Terror' stimulated postcolonial critics to react. Their discursive endeavors aimed at
combating U.S. imperialism, however, have often amounted to an endorsement of repressive regimes such
as the Islamic Republic of Iran. What we see, here, is the twenty-first century version of French intellectuals'
fascination with China in the 1960s. This paper aims to discuss the rhetoric of Middle Eastern academics
in their criticisms of the US imperialist politics towards the Middle East. It will particularly concentrate on
the critical position of distinguished Iranian diaspora intellectuals, such as Ali Behdad and Hamid Dabashi
among others, in their denunciations of the American foreign policy towards Iran. This paper argues that
some diaspora intellectuals have shown the tendency to conceal the local sociopolitical injustices in their
homelands in order to avoid a challenge in their moral campaign for delegitimizing the Orientalist politics
of the imperial powers.
Mahmoud Arghavan is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School of North American Studies John F.
Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin.
Aníbal Arregui, Universität Rostock
Naturalized Infrastructures:
Amazonian Aluminium and the Global Biopolitics of Environmental Justice
Despite social anthropology and historical ecology having shown the Amazonian rainforest to be a humanized
and anthropogenic context, colonial history has depicted it as a purely natural milieu. The social agency of
its material culture, traditional infrastructures and geographical arrangements has been swallowed by the
naturalist preconceptions of the civilizing project. In parallel, first the colonial despoliation, and later
the mechanized extraction of Amazonian natural resources, have provided the modern West with the 'raw
materials' that have in part afforded an intensive process of industrialisation and urbanisation. By following
the example of the extraction of aluminium ores in the river Trombetas (lower Amazon, Brazil) and its
commodification for modern urban context, the paper investigates the role that the naturalization of Amazonian
infrastructures plays in the material flows that enabled globalisation and capitalism. With that aim, this paper
will outline a biopolitical approach where the global trade of aluminium appears as a consequence of exerting
'the power over life' unevenly, this is, as politics of nature that gives rise to many of the social and environmental
imbalances existing between extractive and productive economies.
Aníbal Arregui obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology by the Universitat de Barcelona with a dissertation
on lower Amazonian sociotechnical systems. He now continues his research at Universität Rostock with his
postdoc project that looks for the global connections of lower Amazonian political economies.
28
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Hariprasad Athanickal, EFLU Hyderabad, India
Party Justice:
Changing Patterns of Popular Perceptions and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has had a hugely popular base among the working class
in India, especially in West Bengal and Kerala, for close to fifty years. During the years when the party
grew, it worked almost like a parallel government, with a structure in place to solve local disputes in all
the places where it was dominant. The party was associated with a certain sense of justice and law easily
accessible to the people quite unlike the codified laws and hierarchical legal system of the state that was
a distant abstraction. It was through a constant engagement with local issues and community problems at
the grassroots level that the leaders and workers of the party became a crucial aspect of the social lives
of the people in Bengal and Kerala. The vast majority of the people even when they were not particularly
followers of the party had grown to trust the party's notion of justice and its ways of executing it. This paper attempts to understand the popular perceptions of CPI-M and the contradictory aspects of its presence
as a 'just' and 'neutral' arbiter in the everyday lives of people in Kerala through three seminal literary
texts in Malayalam: Pattabacki (What Is Left Of The Lease) and Ningalenne Communistacki (You Made Me
A Communist) written in the 1950s, and Paleri Manikyam: Oru Pathira Kolapathakathinte Katha (Paleri
Manikyam: A Midnight Murder Mystery) written in 2009.
Lisa Bach, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen
Indigenous Perspectives on the Colonisation of Western Australia in Kim Scott's That Deadman
Dance
In his 2010 novel That Deadman Dance, Aboriginal Australian writer Kim Scott illustrates the history of
early contact between the Noongar people and Europeans in the area of Albany, Western Australia, and
presents an indigenous perspective on the colonisation of the continent. Focusing on the realm of space,
one of the most central elements of indigenous life worlds, the paper aims to examine not only the literary
representations of the connection between the Noongar and their spatial surroundings in That Deadman
Dance but also how the novel negotiates the meeting of the Aboriginal population and the European settlers
on ancestral land in the first half of the 19th century. In a first step, the paper will therefore outline the
indigenous and non-indigenous approaches to space represented in the text by referring to narratological
instruments such as Jurij Lotman's model of narrative space. In a second step, the results of the analysis
will form the basis for investigating the Aboriginal perceptions on the occupation and settlement of their
land. In a final step the paper asks whether Scott's novel can be read 'as a space where an Indigenous truth
can be told that Official History denies or questions, as well as a space of reflection and Indigenous recovery'
(Renes) and, thus, as a potential form of doing justice to the history of the Noongar people.
Since October 2012, Lisa Bach is a PhD student at the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural
Studies (IPP) at Justus-Liebig University. Her dissertation project explores narrative representations of indigenous space in Aboriginal texts from Australia.
29
Lindsay Barrett, University of Technology, Sydney
The Call of the Wild: Wolves, Dogs and the Colonial Apparatus
In her cultural history Dog, Susan McHugh notes in passing the taken-for-granted narrative that understands the
transformation of the free-living wolf into the domesticated dog as an unproblematic consequence of deliberate
and progressive human intervention. According to this normative ordering of knowledge the wolf, replaced by the
obedient human-bred dog, then becomes a form of noble savage left to die off outside those civilizing mechanisms
of coercion and control so integral to the machinery of colonialism. This paper will draw on both contemporary
animal studies and colonial theory to consider the fate of wolves in Europe and North America. On both continents
wolves were persecuted almost to extinction, in the later case as part of the land seizure processes of the nineteenth century designed to make possible the industrial level production of other animals like sheep and cows as
food for rapidly expanding urban human populations. These social and economic processes in turn produced a
romanticized, text-based culture featuring animal-persecuting and exploiting figures like the pioneer and the cowboy. This influential mode of cultural production subsequently found an enthusiastic market not just in the United
States but also in Europe. Yet now protected, ironically, by a degree of state intervention, the wolf is returning in
numbers to both continents, even reappearing over the last decade in eastern and central Germany, a process that
can, this paper will argue, be seen as a form of animal-based post-colonial restitution. The paper will conclude
by stressing the importance of understanding the colonial experience not just in terms of the human, but also in
relation to other animals as well.
Lindsay Barrett is a Research Fellow with the Cultural Studies Group at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is
presently working with colleagues from the University of Potsdam on German-Australian colonial entanglements.
Amelie Bernzen, Universität zu Köln & Paul Kristiansen University of New England
A 'Fair Go' for Organic Agriculture in Australia?
Over the recent past, increasing concerns have emerged in Australia regarding agricultural production methods
that have been causing environmental damage, enhanced by extreme climatic conditions such as droughts and
highly variable rainfall. This has triggered an increasing awareness of and calls for more environmentally sustainable agricultural practices. The area under organic management has tripled worldwide since the late 1990s,
with Australia currently being the country with the largest area under organic management, most of which is extensive farming. This paper will discuss whether organic farming has had a 'fair go' in Australia. On the one hand,
increasing demand for domestic produce is an incentive for more local production. On the other hand, for most
sectors, organic farms in Australia remain smaller than large scale, export-oriented conventional enterprises, and
for some organic commodities, supply remains stagnant. Conventional farms have historically received a higher
level of support in the light of Australia's export potential of agricultural produce, an important contributor to the
country's economic prosperity. However, support for organics, has been inconsistent, with government support
being relatively low, particularly for research and development. The current regulatory system, primarily the
standards, still causes some confusion among producers and consumers. Furthermore, there are still problems
in providing a consistent supply of quality products, partly related to logistics and supply chain management. We
conclude that for organic agriculture in Australia, the road may still be 'rockier' than for other parts of the world
in achieving the full potential in production and distribution.
Amelie Bernzen is a post-doctoral research fellow and lecturer in economic geography. Her PhD dealt with global
standards, quality and risk management in organic food imports, while her more recent research focuses on socioeconomic analyses around land-use change in coastal Bangladesh.
Paul Kristiansen is a Senior Lecturer in Agricultural Systems. Involved with the Australian organic industry for over
15 years, his research interests include horticultural production, supply chain, and sustainable development in SE
Asia.
30
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Prudence Black, University of Sydney
The Speed of Decolonisation: Travel, Modernisation and the 1955 Bandung Conference
With the mid-century independence movements, the concepts of emancipation and nationalism were
high on the agenda. But the material basis for this—technological rather than economic—was not revised.
Emerging third-world nations adopted the same rhetoric of technological planning as the older countries,
but with the added advantage of the 'clean slate' and, for modern experiments. The Bandung Conference
had on its agenda the desire to 'catch up' with the West. Without the 'machinery' of modernization the
transportation of over 600 leaders and delegates to Bandung would have been much more difficult. This
paper discusses the way modern technologies in the form of Lockheed Constellations, Boeing Stratocruisers
and Douglas DC3s were used to transport the conference delegates to Bandung, often along the old Imperial
routes. Along with the techno-modernity of flight, delegates attended the conference in the newly-renovated
Gedung Merderka and stayed at the modern Art Deco designed Savoy Homann Hotel.
Dr. Prudence Black is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published in the areas of aviation studies, design, fashion
and popular culture, and is the author of The Flight Attendant's Shoe (2011).
Gill H. Boehringer, Macquarie University
People's Lawyers, People's Tribunals, People's Alternative Justice Systems
Recently there has been an upsurge of radical critique of law, legal institutions and practice of law as the
impacts of globalization and the 'war on terror' are felt around the globe e.g. increased state surveillance
and repression, human rights and environmental abuse, often in circumstances of impunity. At the same
time, corporate power has been unleashed so that conditions for working class and even middle class
people have seriously deteriorated, inequality has grown significantly, and the threat to the environment
has become an existential crisis. Critiques of law have flowed again after some years of relative silence.
This time, significantly, including a new attack on traditional understandings of international law, much of
which comes from Third World scholars. There appears to be an increase in interest in People's Tribunals
at the international and national levels. There are also indications that local tribunals are being used in a
number of countries. Such bodies are seen as important elements in community struggles for social justice
and the protection of human rights and the environment. Another development is the creation of alternative justice systems in liberated zones e.g Zapatistas in Chiapas; Kurds in eastern Turkey, Brazilian peasants
occupying land illegally.
Gill H. Boehringer is a Former Head of Law School, Macquarie University, has also taught in universities of
the USA, Northern Ireland, England, Tanzania. Has served as a panel member on the Permanent People's
Tribunal in Cambodia inquiring into the garment industry, and in Mexico inquiring into globalization and
the social crisis.
31
Hannah Boettcher, University of Western Australia & Freie Universität Berlin
Contemporary Artistic Articulations of Aboriginal Rights: The Work of Daniel Boyd
This paper focuses on the art of Daniel Boyd (b. 1982), an Aboriginal Australian artist who draws attention
to the ongoing discrimination of Indigenous people and the biased narrative of contemporary historiography in Australia. Boyd's art adds an Aboriginal perspective to discussions around postcolonial justice,
repatriation, and reconciliation. By means of an iconographical analysis of two art works I seek to exemplify
his active role in this debate. The painting We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006) challenges the 'discovery'
of Australia by depicting Captain Cook as a pirate illegitimately conquering inhabited land. The artist thereby criticises the long-held terra nullius doctrine as demonstrated in E. Phillips Fox's original painting
Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), which Boyd relates to. The installation Up In Smoke
Tour (2011) was created in London during Boyd's artist-in-residency at the Natural History Museum. He
responds to the Museum's First Fleet collection that documents not only early European depictions of the
Australian fauna and flora but also the first contact between the local Eora and the British. The implied
Eurocentric viewpoint as well as the absence of Indigenous perspectives in this collection has prompted
Boyd to foreground this lack of information. He framed his images with (de-commissioned) archival boxes
from the Museum's Human Remains Unit. The Museum has established a repatriation programme in order
to deal with the increasing number of repatriation requests from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
communities.
Hannah Boettcher's thesis is part of a joint PhD between the University of Western Australia in Perth and
the Freie Universität Berlin. It focuses on literary representations of Sydney and Berlin read through the
lens of psychogeography.
Chris Boge, Universität zu Köln
Armour, Mask, Skull and Bones: Postcolonial Justice as Reappropriation and Closure
After Ned Kelly was 'brought to justice' by the colonial authorities in 1880, his head was severed from the
body for medical inspection to determine the outlaw's predisposition for crime in accordance with the
pseudo-scientific tenets of the age. Allegedly, the head was preserved in formalin for many years, but,
unlike the death mask, it remains missing: In 1978 a skull, thought to have been Kelly's, was stolen from its
display case at the Old Melbourne Gaol. Upon its return three decades later, DNA tests against a descendant established that it wasn't Kelly's at all. Yet in 2011 a skeleton was positively identified to be that of the
outlaw. On 20 January 2013 the bones were buried in cement, and the ceremony sought to provide a sense
of closure. In a postcolonial attempt to restore justice, the dissected body was laid to rest in peace in its
native soil, restored to privacy. The story of the (re)appropriation of the national icon's remains blends the
scientific narrative of forensic anthropology with the conventions of detective fiction. It is a story of crime
and catharsis claiming to provide closure in what is in fact an unending search for truth and authenticity.
It becomes clear that aspects of justice (as an ethical ideal rather than a legal category) and power (appropriation: who 'owns' the Kelly story and its symbolism?) are open to refashioning and reshaping: 'Whose
justice are we talking about?', 'Whose claims and entitlements are we referring to?'
Chris Boge is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at the Universität zu Köln, Germany where
he teaches postcolonial fiction and life-writing.
32
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Vanessa Borsky, Technische Universität Dortmund
Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform in Recent Autobiography and Fiction
Starting in 2000, that is twenty years after independence, the Zimbabwean government under Robert
Mugabe has launched large-scale acquisition of white owned land as a project of restitution. The land
reform programme has gained notoriety for its often violent dispossession of white farmers and for nepotism by handing out the land to government cronies rather than to poor black peasants. Widely covered
by Western media, the focus of attention has been, however, on the several hundred displaced white
farmers, not on the tens of thousands of black farm workers who lost their homes and livelihoods. A rather
controversial redemption of colonial injustice, the land reform has triggered 'an explosion of white writing'
(Pilossof 2012). While the autobiographical texts are often 'late colonial nostalgia' that complain about
reverse racism and stylise necessary attempts of reimbursement as a day of reckoning, the fictional texts
tend to be more complex. In this paper I will look at several recent texts that deal with the trauma of this
form of postcolonial justice in Zimbabwe, which, in execution as well as in consequence, is unique in the
postcolony. How is the spectacle of white victimhood, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, helpful to understand the
postcolonial present? Can there be common grounds, even reconciliation, in a story that is so radically told
in black and white?
Vanessa Borsky holds a position as a teaching fellow in the Department of Cultural Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund and works on her doctoral dissertation about representations of white women farmers in
recent literature from South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Alexander Bräuer, Universität Rostock
Postcolonial Justice in Spatial Practices: The Case of the Swan River Colony
Colonialism in Western Australia like in many other settler colonies was more than an Ideology, rather it
rested on specific spatial practices. Land constituted the critical resource in colonial society and therefore
spatial practices were closely connected to postcolonial justice. To achieve justice in colonial encounters
meant to establish justice in spatial practices. Drawing on the case study of the pastoral industry on the
Avon River in early colonial Western Australia, I will show in my presentation how postcolonial justice was
nearly achieved through spatial practices. In the late 1830s aboriginal people and white settlers of the
pastoral districts joined a process of economic, social and cultural negotiation. Justice was not achieved
by the actions of a benevolent minority; rather it was created in a messy and sometimes violent process
with unexpected and unwanted results for both aboriginal people and white settlers. It was a success in
particular because it was founded on land and economy, the very roots of colonialism. However, doubts
kept on waiting in the background. Diaries and letters of the pastoral elite do not only demonstrate these
doubts, they show how white settlers tried to return to colonialism as confirmation of white supremacy.
With the introduction of convicts in 1850 and the change of spatial practices in the pastoral industry, the
economic and cultural processes which resulted in (post)colonial justice came to an end and were replaced
by a more common form of colonialism and land seizure.
Alexander Bräuer is a PhD student of the graduate school 'Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship' at the Universität Rostock.
33
Fabian Sonnenburg & Boris Braun, Universität zu Köln
Job Accessibility and Urban Form in Australian Cities
Employment accessibility is an important aspect of social equity. Australian metropolitan areas are characterised by disperse suburban employment while centrifugal forces concentrating on the Central Business
District partly overlay this pattern. Over the last three to four decades, however, significant changes of the
metropolitan population and employment structure have led to a distinct spatial mismatch between areas
of job growth and areas of unemployment and social disadvantage. Moreover, skills and qualifications of
the unemployed frequently do not match the requirements of a dynamic knowledge economy, leaving
many people without job opportunities in acceptable distance and travel time. Thus, our paper aims to
analyse the relation between employment growth, unemployment and urban form using disaggregate
data from the ABS Censuses of Population and Housing. Our findings show that in a longer term perspective the spatial mismatch of places of residence and work has been increasing. This leads to growing
regional employment disparities and an ever more complex pattern of commuter flows. Moreover, growth
of white collar employment mainly occurs on greenfield sites and in automobile-dependent locations
adjacent to wealthier suburbs. In contrast to major planning policies, job growth is relatively moderate in
transit-oriented suburban centres which are accessible by public transport and for people without access
to a car. This indicates that new centres of employment emerge mainly in locations that are not optimal in
terms of social and ecological sustainability.
Carola Briese, Universität Rostock
Postcolonial Justice in the Literary Marketplace:
Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction in the Literary Field
The globalised and neoliberal structure of conglomerate publishing plays a decisive role for the selection,
production, dissemination and reception of fictions. If we conceive of postcolonial fictions that negotiate,
construct and deconstruct notions of justice that circulate in a competitive literary field of cultural and
economic capital we have to ask how the structures of the market affect the circulation of these notions.
In my presentation I will focus on two aspects: First, with a particular view on the UK literary industry, I will
demonstrate to which extent it is still relevant to refer to the literary market as a postcolonial marketplace
in which agency is oftentimes distributed in uneven ways between authors, agents, marketing departments and readers. Secondly, a literary example from the UK literary marketplace will illustrate how these
power relations between the different agents of the literary field affect the transformative potential of
notions of justice in literature, the ways in which notions of justice are being perceived and how the market
translates/transforms notions of justice into commodified and consumable works. The literary example I
could focus on is Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna which has been widely circulated in the (global) literary marketplace and which can be conceived of as a novel that offers a fictional experiment space in which
postcolonial history becomes revised.
Carola Briese is a PhD candidate at the graduate school Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship at the University of Rostock.
34
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Rachel Busbridge, Freie Universität Berlin & La Trobe University
Imagining the Postcolonial Nation: Recognition and Reconciliation in Australia
In Australia, dominant framings of indigenous recognition are bound up with the politics of reconciliation,
wherein the recognition of Aboriginal difference is seen as part and parcel of reconciling indigenous and
settler Australians as equal parties in the nation. This vision has come under critique from postcolonial critics in particular, who ask, quite rightly, to what extent can a settler colonial nation really be 'postcolonial',
thus offering an important caution concerning the potentially oppressive implications of the focus on nation for the recognition of Indigenous cultural difference and political claims alike. In this paper, however,
I argue that viewing the nation as inherently and unavoidably ideological can, paradoxically, essentialise
national identity at the same time as being reductive of Indigenous political agency. Drawing on Aboriginal
public responses to the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, I argue that nation provided an important
vocabulary through which to mount justice claims as well as to assert Indigenous particularity. The unwillingness of Indigenous commentators to leave the nation as the exclusive property of settler Australians, I
conclude, has important implications for how we 'imagine' the postcolonial nation: highlighting the political significance of challenging the proclaimed 'universality' of the imagined national subject, as well as politicising hegemonic regimes of national belonging so as imagine commonality as arising from contestation.
Rachel Busbridge is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at
Freie Universität, Berlin, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Kerry Bystrom, Bard College
Literature, Remediation, Remedy (A Case of Transitional Justice)
In part to reflect on a 'practical turn' in recent comparative literary criticism, this essay asks what role(s)
writing and reading literature can play in the provision of remedy for historical injustice. It looks specifically
at the case of South Africa's democratic transition through the lens of the Chilean-Argentine author Ariel
Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden, its staging and reception in Johannesburg, and its inscription into
the 1998 Final Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). By juxtaposing a
case of literary remediation (Chairperson of the TRC Desmond Tutu's curious insertion of a character from
Dorfman's play into his 'Foreword' to the Final Report) with contemporary manifestations of an older understanding of remediation as a process of medical healing or providing legal redress (ongoing campaigns
by apartheid victims regarding their right to remedy), the essay draws attention to some of the limits of the
literary as a site of praxis. At the same time, it suggests that attention to—or close reading of—moments
where literary and other aesthetic characters and forms are drawn into the medical, psychological, legal,
political, and economic realms can have practical value. Such inscriptions can create new constellations
between the present and the past, and they can make visible continuities (or, conversely, discontinuities
or misrecognitions) between desired and actual worlds. It is in this sense that remediation may aid in the
work of remedy.
Dr. Kerry Bystrom is Associate Professor of English and Human Rights at Bard College (USA) and Faculty
Representative to Bard College Berlin (Germany). She earned her doctorate at Princeton University with the
thesis Orphans and Origins: Family, Memory and Nation in Argentina and South Africa (2007).
35
Vanessa Castejon, University Paris, Anna Cole, University of Brighton
& Oliver Haag, University of Edinburgh
Samson and Delilah in Post-Colonial Europe
The film Samson and Delilah (2009) received considerable attention not only in Australia but also in Europe. The film was shown across European cinemas, awarded the prestigious Caméra d'Or prize at the
Cannes Films Festival and favourably reviewed by critics at the Zurich Film Festival and other European
festivals. The film had an ongoing impact on European imaginings of Indigenous Australia. These imaginings — from clichéd, romantic and exotic to highly political and more nuanced—will be addressed in
this paper. Drawing partly on qualitative in-depth interviews, the collaborative paper considers the varied
European imaginings of Indigenous Australia: France, the United Kingdom and Germany. These countries
have projected different imaginings of Indigenous Australia, reflecting the historical and political contexts
of each society in question and telling us as much about Europe (or rather the many 'Europes') as about
Indigenous Australia (or the many Indigenous 'Australias'). This cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary paper
elaborates on the similarities and differences between the European reception of Samson and Delilah,
arguing that European interest in Indigenous Australian films and cultures are not homogeneous but influenced by different political discourses in Europe, including French post-colonialism and German postNazism and new nationalism. The paper elaborates on the different reactions European audiences have
shown to Samson and Delilah and the extent to which the film has both challenged and affirmed European
ideas of Indigenous Australia. Some of the reactions shown by German audiences, for example, tend to
criticise the clichéd representation of Indigenous Australians in Samson and Delilah, while others seem to
consider the film not political enough to counteract racism. One thing, however, seems to be sure: Samson
and Delilah corrodes the tenacious German ideas of Indigenous Australians as a harmonious and serene
Naturvolk. In France, some people went to see Samson and Delilah for leisure but most of them wanted
to know more about Aboriginal Australia. Some were puzzled by the cliché vision, for others it reaffirmed
the image they had.
Vanessa Castejon is an associate professor at University Paris 13. Her work explores institutional racism
and more precisely Aboriginal political claims in Australia and also the image of Aboriginal people in
France/Europe.
Anna Cole teaches postcolonial literature and history at the University of Brighton. Her co-written film documenting Indigenous debutante balls in urban Sydney, Dancing with the Prime Minister (November Films),
was short-listed for a UN Media Peace Award (2010).
Oliver Haag is a Research Fellow at the Austrian Research Center for Transcultural Studies. Oliver studied
History and Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests are in the areas of
German reception of Indigenous cultures, politics of diversity, and theories of nation-building, with particular interest in Australia, the South Pacific, and Germany.
36
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Donna Coates, University of Calgary
No Fair Go
In her review of Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia by Andrew Leigh, Gillian Terzis writes
that although Australians have affection 'for the wealthy iconoclast, the maverick art collector, the billionaire
draped in a high-vis vest,' the principal of egalitarian is nevertheless central to Australian identity, and 'no
Australian legend has endured the ages quite like the 'fair go'.' But at the same time, she observes, those who
are 'less visible' - the working poor or those who live in abject poverty - have found their stories 'eclipsed' by
the tale of Australia's 'remarkable prosperity.' Yet as she also acknowledges, the 'truth-telling of literature'
often 'undermine[s] strategic efforts to conceal and distort economic and political realities.' As my paper
demonstrates, there is no shortage of literature which depicts the lives of girls and women and the poverty
they endured during the First World War, the Depression, and the Second World War. Drawing upon fictions
by Gail Jones, Simone Lazaroo, Carrie Tiffany, Joan London, and Mardi McConniche, my paper will track the
effects of the three factors Leigh determines effects the outcome of a child's chances in life: 'money, parents,
and time.' Focusing exclusively on the lives of girls and women, my paper will show what desperate measures
(such as leaving Australia) were required for survival and the attainment of economic well being. While the
majority of these girls and women become (s)heroes in their own war efforts, others were never able to
overcome fully their inauspicious beginnings.
Donna Coates teaches in the English Department at the University of Calgary. She has published on Australian,
Canadian, and New Zealand women's responses to the First and Second World Wars in fiction and drama, and
on fictional responses to the Vietnam War by American and Australian writers.
John Docker, University of Sydney
Genocide, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Consciousness:
Thoughts on Histories by Henry Reynolds, James Boyce, and Tom Lawson
The applicability of the term 'genocide' to Australian colonial history has been the subject of troubled yet
productive debate. This paper considers and contributes to the debate by exploring Henry Reynolds's An
Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia's History (2001); the Appendix, entitled 'Towards
Genocide: Government Policy on the Aborigines 1827-38', to James Boyce's Van Diemen's Land (2008),
and Tom Lawson's The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014).
John Docker is a literary and cultural historian who writes about genocide and massacre. He is interested in
how genocide and massacre bring to the fore the most fundamental of questions: the character of humanity as a species, the ethical bases of societies, and the honour of civilizations and nations.
37
Isabelle Garde, Universität Wien
Inclusive Development as Crip(dys)topic Promise:
Querying Development, Dis/ability and Human Rights
The demand to include people with disabilities into development policies and projects as articulated by
activists, international organizations and development NGOs as well as within the UN Convention on the
Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD) points to a desire for a more just future. This paper asks if and
how, 'inclusive development' leads to a querying of ableist norms and processes of exclusion within practices and discourses of 'development'. By looking at disability knowledge produced within the discourse on
inclusive development and the ways in which ableist and colonial dichotomies are re-installed within the
epistemologies of 'inclusive development', I examine the simultaneity of empowerment and re-colonisation, of inclusion and exclusion that lie at the heart of inclusive development. Thus, I argue that the promises
of justice and inclusion produced within development discourse point to a future that is always already out
of place. Revealing this crip(dys)topic future called forth within development discourses opens up space to
reconsider projects of justice from a critical crip positionality.
Isabelle Garde is a PhD student at Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna. Her research
interests include feminist critique of development discourses, queer politics and disability.
Helen Gilbert, University of London
Diplomacy at Large: Indigenous Aesthetics, Cultural Capital and the International Stage
This presentation considers the workings of intercultural diplomacy through a close focus on recent performances staged by Maori and Aboriginal artists in connection with exhibitions in London and Berlin.
Ranging from costumed displays of self-conscious indigeneity to subtle remembrance ceremonies, these
public acts and interventions have been variously harnessed to promote institutions and events, engage
and educate publics, animate exhibition spaces, and, crucially, connect diverse exhibits to each other and
to the respective cities' indigenous denizens, past and present. Keeping in view curatorial investments in
indigenous cultural capital, I consider the performances at issue as experiments in making manifest the
(post)colonial scars that run through the exhibitionary enterprise (historically, socially, spatially, culturally)
and theorise potential links between such scars and an emergent trans-indigenous public sphere where
diplomacy may be reimagined as a grass-roots activity. At the broader level, my research also seeks to
illuminate ways in which performative acts and aesthetics sustain indigenous cultures within, against and
beyond the forces of the neo-liberal market place.
Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, and leader of a five-year
interdisciplinary research project on global indigeneity, funded by the European Research Council.
38
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Mike Griffiths, University of Wollongong
Artifactualities: Biopolitics and Settler Colonial Liberalism
Australia can be conceived in a number of ways that don't sit easily alongside one another: a unified,
federated, nation-state (after 1901), one which remains neither republican, nor independent, subsisting
symbolically within the British Commonwealth, a state established on stolen Indigenous land, a pluralistic
and multicultural society. This slippery southern land is at once a space in which a remote frontier existed
at precisely the moment when the (post)colonial logic of liberalism began to shape the elaboration of
liberal democracy for settler subjects. As such, in this paper, I do not describe this territoriality—strung
between a settler sovereignty and a settler colonial biopolitics—as postcolonial. Rather, it is necessary to
identify the emergence of this settler colonial biopolitics as it was applied to indigenous subjects between
a certain colonial liberalism, a cultural logic of nationalism, and an imaginary postcoloniality, which follows
either. It is for this reason that I will tactically refer to a settler colonial biopolitics retained within a (post)
colonial nation state. In an ironic inversion of the bank circular, slipped in with the early Aboriginal census
data—the enumeration and description of the Aboriginal population along with the surveillance, discipline,
and biopower applied to the Aboriginal body—the (post)settler colonial nation came to describe itself as
a liberal democracy wherein Aboriginal presence was first imagined and later engineered as absence, or,
alternately, as alterity to be simultaneously normativized and fetishized. In making this argument, I retool
and rethink the work of Agamben, Foucault, Schmitt, Patrick Wolfe, Elizabeth Povinelli, and others to ask:
what artifacts remain from the settler colonial regimes of the past that spectrally haunt policy discourse
in the present?
Blanka Grzegorczyk, Philological School of Higher Education, Wroclaw
'We Don't Want No Exploitation of Third World Situations':
The Postcolonial Exotic in Sarah Mussi's Adventure Stories
London-based children's writer Sarah Mussi's The Door of No Return (2007) and The Last of the Warrior
Kings (2008) offer a bleak version of recent British history, in which political violence disrupts personal
quests to reinvent the past and the future that are set within the broader ideological problem of compensation for the activities of the Empire. The novels' ostensible purpose is to reflect back on the economic
and political situation of mainstream Britain's cultural others, suggesting the need for a more carefully
grounded understanding of the power relations that are part of the colonial inheritance and that are taken
for granted. But dependent on stereotypical perceptions of an 'othered' Africa of primitive societies, the
novels resort to the very exoticizing, romanticizing and objectifying of the racial others which they purport
to challenge. This paper offers a critical reading of modern British adventure stories by Sarah Mussi via the
lens of postcolonial studies. It traces important continuities between late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century adventure stories and their recent, avowedly postcolonial, counterparts. Close readings
of Mussi's novels make apparent the points at which these two types of adventure narrative intersect
and diverge. They also reveal a variety of different manifestations of the corrective, postcolonial impulse,
linked by the novels' attempts to address the unsettling legacy of Britain's imperial heritage. The books'
exoticist production of otherness, I will argue, serves varied and often contradictory ideological purposes,
promoting positive exchanges between Western and non-Western cultures on the one hand, but legitimating prejudiced Eurocentric stereotyping on the other. The strategies of cultural representation to which
these novels have recourse in order to challenge the authority of the mainstream lay bare the limits of the
politically engaged adventure narrative at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Blanka Grzegorczyk, PhD, is a Teaching Assistant at the Philological School of Higher Education in Wroclaw,
Poland and has been a member of the Centre for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the University of
Wroclaw Institute of English Studies since 2007.
39
Anna Haebich, Curtin University
Dark Matter: Seeking Justice In Settler Colonies
This paper is part of a larger project to record the diversity and creativity of Indigenous performers in Western
Australia as they dialogue, challenge, subvert and protest for justice in the ongoing contest with settler
colonists over rights to culture, land and belonging. This paper addresses the Noongar struggle for justice
in Whadjuk country, the current site of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. Two vital contemporary
moments provide the context: the advent of Noongar theatre in Perth in the 1980s and Australia's first
successful Native Title claim over metropolitan lands in Perth 20 years after. However the focus is on the
British invasion of Whadjuk lands during the early 1830s. Recent histories document the violent clashes
and deaths but here we pause to examine how Whadjuk cultural performances might have contributed
to survival on their lands. I say 'might' because how and what can we really know? All I can propose is to
illuminate and trace possibilities to intuit their vital role for Wadjuk people, perhaps by releasing emotions
and regenerating wyrin (spirit) to sustain their world during this time of momentous and tragic change. My
tools of trade include cross-disciplinary frameworks, performance theory (Diana Taylor), archival analysis
and metaphor (e.g. the role of Dark Matter in the universe. But most important is my decades-long affective,
corporeal and intellectual engagement with Noongar culture in the company of my Noongar partner and
family. Also the knowledge that still today Noongar people survive hardship by coming together in their
ancient family lineages to perform, dance and sing as their ancestors did in the 1830s.
Distinguished Professor Anna Haebich is an internationally regarded historian known for her interdisciplinary
approach to research. Anna's books on Aboriginal history are classics in the field and include the multi-award
winning Broken Circles Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 and For Their Own Good Aborigines and
Government in the Southwest of Western Australia.
Birte Heidemann, Technische Universität Chemnitz
Post-Agreement Northern Ireland's 'Sorry Business':
Liquid Testimonies of Truth in David Park's The Truth Commissioner
This paper argues that with the ever-increasing presence of institutional bodies that claim to 'normalise',
'measure' or even 'commission' truth, it is the fictional attempts at objectifying truth that forge the most
incisive critiques of what Northern Irish novelist David Park would call the 'sorry business' of reconciliation
and forgiveness. The focus of this paper, however, is restricted to Northern Ireland's Peace Process which,
after three decades of relentless violence, came to an end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement
in 1998. Notwithstanding its ethical intentions, the Agreement's rhetorical agenda for progress is fraught
with an unresolved past that is set off against the prospects of a cosmopolitan present. David Park's novel
The Truth Commissioner (2008) brilliantly captures these tensions between past and present, particularly
the ramifications of the country's traumatic history of colonial injustice(s) to the post-Agreement era of
'progress'. Emulating South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the novel revolves around the
trial of a disappeared teenage informer which, instead of pursuing the culprit with a genuine intent, is
transformed into a stage for reconciling the individual life trajectories of the four troubled protagonists
that they do not want to forgive but forget. Drawing upon Derrida's distinction between 'calling for forgiveness' and 'calling upon forgiveness', this paper explores the 'prescriptive' and even 'calculated' dimension
of forgiveness in Park's narrative.
Birte Heidemann is completing her dissertation on the concept of the liminal space in contemporary Northern Irish literature at the University of Potsdam. Her research interests are in postcolonial literature and
theory, Northern Irish writing and the post-9/11 novel.
40
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Victoria Herche, Universität zu Köln
'Rights of Passage' - Indigenous Australian Film and the Coming of Age Theme
Coming of age films narrativize the complex and contradictory experiences of growing up as a liminal process producing and questioning boundaries between cultures, generations, audiences, industries, and media. By exploring the concept of liminality as a passage and as a permanent state (cf. van Gennep, Turner,
Szakolczai) this paper will focus on contemporary Australian coming of age films by Indigenous filmmakers
portraying the liminal condition of young Indigenous people who experience a sense of unbelonging and
disconnection from their community, culture, and country. These films do not portray the coming of age
process simply as a threshold to be passed through, but rather in terms of an acknowledgement of 'being
in transit' as a potential source for reconciliatory agency. Thus, as in Warwick Thornton's Samson and
Delilah (2009), the protagonists' rite of passage turns into a potential 'passage to rights', a chance to reposition themselves as young Aboriginals in contemporary Australia.
Victoria Herche holds an M.A. in Theatre, Film and TV Studies, English Studies and German Studies from
the Universität zu Köln, Germany. Currently she is working on a Ph.D. project examining contemporary
Australian coming of age films.
Dolores Herrero, Universidad de Zaragoza
Merlinda Bobis's Fish-Hair Woman:
An Attempt to Lay the Question of Justice in Its Place
Merlinda Bobis's Fish-Hair Woman, based on a previous short story with the same title published as part of
this Filipino-Australian author's collection White Turtle, relies on magical realist strategies in order to defy
conventional narrative modes and testify to the unutterable, to all that resists straightforward representation, namely, the massacres and brutal destruction of whole villages, and the traumatic disappearance of
thousands of innocent and helpless people as a result of the militarisation of the country in the 1987-1989
total war waged by the Philippine government against communist insurgency.
Estrella, the main character in the novel, is called 'Fish-Hair Woman' because she uses her hair to fish out
corpses, victims of war, from the river. The purpose of my paper will be to use some theories put forward
by ethical criticism and trauma and memory studies in order to analyse Bobis's novel as an innovative narrative plea for justice that strives to claim that individual and collective atrocities cannot be simply swept
under the carpet, and that, to quote Gail Jones's words on the novel, 'testimony is solidarity and the loss
and retrieval of any story of historical suffering implicates us all.' This paper will show how Fish-Hair Woman manages to dig up individual traumatic memories from their ruins so that the painful collective past
can be somehow reconstructed and brought to the surface, the memory of the disappeared can be finally
honoured, and resilience can pave the way for hope in a better future.
Dolores Herrero is Senior Lecturer of English Literature at the Department of English and German Philology
of the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. Her main interests are postcolonial literature and cinema, on which
she has published extensively.
41
Isabelle Hesse, University of York
The Limits of Postcolonial Justice: Israel/Palestine in British Culture
Although Britain's role as a colonial Empire is increasingly engaged with in cultural productions, an often
overlooked aspect of its colonial history is the British Mandate in Palestine, with the British officially
governing the country between 1923 and 1948. In this paper, I examine two examples of recent British
literature/drama – Marina Lewycka's novel We Are All Made Of Glue (2009) and Peter Kosminsky's Channel 4
miniseries The Promise (2011) – which critically depict the British presence in Palestine and draw attention to
Britain's responsibility for the current conflict in the Middle East. I am interested in the tropes that Lewycka
and Kosminsky use to represent this conflict, for example the British narrator explaining the conflict to the
audience, thus directly implicating the British public and taking them on a didactic journey to learn more
about the situation in Israel/Palestine. I trace how effective their works are in raising awareness of the plight
of the Palestinians and motivating a sense of 'postcolonial' justice that should be granted to the Palestinians,
whose suffering continues to be overshadowed by the spectre of the Holocaust. I argue that ultimately the
memory of the Holocaust is still too prominent in British culture for a sustained sense of responsibility for
the conflict in Israel/Palestine to emerge and to trigger any meaningful action that would result in ending the
occupation, moving the Palestinians effectively from being 'colonial' to becoming 'postcolonial.'
Isabelle Hesse is a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at University of York, UK, where
she completed her PhD on contemporary Jewish, Palestinian, and postcolonial writing.
Christin Hoene, Universität Potsdam
'This Alien Legacy': The Origins of 'Sodomy' Laws in British Colonialism and their Postcolonial
Repercussions'
In this paper, I aim to provide a critical overview of the origins of the so-called 'sodomy' laws in British
colonies and their contemporary repercussions in postcolonial societies. In more than 40 former British
colonies, including the Indian subcontinent, homosexuality remains illegal under British colonies using old
British laws. In countries such as Sri Lanka, laws against homosexuality were introduced by the colonisers
and still pertain even after independence. Much media attention was paid when, on 11 December 2013,
India's Supreme Court restored an 1861 law banning gay sex and when the Nigerian president, Goodluck
Jonathan, signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act on 7 January 2014. Focusing on India and Nigeria
as two of the most prominent and topical case studies and analysing recent news coverage as well as the
2008 Human Rights Watch report on the topic, I will trace these recent political developments to their
origins in colonial law and in an orientalist discourse that at the same time outlawed homosexuality and
exoticised it as secret desire. I then want to discuss in how far these anti-homosexuality laws are part of an
anti-Western discourse that, in a reversal of causality, invokes a traditional and straight pre-colonial past
now contaminated by queer and neo-colonial Western influences.
42
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Martina Horakova, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Ways of Postcolonial Belonging: Writing Spatial History as a Personal Journey
In my paper, I will offer a short reflection on a group of narratives written by Australian historians around the
turn of the 21st century, narratives which transgress conventional historiography by interweaving elements
of academic/intellectual memoir, travelogue, and storytelling. While the personal turn in history writing is
neither new nor unique in Australia, these narratives, I believe, are specific in their attempt to articulate one
of the many versions of Reconciliation and provide one of the many perspectives on 'postcolonial justice'
in relation to the dispossession of Indigenous people. I will focus on those aspects of the narratives which
express subjectivity, ambivalence, doubt, estrangement, self-reflection, sense of complicity, spatial anxiety and
desire of belonging, and lend the narratives the air of an innovative, hybrid mode of writing spatial history.
References to Peter Read's Belonging, Mark McKenna's Looking for Blackfella's Point, Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's
Eye, Bruce Pascoe's Convincing Ground and Deborah Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country will be provided
in order to illustrate different ways of transcending what seems to be an impasse in searching for an ethically
correct relationship to land and its first peoples in the postcolonial space.
Martina Horakova is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk
University in the Czech Republic. Her research interests include confluence of women's life writing and
travel writing, effects and ethics of cross-cultural narratives, and narratives of belonging in settler colonies.
Julia Hoydis, Universität zu Köln
Rape, Revenge, and the Aesthetics of Erotic Justice in Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death
Who Fears Death (2010) by Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor is a striking contemporary novel
that confronts readers with complex ethical questions, an aesthetic of magical realism, and challenges
conceptions of responsibility and reconciliation in a postcolonial context. Set in a post-apocalyptic African
desert kingdom, torn apart by genocide and tribal feuds for superiority, the protagonist Onyesonwu, who
bears the indelible stain of being an 'ewu' – a child of rape – is driven by the desire to kill her mother's
rapist. Singled out in the community because of her family history and appearance, Onyesonwu becomes
a sorcerer's apprentice and devotes all her strength to her mission of seeking revenge. In the process she
develops her own logic of 'erotic justice', enduring hardships, transgressing boundaries and sacrificing
people and relationships. Okorafor's heroine is an example of the erotic, subaltern subject, which, in Ratna
Kapur's sense, brings 'to the foreground the desire of this subject not as a way to deny that violence and exploitation that surrounds her life, but as a heuristic device to challenge the representation of her exclusively as
a victim' (2005: 9). Chronicling the growing of a young woman into sexual maturity, the narrative allows a
critical engagement with matters of (self)justice, liberation, power, and cultural heritage, including controversial
issues such as female circumcision. Okorafor's novel constructs an aesthetic realm of a 'feminist fantastic'
(Cooper 2012), while raising questions such as what constitutes justice in a context of 'unspeakable crimes'
and what happens when reconciliation is equaled with surrender.
Julia Hoydis is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Cologne, Germany,
where she has been teaching Anglophone literatures and cultures since 2007 .
43
Daniela Hrzán, Humboldt-Universität Berlin
Is There Justice for Women? Gendered and Sexual Violence in South Africa and Their Negotiation
in Megan Voysey-Braig's Till We Can Keep an Animal (2008)
'Rape is endemic' in South African culture. This statement, put forward by Charlene Smith, herself a survivor
of rape and sexual violence, made headlines when it first appeared in the Washington Post in 2000. Since
then reports from both within and outside South Africa have taken up the issue in a rather sensationalized
manner, thereby creating an image of South Africa as a country inherently hostile to women. It is this
public discourse which is also invoked in Megan Voysey-Braig's 2008 post-Apartheid novel Till We Can
Keep an Animal. The book departs from the experience of Sarah, a white middle-aged woman, who is
being attacked by two men in her own home and who is raped and eventually murdered. Till We Can Keep
an Animal is not the typical 'black peril' narrative as it has been discussed for example by Lucy Valerie
Graham in her 2012 study of race and rape in South African literature. Rather, it resembles books such as
J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace in the way it discusses the potential existence of both 'black peril' and
'white peril' plots. My paper will therefore also examine the critical potential of Sarah's 'ghostwriting' for
a possible counter-history to the (well-known) unspoken script of interracial rape as it presents itself on
the surface of the novel.
Daniela Hrzàn is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Humboldt Universität Berlin where she is writing
up her dissertation on recent discourses about Female Genital Cutting in the United States.
Andrew W. Hurley, University of Technology, Sydney
No Fixed Address, but Currently in East Berlin:
The Bicentennial, Indigenous Protest and the Festival des politischen Liedes, 1988
In his work on multidirectional memory, Michael Rothberg makes the point that '[a]lthough it is difficult
to grasp today […] communism provided one of the discursive spheres […] in which the articulation of
genocide and colonialism could first be attempted — and this long before the intellectual vogue for […]
postcolonial studies' (2009: 118). In this paper, I will begin to explore some of the surprisingly many ways
in which the East German State participated in the articulation of genocide and colonialism and their
legacies in the Australian context. In particular, I will focus on the Aboriginal reggae-rock band No Fixed
Address's performance, just after Australia Day 1988, at the East German Festival of Political Song. On its
face, this offered a signal transnational location for Indigenous protest during the Bicentennial year. But
I will investigate how the articulation of protest was skewed (and undermined) by two partly competing,
partly symbiotic intentions on the part of the East German and the Australian States. I will explore how,
in this ambiguous context, the protest unfolded in complex and sometimes unintended ways, and close
by contemplating how we might begin to assess the German Democratic Republic as a venue for airing
Indigenous claims on justice in Australia.
Andrew W. Hurley is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology,
Sydney.
44
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Karin Ikas, Universität Duisburg-Essen
Slavery and Resilience in Caryl Phillips' Novel Cambridge
Slavery constitutes not only a serious threat to survival and physical health but it also aims at destroying the mental health and self-esteem of the victims. In other words, what is at stake is the survival of
an individual's ego and identity. So, how is it possible to survive with what Ervin Goffmann has called a
'spoiled identity' in his theory of social stigma? This paper makes a case for resilience as a useful concept
here. Resilience does not eliminate stress or erase life's horrors and difficulties. Instead, it gives people the
strength to tackle problems head on, overcome adversity and injustice and move on with their lives. Using
interdisciplinary approaches to resilience as well as Goffmann's idea of a spoiled identity as the jumpingoff points, this paper considers resilience in the context of transatlantic slavery as it is approached in Caryl
Phillip's novel Cambridge from the perspective of an enslaved educated man of African origin and a Victorian
plantation owner's daughter who are both writing from subjugated positions. What psychological, mental
and physical resources do both characters have to build up resilience? How do they proceed? To what
extent are they well networked and can rely on external support? What aesthetic strategies does Caryl
Phillips apply to address these questions and how might they help to work towards overcoming the impasse
sometimes associated with the postcolonial restoration of justice and resilience after the experienced
traumatic history and insult of transatlantic slavery?
Karin Ikas currently works as a stand-in Professor for Anglophone Literature and Culture at the Universität
Duisburg-Essen. In 2010 she obtained her second Ph.D. (Habilitation) in Anglophone Literary and Cultural
Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.
Felicity Jensz, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Disrupted Mission Histories: Reassessing Historical Perspectives of Postcolonial Justice
Many missionary groups within Australia during the colonial period were German-based, and as such relied
upon German citizens as workers for their missions. As outsiders of the British Imperial system German missionaries
at times used their position to criticize the colonial system, calling for a fairer treatment of Indigenous peoples.
By the time of the First World War, many German missionary groups had already given up their work and
left Australia due to a perceived lack of 'success' of converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity. Those who
stayed in postcolonial Australia were forced to leave at the onset of WWI due to their status as enemy aliens
of the British Empire. This paper will elucidate these histories, and will argue that the disjuncture of previous
historical continuities through global political events created a cleft between the claims of nineteenth century German missionary groups for colonial justice, and contemporaneous narratives that often frame these
events as historical curiosities, rather than political realities.
Felicity Jensz received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2007. Since 2008 she has been employed
in the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures at the Westfälische
Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany.
45
Mohamed Shafeeq K, EFLU Hyderabad, India
Global Justice
Global justice has been a cosmopolitan project ever in the becoming. The Kantian factor in it was to imagine and elevate to the global level the peace achieved at the level of polity. It has been Etienne Balibar's
insight that in modern democracies the split within the individual between the political function (citizen)
and the empirical feeling human (subject) has been projected on to two segments of the population. In
the postcolonial context this observation has been furthered most notably by Partha Chatterjee in what
has spanned most of his oeuvre. Chatterjee's exhortation is not just to acknowledge the split in the nation,
but also to read a new and radical politics in the intersection between the two segments, such that this
intersection is where politics resides for most of the world, and in a fashion removed from normative Western understanding. However, it has been Chatterjee's crucial schematic roadblock that the autonomous
domain could not interact with each except in the global (Western) language of bourgeois statehood. I
propose that a true departure from the Western epistemic frame of global justice is possible only if we
map in the so-called 'autonomous domain' a cosmopolitan language – that is, a language that can define
and apply to the cosmos from the particularity of the abject polis.
Mohamed Shafeeq K is a PhD student with the Dept. of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages
University (EFLU), Hyderabad, India.
John Njenga Karugia, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Africa Looks East in Search of Postcolonial Justice
African countries are seeking and perceiving a sustainable political economy of dignity in their intensifying
relations with Asian nations. Asia is generally perceived as treating Africa in a fairer manner than the 'West'.
As a result, some observers and actors portray relations with Asia as a source of postcolonial justice. At the
same time, some Asian actors are seeking postcolonial justice themselves. This paper analyses these complex
discourses and attempts to analyse whether Asia is Africa's postcolonial justice. It focuses on recent research I
conducted in Malaysia, India, China and East Africa in the context of Indian Ocean imaginaries and memories.
John Njenga Karugia is a scholar from Kenya, and he attained his PhD in African Studies from the Universität Leipzig. He is a research associate and lecturer at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main where he
works at AFRASO (Africas Asian Options).
46
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Melissa Kennedy, Universität Wien
Injustice and Inequality: Structures of Tyranny by the 1%
The Occupy Wall Street movement brought to public attention the increasing gap between the 1% (or more
accurately the 0.1%) super rich and the hollowed-out middle class. The phenomenon, however, is not restricted
to 21st-century USA. Concentrated wealth in the hands of a very few is a feature of modern capitalism, well
documented in Anglophone literature at least since the Industrial Revolution and mercantile colonialism.
Following the long-view of globalisation as the systematic spread of capitalism (Amin, Meiksins Wood, Wallerstein), economists such as Amartya Sen and Ha-Joon Chang have described a long history of British and
American policies that create and enforce favourable trade conditions, with exploitative corporate behaviour defended through law and military intervention. This essay analyses postcolonial historical fiction
that represents three particular historical spaces and historical moments of capitalist imposition in Dionne
Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon (USA slave trade), Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and River of
Smoke (India-Chinese opium trade) and Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (Australian privatisation of land for
farming). I focus on how the novels depict colonial British and settler white political, legal and military/police
enforcement to protect their economic interests in order to show the economic motivation of many of the
structures of injustice familiar to postcolonial studies.
Melissa Kennedy (Universität Wien) lectures in English Literature, Culture and Media Studies. She has published
on Maori, Francophone, and indigenous Japanese postcolonial literature and cultural studies. Her current
work applies economics to postcolonial considerations of poverty and inequality.
Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University
In the Wake of Moby Dick: Whaling, Colonialism and (Trans)national Remembrance in Kim Scott's
That Deadman Dance
In Moby Dick, Hermann Melville salutes the whale-ship – 'the true mother of colonial Australia' - as an agent
of colonialism and global modernity. As a vital and lucrative transnational industry in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, whaling moved people – not only whalers but convicts, explorers, missionaries,
adventurers, merchants and settlers — from one geographic space to another, one port to another, one
cultural context to another, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. In his 2011 novel, That
Deadman Dance, Kim Scott brings an indigenous antipodean imaginary to reflect both on the 'enlightened
world' that was brought to the 'pestiferously barbarous' shores of Australia by whale-ships, and Indigenous
responses to new languages, customs and cultural practices. Through the character of Bobby and his kin, and
their relations with 'men from beyond the horizon', the novel imagines a formative moment of early contact
in which reconciliation and accommodation between settlers and the Indigenous inhabitants was possible. In
this paper, I explore the novel's work of transnational remembrance, its memoryscapes of loss, dispossession
and survival, and its ecological vision of justice.
Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Australian National University.
47
Peter Kilroy, University of Leeds
Postcolonial Justice? Recognition, Redistribution and the 'Mabo' Legacy
What is the relationship between law and justice in a postcolonial context? This question opens out onto a
familiar set of postcolonial problematics. To what extent are such concepts and practices bound to Enlightenment and colonial particularities, and to what extent can they be loosed from such moorings and rendered
universal? Is there one law and justice for all, or should accommodations be made for Indigenous or minority
groups? When does participation in such a process mean capitulating to a structure of oppression, and when
does it constitute a form of resistance? With such problematics in mind, this paper will focus on the struggle
for Indigenous land rights in Australian law and, more specifically, the famous 'Mabo' Native Title decision
of 1992. It will situate the Mabo ruling and its legacy in a state of unresolved tension between the universal
and the particular, between identity and difference and, in particular, between recognition and redistribution. More than twenty years on, has it produced much heat in terms of the concrete redistribution of land,
resources and political power? How have Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians negotiated these twin
claims of recognition and redistribution post-Mabo, and might something like 'postcolonial justice' ever be
found in the space between them?
Peter Kilroy is a UK-based lecturer in Cultural Studies interested in colonial and postcolonial media. He is
reviews editor of parallax journal.
Kerstin Knopf, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald
Jindabyne: Cultures, Ethics, Justice in Australian Cinema
Jindabyne is a 2006 film by Ray Lawrence that takes issue with the strained relationship between white
and Aboriginal Australia. On their annual fishing trip Stewart and his friends discover the dead body of an
Aboriginal girl in the river. Instead of hiking out and getting the police, they tie the girl to a rock and continue their fishing; they will not have their weekend wrecked by a girl like that, it seems. After their return,
a scandal breaks loose: they are accused of having enjoyed their fishing beside the girl's body. Stewart's
wife Claire is shocked over her husband's heartless behavior. While their marriage slowly disintegrates
and racial tension rises and splits the community, Claire seeks some sort of reconciliation and justice. This
paper introduces this marvelous film by a non-Aboriginal director and uses it to discuss the neocolonial
mentality that produces racist violence against Aboriginal women. As well it critically looks at attitudes and
ethics that influence the interaction between the mainstream and the marginalized Aboriginal community
in a pre-apology Australia.
Kerstin Knopf teaches North American literature, film and media in Greifswald. Her main research interests
are Postcolonial Studies, Black Atlantic Studies, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian romantic literature, American prison literature, and Women and Gender Studies.
48
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Lotte Kößler, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
'The White Man's Justice': A New Reading of Wulf Sachs' Black Hamlet (1937)
Wulf Sachs' attempt of proving the universality of psychoanalytic categories must be seen as an almost
revolutionary claim in his time, but is today highly contested. His struggle to establish a liberal 'discourse of
justice' (Habermas) is imprinted in his continuous generic reworkings of the text as biography (1937) novel
(1940) and case study (1947). In these hybrid modes of narration, voices and identities of analyst and patient seem to blur and the author's liberal claim of equality becomes cushioned by the 'epistemic violence'
(Khanna) Sachs is exerting against his Shona patient, Chavafambira. By (re)constructing Chavafambira's
biography, the author also constantly displaces and questions his own voice, the Jewish emigrant fleeing
pre-Holocaust Europe, just to find himself in pre-apartheid South Africa. An exemplary reading of the
court scene, available in all three editions, shows how Sachs' rhetoric of psychoanalysis and his references
to Shakespeare as the colony's cultural capital tries to construe a humanist ideology of equality. Can the
psychoanalytic epistemology question the pre-apartheid law system or does it rather stabilize it by sharing
the same 'hermeneutics of suspicion'(Ricoeur)?
Lotte Kößler studied History, Anthropology and English Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in
Munich where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on Zimbabwean and South African literature.
Kateřina Kolářová, Charles University, Prague
'Grandpa lives in paradise now': (Neo)-Colonial Circuits of Vitality and Debility
Theorists calling for decolonization of disability studies and its epistemologies foreground the importance
of analyzing disability within the global South and in terms of relations between global North and South.
My critical appreciation of postcolonial justice is motivated by a study of practices of neo-colonial displacement of disability/debility onto the global South that interrogates ways in which neoliberal capitalism
extracts vital capacities from individual and collective bodies in the reproduction of vitality and capacity of
others. The paper focuses on the practices of reproducing life and capacity within the broader geo-political
context of Empire. Germany will serve me as a concrete example of how neo-liberal practices of capacitation challenge the theoretical and political landscape of disability studies. In the autumn of 2012, the German public finally took notice of an entrepreneurial solution to the care crisis that has been flourishing in
Germany (and other countries) for several years: namely, the 'outsourcing' of elderly and disabled people
(in particular people with Alzheimer's) into Thailand and other countries of the global South. Even a brief
glance at the advertising materials of these care homes and centers reveals the racialized and gendered
dynamic that sell them. In the paper I address the following questions: How are structures of disablement
complicated through such transnational circuits of privilege and care? How should we theorize the structural, racial, and class privilege conferred upon disabled Northern subjects in care arrangements where
subjects of the South are turned into exploitable sources of reproductive labour?
Kateřina Kolářová is Head of and the Assistant Professor for Cultural Studies at the Department of Gender
Studies, Charles University, Prague. Her work interrogates intersections of gender, disability and queer
studies.
49
Lianne van Kralingen, Freie Universität Berlin
Justice and the Company: Economic Imperatives in The Journal of Jan van Riebeeck (1652-1662)
To understand what form justice takes when it is demanded in light of economic imperatives, this paper
takes a close look at an account of the actions of the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) as presented
in the Journal of Jan van Riebeeck (1652-1662), who reported his actions as the first commander at the
Cape of Good Hope to his superiors in the Company. Through a discussion of two passages of this early
report this paper shows that the text presents the wish for economic gain and the company's welfare as
the driving force for the institution of local policies. This paper argues that the Company's global policy
and position led to a process guided strongly by economic imperatives rather than colonial possession and
(cultural) oppression. This in turn led to what may be considered both just and unjust but economically
consistent behaviour in the station's relation to the native population. From the context of David Harvey's
notion of accumulation by dispossession this paper shows a logical progression in the capitalist activity of
the company: from dispossession of natural resources to the commodification and dispossession of the
(human) body. This paper shows that these economically led processes eventually lead the settlement to
become a lucrative colony rather than a mere refreshment station. Thus, this paper argues lastly, the journal causes us to question the existence of a universal justice and shows how justice is configured when it
is considered in light of economic imperatives.
Lianne van Kralingen is currently an MA student of English Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin with a BA
degree in English Language and Culture from Leiden University with a heavy focus on Postcolonial literature and theory.
Stefan Laser, Universität Kassel
Who Benefits from Sustainability?
Analysing the Indian Politics of Electronic Waste in a Transnational Setting
In 2011, the Government of India enrolled the 'E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules'. This law was
drafted under the umbrella of sustainability, framed as such (for instance but not only) by the 'National Environment Policy' of 2006. The E-Waste Law tries to address an issue that has been present in the country
for about 30 years: enormous piles of hazardous waste brought in by excessive international consuming
habits and handled by the 'informal sector' in improper ways. Humans and 'nature' have been abused in similar ways. Hence a comprehensive solution that strives for justice and equity was sought. However, today,
it is doubtful yet crucial whether this legislative may be successfully implemented in the near future. Revisiting this example in a broader framework, a key question appears: how can we evaluate the governance
of collective goods ever since both global politics and companies discovered 'sustainable' management as
a comprehensive solution? What is happening on the ground, behind the mask of this fancy modern term
called sustainability? Indeed, there is no easy way out of this question—both ignoring 'modern terms' as
well as celebrating them obviously miss central academic notions of rigour. As a point of departure, I propose (with regard to the e-waste case) one has to analyze the process of how the law came into existence
before talking about its degree of justice. In other words, one has to bring justice to the data by accepting
its complexity.
50
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Ole Birk Laursen, University of Copenhagen
Reading the Riots: Racism and Rights in the Novels of Courttia Newland and Alex Wheatle
The August 2011 riots across Britain revealed new challenges to our understanding of racism and human
rights in Britain's black communities. The current economic crisis has caused massive unemployment among
Britain's young black population and, at the same time, young black men are 28 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than non-blacks. In many ways, a liberal multicultural discourse as projected,
for instance, by the London 2012 Olympics has concealed inequalities within London's black communities
and maintained hegemonic ideologies of race and class divisions that are based in Britain's colonial past. This
paper focuses on Alex Wheatle's novels East of Acre Lane (2001) and The Dirty South (2008) and Courttia
Newland's novel The Scholar (1997), which have in common their urban contexts and engagement with
justice and human rights. Moreover, it examines novels set in contemporary London alongside novels set in
the late 1970s and early 1980, thus bringing to light a longer history of racism, justice and violation of human
rights among black people in Britain. The central aim of this paper is to locate issues of racism, justice and
human rights in contemporary black British fiction in light of the August 2011 riots in London. My contention
is that an investigation of representations of contemporary multicultural Britain must concern itself with
these issues in order to differentiate between what Slavoj Žižek calls 'liberal multiculturalism', which operates
within the ideological structures of capitalism, and a radical discourse that critiques these power structures.
Ole Birk Laursen holds a PhD from the Open University, UK, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Copenhagen, where his research concerns anarchism and anti-colonialism in the British Empire.
He is primarily interested in anti- and postcolonial resistances, riots and rights, and the cultural responses to
such occurrences.
Cordula Lemke, Freie Universität Berlin
Aesthetic Justice: Scottish Ecopoetics in Mandy Haggith's The Last Bear
In my paper I want to argue that Mandy Haggith's engagement with Macpherson's epic poetry addresses
Macpherson's omissions by resorting to the rich implications of 'aisthesis'. Different forms of sense perception and textual perception vie with each other in doing justice to a hidden Scottish nation which was
doomed to fail under the pressure of a teleological line of historiography. In her novel The Last Bear Mandy
Haggith rewrites James Macpherson's Ossianic poetry with a focus on questions of gender and ecology.
James Macpherson's attempt at providing the Scottish nation with a founding myth designed to counter
English cultural hegemony is strangely insufficient in its treatment of women or nature. Women's portrayals
as ghostly and the depiction of the Scottish landscape as a desert are contrasted with Macpherson's narrative
style which evokes strong sentiments by its overflowing poetic grandeur. It is my contention that Haggith
counters Macpherson's ephemeral depictions by providing an aesthetic texture for aspects of the Scottish
nation neglected by Macpherson. Her extensive use of different sense perceptions in connection with textual
aesthetics fleshes out a Scottish identity which challenges Macpherson's empty poetics.
Cordula Lemke is Junior Professor at the Department of English at the Free University of Berlin. She has
published in the fields of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies and 19th to 21st century literature.
51
Karsten Levihn-Kutzler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Climate Justice and Anthropocene Allegory in Susannah Waters' Cold Comfort
In debates about the implications of human-made climate change for postcolonial studies and the humanities in general, the term 'Anthropocene' has recently gained prominence. The term denotes a geological
era defined by humanity's cumulative effect on the planet and its climate. Among others, Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that this concept forces us to re-conceptualize human agency in order to understand
our collective impact as a species on a new scale. At the same time, ongoing debates about climate justice
draw attention to the role of global economic and political inequalities, uneven development and environmental racism in shaping human-made climate change. In my paper, I would like to explore the tension
between these two – seemingly opposite – perspectives by looking at Susannah Waters' 2006 novel Cold
Comfort. Waters portrays a native Alaskan community co-opted into global Petro-Capitalism even as the
thawing of the Arctic permafrost destroys their basis of life and the coordinates of indigenous culture. I
will argue that Cold Comfort helps us to understand climate change's double nature – universal threat and
source of particular injustices – only by looking at the disenfranchised margins of global carbon culture.
Karsten Levihn-Kutzler studied English and Drama-, Film and Media Studies in Frankfurt, Germany and
Southampton, UK. His research interests are Contemporary Anglophone Literatures, the relation of
literature and globalization, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism.
Timo Müller, Universität Augsburg
'Puerto Rico for Women, Barbados to Shop': U.S. Hip Hop and Economic Neo-Imperialism
Hip hop has become one of the most globally successful cultural exports of the United States in recent
decades. As such, it is part of a lopsided flow of cultural narratives and images that has been criticized
as complementing and reinforcing the economic neo-imperialism that the U.S., spearheading many firstworld and threshold states, has been imposing on developing countries around the globe. The Caribbean
has been an early and conspicuous realm of this economic neo-imperialism. My paper will examine the
role of hip hop in these developments through readings of commercially successful rap songs in which U.S.
artists reference, define, and negotiate the Caribbean. The emphasis on economic success in mainstream
hip hop culture, my paper suggests, makes rap songs a particularly illuminative example for the interdependency of cultural and economic neo-imperialism. Close readings of songs by NAS, Rick Ross, Immortal
Technique, and other popular hip hop artists will show that some rap songs reinforce such tendencies
while others draw them into doubt, thus complicating overly hierarchical, one-sided models of cultural
imposition. Thus, the paper suggests, U.S. hip hop has variously served as an agent, a medium, and an
indictment of postcolonial injustice.
52
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Gesa Mackenthun, Universität Rostock
'Postcolonial Justice' and Territorial Dispossession: The Case of North America
The conference on Postcolonial Justice coincides with an increased international critical focus on the present
practice of land grabbing, in particular in countries whose literature and culture are at the center of ASNEL's
studies. The possession of and access to land - probably the most important resource for tribal peoples
around the globe – is today increasingly embattled due to a rising global population and the triumphal march
of the neocolonial economy. Global investors and businesses seek control of agricultural land in order to force
it to maximum productivity with the help of intensified agricultural technologies and chemicals; it is needed
for mining for precious minerals necessary for western digital technologies (such as rare earths); for the
production of electricity (e.g. dams); land is used for waste disposals for a capitalist culture of obsolescence.
These practices obviously destroy more traditional and ecologically less harmful uses of the land as well as
the local economies and communities who subsided on this land use. This paper will look at this problematic
from a juridical perspective, with a special focus on the situation in the United States of America. The legal
situation is special here because of hundreds of treaties that had been formed between the colonial governments and indigenous tribes. There have been various attempts to delegitimize and nullify these treaties in
the 20th century, which led, among other things, to the foundation of the International Indian Treaty Council,
an NGO seeking international alliances in the Native American struggle against continued land grabbing. I will
also look at how these issues are related to ecocritical issues and how they are reflected in recent literature
by Native Americans.
Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University. Her current research deals with
nineteenth-century travel and archaeology and the scientific construction of American antiquity.
Jatinder Mann, King's College London
'Saying Sorry': A comparison of the Australian and Canadian governments' apologies to
indigenous peoples for the 'stolen generations'
In 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his famous apology in the Australian Parliament to indigenous
Australians for the 'stolen generations' of Aboriginal children that were forcibly taken away from their
families and placed in residential schools where many were subsequently abused. Prime Minister Stephen
Harper apologised soon after to Canada's indigenous peoples as well for a similar policy in that country.
However, that is where the similarities end. The Canadian government went on to offer financial compensation
to surviving victims of the residential schools policy. But this was something the Rudd government and its
predecessors have refused to agree to. My paper will compare the experiences of the two countries and
offer some explanations for the differences between them.
Jatinder Mann specialises in transnational and comparative history and politics, with a focus on Australia,
Canada, and the British World. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and also an Associate
Fellow in Canadian Studies at the UCL Institute of the Americas.
53
Ferdinand Mbecha, Freie Universität Berlin
Postcolonial Justice: Priscilla Manjoh's Snare as a Trickster Narrative of Atonement in a
European Metropolis
One of the most popular proverbs in Achebe's Things Fall Apart goes thus: 'Eneke the bird says that since
men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching': A proverb that introduces
us to trickery and tricksters. Within the context of postcolonial justice, this paper examines Priscilla Manjoh's
novel Snare (2013) as a trickster narrative of the perennial struggle between the hunter and the hunted.
Many young Africans who succeed to enter Europe either legally or illegally soon learn that their greatest
obstacles to success are not yet over. After successfully beating inclement nature (for those who enter by
boats from across the Mediterranean) they are confronted by their greatest hurdle – the legal system of their
host countries; a system that is designed to exclude the so called economic refugees. Manjoh's novel, set in
the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, narrates the experiences of a group of young Africans
who employ varied forms of trickery to outwit the system. Their struggle against the system is anchored on
the argument that they are merely taking back what was stolen from them in colonial times. Manjoh's novel,
like all trickster narratives, is full of humor and cunning. However, between the lulls of the laughter evoked
by the activities of the tricksters beat the traumatic pulses of loss, dilemmas of identity – an entrapment that
harkens back to the title of the novel: Snare.
Ferdinand Mbecha is a PhD student at the Institute of English Philology of the Freie Universität, Berlin. His
research interests include popular culture, folklore, transnational studies, and cultural appropriation.
Andrew McCann, Dartmouth College
Biopolitics and the Limits of Critique
This paper begins by thinking about the ways in which academic critique (in the Humanities) often presupposes an opposition between the law and justice that rests on a more fundamental opposition between
the material and the immaterial. I argue that this framework has made it very difficult to think the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics adequate to the circumstances of the postcolony. By displacing this
framework, I argue that we can rethink the relationship between biopolitics, postcoloniality and justice.
Some of the debates around the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention) highlight
these divergent framings of the postcolony, and suggest that an inability to think the affirmative dimension
of the biopolitical (and a corresponding orientation to the pure potentia of non-instrumental critique) has
merely consolidated the border between what Foucault would call the space of the 'make live' and the
space of the 'let die'.
Andrew McCann is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College in the USA.
54
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Carly McLaughlin, Universität Potsdam
Exceptional children: framing child refugees' agency in Australia's detention centres
In Australia, the depiction of irregular migrants as monstrous parents who throw their children into the sea or
force their children to take part in hunger strikes and lip-sewing protests in detention centres has rightly been
identified as part of the government's campaign to dehumanise asylum seekers and to legitimise its emergency powers. Whilst scholars and activists have worked to expose these discursive practices around adult
asylum seekers, little focus has been placed on the children and the discourses which form around them.
The starting point of this paper is that the demonization of asylum seekers as negligent parents operates
also as a mechanism within specific discourses around child asylum seekers. Specifically, the image of the
vulnerable, innocent child in need of protection from adult asylum seekers automatically triggers and justifies
the intervention of the State, specifically the Welfare State. Such interventions empty protests committed by
children of any political meaning and agency. As this paper argues, universal (Western) ideas about children
as vulnerable and lacking agency, which continue to underpin legal and welfare practices concerning children
and to serve ulterior political ends, obscure the specifically political nature of their actions. Drawing on calls
within the fields of sociology and anthropology to recognise the ontology and epistemology of childhood
and to acknowledge children's (political) agency, this paper attempts to create a discursive space in which
the political dimension of child asylum seekers' acts of protest in the form of self-harm becomes intelligible.
Carly McLaughlin completed her PhD in German Studies at Queen Mary, University of London in 2008. Now
she works in the School of English and American Studies at the Universität Potsdam where she teaches
cultural studies.
Philip Morrissey, University of Melbourne
Neo-Liberal Capitalism and the Formation of Aboriginal Subjects
The 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (The Intervention) was a watershed in Australian Aboriginal affairs. The formerly dominant policy of Aboriginal self-determination was rejected in
favour of an authoritarian approach curtailing basic freedoms for residents of prescribed areas under the
Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007. Since then successive Federal governments
have implemented contradictory policies. On the one hand, supporting self-determining community based
organisations; on the other, developing and imposing authoritarian strategies for welfare and community
development. At the same time the corporate sector has played an increasing role in forming the subjecthood of a prospective Aboriginal elite through its funding of educational, personal development, and mentorship programs for Aboriginal youth. In an earlier paper I considered the impact of State orchestrated
corporatism on Aboriginal identity during the terms of the Keating led Labor government. In returning to
this theme I will conduct a preliminary examination of the induction of select Aboriginal youth into corporate and, by extension, neo-liberal values, in contemporary Australian society.
Philip Morrissey is the Academic Coordinator of the Faculty of Arts Australian Indigenous Studies Program.
In that role, he developed the University of Melbourne's first Indigenous Studies major and Honours program.
55
Katharina Motyl, Freie Universität Berlin
Intersectional Intifada: Anglophone Palestinian Women Writers on the Quest for Gender Justice
in the Occupied Territories
The last years have seen an increasing number of young women writers of Palestinian background addressing misogynist violence in the Palestinian Territories in their works. For the longest time, Palestinian women – and Arab women at large – had shied away from publicly criticizing misogynist violence at the hands
of Arab men against the backdrop of the legacy of imperial feminism in the Arab world, a phenomenon
that Gayatri C. Spivak poignantly called 'white men saving brown women from brown men.ˮ In particular,
the state of Israel is, as Jasbir K. Puar and others have pointed out, portraying itself as a stronghold for
women's and LGBT rights, contrasting itself with Palestinian culture, which, it alleges, is inimical to said
rights. In other words, the state of Israel is 'pinkwashingˮ the occupation. Against the backdrop of these discourses, Palestinian women's indictments of misogynist violence have frequently been seen as
traitorous, as catering to the colonizer's agenda. Nonetheless, young Palestinian writers such as Suheir
Hammad and Randa Jarrar have started to vocally indict misogynist practices in the Occupied Territories –
with an ontologial twist, however. These narratives often point to the Israeli occupation as being a factor
in triggering misogynist behavior and crimes on the part of Palestinian men. Some Palestinian feminists
have also displayed a – problematic – tendency to foresake intersectional inquiry into Palestinian women's
oppression by prioritizing anti-colonial critique.
Stephen Muecke, University of New South Wales
Environmental Justice in Goolarabooloo Country:
The No Gas Campaign in Broome, Western Australia
Colonisation came late to many parts of remote Australia. In 1900, Broome was a frontier Indian Ocean
port with a pearling industry in which many Indigenous locals were enslaved. Today, the plundering of
'natural' resources proceeds apace, with the State and multinational corporations continuing to colonise
Aboriginal land: In January 2014, the EPA, a government agency, has decided that fracking permission for
the Canning Basin can be issued to Buru corporation without any environmental impact assessment. Locals are fighting back, led by a number of NGOs. The earlier struggle over a gas plant at James Price Point
(Walmadany) was marked by victory for an alliance of Indigenous groups (Goolarabooloo), green activists,
NGOs, scientists, anthropologists, lawyers and journalists. The focus of this paper will be a description of
their strategies for struggle in the name of justice. What this descriptive (ethnographic) method hopes to
bring into focus are the kinds of justice people are activating, whether it is based on 'rights', 'recognition',
'equity' or 'representation' (or concepts outside of that liberal-democratic vocabulary). The scenario exemplified by the Broome case, where a colonialist economy is being imposed anonymously and globally, with
massive assistance from the State, is the surprise that the anti-colonial (not yet post-colonial) strategies of
resistance can actually work, albeit in one battle in a continuing war.
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He works with
Indigenous groups in Broome and on the Indian Ocean.
56
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Tom Murray, Macquarie University
Speaking with: Towards a Collaborative Re-Mediation of Cultural Artefacts in Contemporary
Audio-Visual Narratives
This paper will provide a brief overview of my research into the potential of screen media to communicate
and examine representations of 'otherness'. In particular I will discuss the process of collaboration that
has underpinned my work's capacity to facilitate the telling of Australian Indigenous histories and contemporary Indigenous perspectives. Much of my work is concerned with remediating historic silences, and
some of it involves the repatriation and re-contextualisation of physical and cultural artefacts. Providing
examples from my past work, and some questions posed by my current project, this paper describes the
significance of inclusive and collaborative methodologies in this process.
Tom Murray teaches Cultural and Media Studies at Macquarie University. His historical documentary films
focus on Indigenous history and culture.
Aparna Nandakumar, EFLU Hyerabad, India
'A Generation Awakens': Youth and Politics in a Postcolonial Nation
In the post-colonial, post-independence scene of India, youth became simultaneously subjected to anxieties regarding Westernization and 'un-Indian' lifestyle aspirations on the one hand, and on the other to
anxieties about violence, hooliganism and social deviancy, and ultimately as an unregulated mass of energy that could challenge the sovereignty of the Indian state. Yet, over the last couple of decades, youth has
re-emerged in mainstream media narratives as the agential protagonist of a new globalizing nation, and as
characterizing the desires and anxieties of the new, rapidly expanding Indian middle class. I attempt to trace these trajectories through an analysis of the popular Hindi film Rang de Basanti (dir. Rakeysh Omprakash
Mehra, 2006), which narrates the awakening of a generation of youth to the needs of the contemporary
nation through their encounter with the stories of young Indian revolutionaries during the anti-colonial
struggle – an encounter triggered by the portrayal of these revolutionaries in the diary of a former British
civil servant. This paper draws largely on Rang de Basanti, and on two articles, one by Dipesh Chakraborty
on the nature of Indian politics and another by Satadru Sen on the debates around the 'anarchies of youth'
in the colonial and nationalist press prompted by an incident of violence in Presidency College, Calcutta,
in 1916.
Aparna Nandakumar is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Cultural Studies at The English
and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. Her research attempts to conceptualize the popular
imagination of the discursive category of youth in India.
57
James Odhiambo Ogone, Universität Potsdam
Epistemic Injustice: African Knowledge and Scholarship in the Global Context
The postcolonial African context is characterized by a pervasive influence of modernity often perceived
as a camouflaged form of coloniality. Indeed, the intellectual domain is considered one of the current
effective battlefronts for imperialism. This is demonstrated in contemporary epistemology where Western
knowledge enjoys epistemic privilege over indigenous African ways of knowing. In this paper, I read this
skewed state of affairs as amounting to epistemic injustice as it violates the fundamental rights of the
affected indigenous peoples and knowledge. Evidently, the result of this trend has been the endangerment of the subaltern African knowledge structures and the corresponding entrenchment of the dominant
Western knowledge. This paper therefore argues that knowledge forms an essential ingredient of power
relations in the prevailing world order. To put this into proper perspective, the paper intends to specifically
address such issues as ownership, accessibility, credibility and intelligibility which are core to scholarly discourse on the admissibility or otherwise of African knowledge in the mainstream global arena. It is hoped
that the paper will bring to the fore the subterranean dynamics that inform and structure the unequal
relationship between African societies and the Western world especially with regards to the politics of
knowledge and power.
James Ogone is a DAAD doctoral candidate at the Universität Potsdam's department of English and American Studies. He has a background in both teaching and research in the field of literary studies. His current
project focuses on media technologies and African modernities. His other research interests include diaspora studies, cosmopolitanism and indigenous epistemologies among others.
Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois
Dislocating Experience: Postcoloniality, Disability and Authorized Knowledge
In their introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies titled
Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism (2010), Clare Barker and
Stuart Murray suggest the need for more located examinations of disability outside of the Western, globalNorth dominated field of disability studies. Implicit in their claim is the broader contention that cultivating
knowledges built from experiences of disabled people within global contexts can serve as methodological
practice capable of resisting universal and universalizing claims about disability to, in turn, facilitate global
disability justice projects. While sharing this conviction, an examination of the ways in which U.S. mainstream news sources deploy experiences of disability within the global South as a means to authorize
the spread of global capital (and U.S. nationalism/imperialism) troubles any uncomplicated reliance on
experiential knowledge as a starting point for global disability justice and efforts to decolonize disability
knowledge production. This paper asks what we might learn from the ways in which cultural representations of disability dislocate experiences of disabled people from the particularities of context and, further,
how we might use that knowledge to hone disability studies methodologies adequate to the project of understanding disability within global contexts. I argue that alongside the excavation of knowledge situated
in experiences outside of the Global North, we need to trace the technologies of power that do the work
of dislocating and universalizing experiences of disability if we hope to facilitate projects of postcolonial
disability justice.
Alyson Patsavas is a PhD Candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research
focuses on the cultural discourses of pain, queer theory, crip forms of knowledge production and representations of disability in film.
58
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Beatriz Pérez Zapata, Universdad de Zaragoza
An Endless Game: Neocolonial Injustice in Zadie Smith's The Embassy of Cambodia
The Embassy of Cambodia (2013) focuses on one of Zadie Smith's recurrent issues: migration in London.
This migration story is set, once again, in Willesden, and it is narrated by its people, observers and witnesses. The short story narrates the life of Fatou, a domestic worker from Ivory Coast, whose working conditions resemble slavery. As she walks by the Embassy of Cambodia, she becomes fascinated by a game of
badminton, which never seems to stop and whose players can never be seen. The titles of the chapters are
the score of this game, which Fatou, or any other in an unprivileged position, will never win. The game becomes metaphorical as the story unravels Fatou's traumatic past and present, tales of genocide, as well as
old and new types of slavery. My purpose in this paper will be to provide a close analysis of the short story
and the injustices which are narrated. Focusing on Fatou's character, and calling attention to the enslaving
situation of many migrant women in domestic services, this paper will reveal who are the victims and who
the perpetrators in these modern injustices, which nevertheless seem to be old, and never-ending, just as
the game of badminton.
Beatriz Pérez Zapata is a pre-doctoral researcher from the Department of English and German Philology
at the Universidad de Zaragoza. She is part of the research group 'Trauma and Beyond: The Rhetoric and
Politics of Suffering in Contemporary Narrative in English'.
Eva M. Pérez, Universitat de les Illes Balears
Espionage, Literature and Ideological Justice: Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan's latest novel Sweet Tooth may be interpreted from a multiplicity of viewpoints related to
several of the main themes of the conference. Set in the early years of the 1970s, but narrated retrospectively from its protagonist in the 2010s, Sweet Tooth includes numerous references to the Cold War and
the then acute ideological struggle between capitalism and communism. The primary English setting of the
novel allows an analysis of the escalating armed confrontation between the United Kingdom and Northern
Ireland, inscribed within the series of terrorist attacks by the IRA in the early 1970s. These, together with
the energy and administrative crises that nearly brought the country to a standstill, characterise the new
political climate in Britain after its total transformation and loss of its empire as a long-term consequence
of World War II. My paper will therefore explore the precarious balances of power and justice as exemplified by the CIA, communist propaganda, the IRA and Great Britain, and the always difficult relationship
between literature and ideology.
Eva M. Pérez is a full-time lecturer on modern and contemporary English literature at the Universitat de les
Illes Balears, Spain. She holds an MPhil (University of Bradford) and a PhD in English Philology (Universidad
de Oviedo).
59
Michael Pickering, Australian National University and National Museum of Australia
A Lingering Presence? Museums as Colonial Institutions in a Post-Colonial world
Museums in Australia are inheritors of an interesting colonial legacy. Initially institutions of British Colonialism, and prevailing socio-political values, Australian museums later became institutions of Australia's
own colonial period. In many ways, through their conservatism and sanctification of collections, Australian
museums dragged out-dated colonial concepts and values into the late 20th century. It is only relatively
recently that museums in Australia have engaged in long- term self- evaluation, looking at their own histories and the motivations behind the development and management of their collections. One outcome of
this reflection is a commitment to repatriation of Indigenous remains and secret sacred objects. This paper
will describe the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander remains arrived in museums - both in
Australia and overseas - and some of the ethical issues associated with their collection and retention. It
will then describe the prevailing attitudes of the Australian museum's industry regarding the repatriation
of such remains. It will argue that repatriation of remains is both appropriate and rewarding for the participating institution, leading to an increase in knowledge that would not have been achieved in the retention
of such remains.
Michael Pickering is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the National Centre for Indigenous Studies . He is currently a Senior Curatorial Fellow with the National Museum of Australia, and a member of the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Patricia Plummer, Universität Duisburg-Essen
'R.I.P. Terra Nullius': Indigenous Australian Art After Mabo
This paper will focus on diverse responses to Mabo vs. Queensland II and its aftermath in Indigenous Australian art. Artworks discussed will range from Ellen Jose's installation R.I.P. Terra Nullius (1996) in which
the artist celebrates the death of the concept of Australia as terra nullius to more recent and equally political works by e.g., Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Adam Hill, Jason Wing (winner of the Parliament of NSW
Aboriginal Art Prize 2012) and Kate Dickens (winner of the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize 2013).
Patricia Plummer is Chair of Postcolonial Studies. Her publications, research and teaching focus on literature and culture of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on travel writing, Orientalism and transcultural spirituality, postcolonial and gender studies as well as popular culture.
60
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Jajati Keshari Pradhan, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
(Un)Writing the Gendered Subaltern: Poetics of Postcolonial Violence and Justice to Come
In view of the capitalist turn of postcolonial society and the accommodation of routine violence against all
its Others, this paper, drawing on Derrida's conceptualization of violence and deconstructive justice, takes
up the case of the Third World gendered subaltern as the doubly Other(ed) figure —an absent figure in
theory and practice—with an attempt to critically see the nature of justice that has (or can) ever come for
this gendered Other through an engagement in a just mode of life. What informs and disturbs, the paper
argues, is the problematic working of our life through theory and practice that is operative with violence,
both material as well as symbolical. The critique of violence is paradoxically operative with violence. As the
Other is yet to escape violence, the 'post' of postcoloniality—the condition of the possibility of living a just
life—is yet to come. The paper otherwise proposes to move beyond the postcolonial mode of essentialist
life practices towards a new mode of living life in Derridean line of argument through the radical interventionist intersubjective paradigm that takes care of every other Other and radically works towards a better
and just world through its critique of violence.
Jajati Keshari Pradhan is a doctoral research fellow at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. His current area of research is Postcolonial Subaltern violence and the constructions of gendered space in South Asian autobiographical/testimonial life writing and
its broader ethical implication on the general mode of collective lives and the futurity to come.
Joseph Pugliese, Macquarie University
Indigenous Justice, Deaths in Custody and Refugees in the Colonial Present
In the course of 2012, Uncle Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association (ISJA),
working with an Indigenous and non-Indigenous collective, worked to realise the Aboriginal Passport Ceremony. On 15 September 2012, the ceremony was staged at The Settlement, Redfern. In my paper, I want
to discuss the complex range of meanings that this ceremony generated – from the perspective of an
activist working with ISJA to materialise this event, and from the perspective of an academic committed
to decolonising scholarship. This event, I contend, marked the counterdiscursive resignification of the very
technology – the passport – deployed by the colonial-settler Australian state in order to consolidate and
reproduce the ongoing usurpation of Indigenous sovereignty. Precisely by resignifying the passport as
an Aboriginal technology crucial in legitimating non-Indigenous people's movement through Australia's
Aboriginal nations, the ceremony at once marked Aboriginal people's unceded and unextinguished sovereignty over country and their right to offer welcome and hospitality within their own lands. It is in this
context that I proceed to examine the critical intersection of the colonial-settler state's violent treatment
of refugees and asylum seekers, deaths in custody, the ongoing assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty and the
possibility of justice.
Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural
Studies at Macquarie University.
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Manav Ratti, Salisbury University
Literary Voice and Postcolonial Justice: Indra Sinha's Animal's People and the Bhopal Disaster
Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007) represents the 1984 Bhopal industrial disaster through the eponymous character Animal, whose spine has become so twisted by the gas leaks that he must walk using
his arms and legs. I focus on 'justice' as restorative and distributive, and how literature can help realize the
delivery of justice where law has failed. I analyze specific literary features such as voice, characterization,
and perspective (the novel is narrated through Animal speaking directly to a journalist in Hindi, which
is then translated into English). I argue that the use of the direct first-person voice in the novel creates
ethical confrontation, morally compelling readers to empathize with the character and thus understand,
and perhaps sympathize with, the disaster. Sinha has altered names in the Bhopal disaster, changing the
names of the city, the corporation, and peoples involved in relief efforts, thus creating a kind of 'generality'
to the disaster by extracting from specific events the wider acts of immorality and injustice. At the same
time, the focus becomes the suffering of the victims, a focus consonant with the novelist's wish for ethical
confrontation and moral compulsion as forms of promoting knowledge and awareness where law has not
delivered justice. Between law and literature, where is there space for justice, as in just representations,
just economic equality, just recognitions of the dignity of human life, across class, ethnicity, and nation?
Manav Ratti completed his doctorate in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Salisbury University (Maryland, USA), and Fellow at the
Institute of Advanced Study in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Geoff Rodoreda, Universität Stuttgart
In Search of a Good Yarn: Mabo as Postcolonial Narrative
It is now an oft-repeated mantra that in 1770 the English explorer James Cook officially claimed possession of the
East Coast of Australia for Britain under the doctrine of terra nullius. It is a 'fact' of history that is now recognised
in the common law, for the claiming of the continent under the doctrine of terra nullius – the idea that the land
belonged to no-one – was the reason the High Court of Australia gave, in handing down the Mabo decision of
1992, for the law's complicity in the wrongful dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands. However,
subsequent legal and historical research has shown there was no such thing as a 'doctrine of terra nullius' at the
time Australia was first 'settled' by Europeans. What, then, was the High Court on about? Instead of seeing the
High Court's decision in purely legal terms, the judges' pronouncements on terra nullius in Mabo might better be
understood as both drawing on and contributing to a wider cultural project in the latter decades of the twentieth
century aimed at re-writing the Australian story. To wit, a tale of the essentially peaceful settlement of empty
space became one of the violent invasion of already-inhabited land. This paper considers the Mabo decision as
the key moment of postcolonial justice in the nation's history, and argues that reading Mabo as nation narration
rather than as mere legal statement helps to account for its wide-ranging impact on, among other things, politics,
historiography, public ceremony, cinema and (with respect to the author's particular interest) literature.
Geoff Rodoreda is a lecturer in the Department of New English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
He studied Social and Political Science, Media Theory and Journalism in the city he grew up in, Sydney, Australia,
and has worked as a radio, print and online journalist in Australia and Germany.
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Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, SKB University, Purulia &
Saswat Samay Das, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Praxialising Postcolonial Theory: Indigenous Colonisation, Dissidence & Academic Activism
Unless the discursive engagement of pedagogy is abuzz with insurgent voices, war cries of mal-nourished children,
wailings of farmer suicides, the macabre sight of tribal population evicted and elbowed out by the state for developmental projects induced by global capital, etc, how can we talk of epistemic justice and ethics? How does
the academia relocate itself in the hurly burly of hunger, neo-colonisation and injustice? Postcolonialism as a
dissenting theoretic optic has allegedly become almost defunct in the globalised neo-capitalist ambience and
today, postcolonial theory suffers from critical amnesia and theoretic fatigue as it relies more on abstract critical
textual metaphysics than on a commitment to immediate praxis. Post-globalization, the hegemonic unitary logic
of neo-colonialist global capital continues unabated and the prevalent postcolonial epistemes have surrendered
to the status quo of neo-liberalism. When pedagogic practices collude with the ideologies of globalization we
witness the demise of the critical rage potential and consequently pedagogic norms are de-radicalized to the
extent of complacency and stagnation. A re-radicalized, re-rooted/re-routed pedagogic agenda of resistance can
be articulated through radical academic activism and pedagogic reformulation. Theory has to be re-embedded to
new localized praxis of re-colonization and resistance. The present paper offers such a praxis oriented approach
of postcolonialism and pedagogy where Caliban is disembedded from the textual and semiotic confinements so
that he can be resituated in contemporary conditions of subjugation and hegemony. Dantewada and many other
similar locales in India are symbolic cases of global capital and state apparatus colluding to script a narrative
of recolonisation that necessitates Caliban to meet Binayak Sen (a local real life dissident) to contextualise the
text within the immediate political economic reality. A Shakespearean text/any text in a postcolonial classroom
today has to be reembedded in such contemporary conditions of hegemony to foreground issues of justice and
emancipation.
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Assistant professor, Department of English, SKB University, Purulia, India.Saswat
Samay Das is Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, India.
Kirsten Sandrock, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
The Poetics of Justice in Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton
This paper explores the poetics of justice in Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012). I will concentrate on two dimensions of justice, the level of content and the level of narrative representation. After
briefly looking at the religious and political dimension of the fatwa as represented in Joseph Anton, I will
explore the poetics of justice on the narratological level. I suggest that the text sets out to maintain and
restore personal justice after years of hiding and internal exile. However, this maintenance of justice is
a dubious act. Rushdie not only uses his authorial power to criticize the injustice of the fatwa; he also
employs it to justify his own actions and to get even with those by whom he felt betrayed. As a result,
the narrative sits somewhat awkwardly between criticizing the injustice of other people's verdicts while,
simultaneously, judging over former friends and acquaintances in a rather self-righteous manner. From a
narratological perspective, this awkwardness is underlined by the use of a heterodiegetic narrator, which
simulates a level of objectivity that is clearly contradicted by the narrative's subjective unfolding of events.
Ultimately, I argue that the poetics of justice in Joseph Anton challenge us not only to problematize the culturally specific understanding of what is right and wrong but also to theorize some methodological issues
that are implicated in literary discussions of justice, such as the question of narrative perspective, narrative
selection, and the role of the author in representations of justice.
Kirsten Sandrock is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies at
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Her research interests include early modern literature, Canadian and
Scottish Studies as well as Postcolonial Studies.
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Tobias Schlosser, Technische Universität Chemnitz
'Dead Will Dance on Judgment Day':
Apocalyptic Visions of Western Society in the Songs of Native Canadian Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie
For more than four decades in her songs, Native Canadian singer and songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has
addressed the unjust treatment of indigenous societies. Closely linked to the Red Power Movement, she
has responded to neocolonial injustice such as the subversion of indigenous sovereignty when it comes
to water rights or mining rights on tribal land. In my paper, I argue that her songs are more than the mere
artistic expression of protest. They show the strong belief that justice will finally come. To meet this end,
I will focus on a selection of songs by Buffy Sainte-Marie which I will read through the lens of Nietzsche's
idea of transvaluation, a concept which can generally be understood as the process of transforming values
by an oppressed group in order to find justice and revenge. I claim that Buffy Sainte-Marie as a member of
a marginalised group uses this principle. The native singer-songwriter negates and transforms the values
of the dominant capitalist members of society. In addition, I will demonstrate that her dealing with the
traumatic neocolonial experiences and her search of postcolonial justice lead to a rather apocalyptic vision
regarding the greedy oppressors. Thus, my reading of her lyrics will illustrate that at a certain point in time
the need for reconciliation will be rendered useless because the society which exploits the native peoples
of North America will eventually have destroyed itself.
Tobias Schlosser holds a Master degree in English Studies and Philosophy. During his academic education,
he completed studies abroad and research projects in New Zealand, Canada and Malaysia.
Chrischona Schmidt, Australian National University
'I paint for everyone': The Making of Utopia Art
The Utopia art movement in Central Australia – originally initiated as an adult education program teaching
batik-making in the late 1970s – has since become nationally and internationally renowned. Much of its
history, however, is unrecorded. Critics engaging with art from Utopia have situated and praised it by
applying concepts from the lexicon of western art history, using parallels with 'abstraction', 'abstract expressionism', 'impressionism', noting visual similarities to European masters of the 20th century. I question
the assumption underlying some of these critiques that these visual similarities are solely a product of the
artists' responses to market demands as articulated by intermediaries, irrespective of their own vision or
agency. Through close observation of artistic practices and negotiation processes between artists and art
dealers, I demonstrate that artists' agency can be uncovered, and I will briefly describe and define the
different currents and sub-currents found in Utopia art, which reflect this agency, by focusing on genres,
themes and styles. I argue that the impact of art dealers, the art world, families, other artists in the community, and the constraints associated with everyday life in a remote community all affect the creation of
artworks. This examination of artworks and relationships in the art world facilitates a better understanding
of the emerging of local art movements, their development and their multi-layered histories. Furthermore
it provides a point of comparison for further studies and research into Indigenous art histories throughout
Australia.
Chrischona Schmidt is specialized in the fields of Indigenous Australian art history, contemporary art history
and social anthropology.
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Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Social mobility in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)
While the new urban middle-class in the South East Asian tiger economies have attracted the attention of
sociologists for some time, recent novels and films from the region seem to emphasize the gulf between
the rich and the poor and present a rather skeptical view on social mobility. Both Aravind Adiga's The White
Tiger (2008) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) spell out their protagonists'
careers from rural poverty to successful entrepreneurship, careers that have murder, corruption and social
alienation as prerequisites. 'The history of the world', as Adiga's protagonist puts it, is 'the history of a
ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor' devoid of ethical considerations. Hamid's
more recent novel seems to take its cue from Adiga's mere hints at advice literature and takes the form of
the business self-help guide currently so popular across Asia, while at the same time launching an attack on
the very concept of self-help. Both novels address colonial legacies as well as regimes of globalization, and
they foreground the narrative agency of their protagonists, thus challenging readers' ideas about the poor.
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Full Professor of English at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Bonn. Her research interests include new English literatures and cultures, postcolonial studies, cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain, colonial and contemporary British writing and ethnic minority cultures.
Lioba Schreyer, Universität Duisburg-Essen
'Cry for Justice' - Mabo and Poetry
Indigenous poetry is an emerging genre providing a platform for feelings, fears and fury about the social
injustice Indigenous Australians experience on a daily basis. Bonita Mabo's poem 'Small, Proud and Loud'
(1973), dedicated to her husband Edward Koiki Mabo, captures the determinacy to fight for justice almost
20 years before the success of the Mabo case. Despite this seeming legal triumph, the Post-Mabo reality is
overshadowed by great effort and slow progress of every following case. In the past 20 years, established
Indigenous poets such as Lionel Fogarty and Kerry Reed-Gilbert cry out for justice in their poetic texts.
Lioba Schreyer has recently finished her Master's degree at the Universität Duisburg-Essen where she has
also been a research assistant in the section of Postcolonial Studies. Currently she is working on her doctoral project which deals with contemporary Indigenous Australian poetry.
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Frank Schulze-Engler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Poetic Justice? Christopher Okigbo, Dedan Kimathi and Robert Mugabe on Literary Trial
Can literature contribute to justice? The idea that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world
may be an old and overly idealistic one, but the notion that literature should confront injustice and
somehow play a part in defending the rights of those to whom rights have been denied seems plausible
enough in a palpably unjust world, particularly in societies characterized by the absence of functioning
systems of law. But whose rights exactly are at issue, and whose injustice is to be confronted? While postcolonial discourse habitually seems to suggest that it is the legacies of colonialism and the predominance
of the 'global West' that are responsible for injustice in the 'global South', a more detailed scrutiny of 'postcolonial' literature is likely to unearth rather more complex – and ethically puzzling – scenarios. The paper
will analyze three imaginary trials staged in modern African literature: The Trial of Christopher Okigbo by
Ali Mazrui, a novel that puts the celebrated Nigerian poet who became a major in the Biafran Army and
died in the Nigerian Civil War on trial in the after-world for having betrayed his obligations to literature;
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a play that celebrates the spiritual victory of the military
leader of Kenya's Mau Mau Movement over his colonial adversaries who captured him and will condemn
him to death; and The Trial of Robert Mugabe, a novel by the Nigerian writer Chielo Zona Eze that makes
Zimbabwe's ailing dictator face a jury of African thinkers, politicians and artist that dissects the rhetoric of
national liberation with which he seeks to justify his murderous rule. What is negotiated in these texts, the
paper will argue, are intricate questions of agency, accountability and justice that are intimately connected
to Africa's postindependence present rather than to its colonial past.
Frank Schulze-Engler is professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Institute for English
and American Studies.
Ellen Smith, King's College London
Different Workers: Political Commitment, Social Justice and Subaltern Labour in Katharine
Susannah Prichard's Aboriginal Writing
Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings from the 1920s are among the earliest, by a communist, to represent Aboriginal workers in the cattle industry. However, critics of Australian literature have not, in general,
situated these writings in relation to Prichard's Marxist politics, or left wing discourse more generally.
While it is commonplace to refer to Prichard's steadfast commitments to the Communist Party of Australia there is a general consensus that her socialism did not, perhaps could not, inform her writings about
colonial relationships in the same way that it informed her other writings, particularly those about white
workers. In this paper I offer a reassessment of this position by situating Prichard's Aboriginal writings in
relation to discourses about race and labour in the Communist party and on the left in Australia in the
1920s. I argue that when situated against this context, Prichard's Aboriginal writings read as awkward
negotiations of the absence of an adequate local political language to encompass the conditions of Aboriginal workers. They also engage a broader set of theoretical questions about where non-modern and rural
populations – peasant, agrarian and aboriginal – might sit in relation to Marxist understandings of social
transformation that typically place revolutionary energy with the urban proletariat. Thus, I suggest, that
while Prichard's Aboriginal writings fail as conventional left wing political analysis, and fail also to imagine
Aboriginal political agency, they nonetheless begin to account for a gap between the commitments of the
Australian left to social justice, and the labour and suffering of Aboriginal workers in the cattle industry.
Rejecting the orthodox political solutions she presented elsewhere these texts constitute important meditations on silence, inarticulacy and rage.
Ellen Smith received her PhD from Princeton University in 2012. She is currently an Endeavour postdoctoral
fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King's College London.
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Ana Sobral, Universität Konstanz
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
'Internal Battlegrounds':
Self-Othering and (Poetic) Justice in South African Post-Apartheid Culture
With the end of the Apartheid in South Africa, long-standing notions of 'self' and 'other', which had been
heavily drawn along racial lines, began to crumble and urgent questions about new cultural identities in
the wake of racial segregation arose. The violence (discursive as well as physical) that had previously been
employed to maintain racial boundaries found new forms of expression within a society still marked by
racial tensions. This sense of 'things falling apart' and the accompanying loss of a centre, however uncomfortable, have been translated into different cultural objects that explore the shifting and oftentimes
confused boundaries between 'self' and 'other'. In my paper I wish to explore the practice of self-othering,
i.e., an identification with a racial 'other' and its consequences, in the works of white post-Apartheid authors and artists. Focusing on ambiguous and/or self-divided figures in the novel Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee,
the music and video performances of the polemic rap-rave group Die Antwoord and the irreverent comic
series Bittercomix by Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes, my paper will examine the ways in which the
search for otherness within the white subject has been used as a means of articulating difficult questions
of guilt and justice in post-Apartheid culture. I will especially discuss how different forms of defamiliarization are employed in these works not only to negotiate but also to problematize the past and the future
of South Africa.
Ana Sobral is a Lecturer of British and Anglophone Literatures. Her postdoctoral project deals with representations of globalization in contemporary popular music. Research interests include literature and
popular culture in a global context.
Mark Stein, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Translating Reluctant Fundamentalisms
This paper is a comparative study of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel and Mira Nair's 2012 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist. As instances of 'global storytelling' (Peter Bradshaw), both are translocal narrations
which, in different ways, mediate distinct cultural and narrative perspectives. In the context of the 9/11
bombings, in the wider context of US military aggression, and with reference to Pakistan's colonial remains, both cultural products engage complex questions of respect, reparation, and reconciliation. They
can be read as meditations on the (im)possibility of postcolonial justice. This paper argues that Nair's
'translation' of Hamid's text into film radicalizes the novel in certain respects whilst toning it down in
others. Heavy-handed ambition spells out its critical impetus so clearly that the film pales before the more
nuanced novel. But if read as an instance of 'accented cinema' (Hamid Naficy), the film is successful at
poignantly contrasting and blending distinct cultural, visual, and aural repertoires, gesturing beyond the
dualism on which it rests.
Mark Stein is Professor of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster. He has taught Anglophone literatures and cultures at Frankfurt, Bremen, and Saarbruecken Universities, was a visiting training fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and a research fellow at
the Postcolonial Studies graduate school (Graduiertenkolleg) of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Before joining WWU Münster, from 2002 to 2006, he was Junior Professor for Theories of non-European
Literatures and Cultures at the Universität Potsdam.
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Hanna Straß, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
'Destroy bombs not people. No more war games on our sacred lands':
Nuclear Colonialism in Kiana Davenport's House of Many Gods (2006)
Dealing with the question of justice in postcolonial contexts undoubtedly requires taking historical, political, economic and social dimensions into account. The environment as a place of colonial injustice,
however, has often been neglected in scholarly debates. Yet, colonialism and its aftermath entailed
detrimental effects to the environment, such as the exploitation of natural resources, the destruction of
sources of the livelihood of native populations, the dispossession and relocation of peoples to less fertile
areas, the spread of communicable disease, the contamination of environments with military and industrial toxins, etc. When addressing questions of justice and retribution in this context, an environmental
justice perspective, explicitly combining social and environmental concerns, provides new insights. The
novel analysed in this paper engages with an environmental justice problem that affected, albeit in varying
degrees of intensity, different countries throughout the world: nuclear colonialism (Huggan/Tiffin 2010).
Kiana Davenport's novel House of Many Gods (2006) deals with the effects of nuclear pollution caused by
U.S. military practices on the Hawaiian Islands. Placing nuclear pollution at its centre, the novel engages
with the temporal complexities of what postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon has termed 'slow violence' (2011,
2-3).
Hanna Straß has a Master degree in Intercultural Anglophone Studies from the Universität Bayreuth. She is
currently a member of the DFG-research training group Globalization and Literature. Presentations, Transformations, Interventions at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Florian Tatschner, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Ghosts in the Archive, or, the Spectral Repertoire of the Other:
Anna Lee Walters's Ghost Singer and the Aesthetics of Survivance
Faced with the consequences of centuries of colonialist oppression, displacement, and genocide, Indigenous
cultures of North America have often been concerned with matters of resistance, restitution, and justice. More recently, Native American authors have employed 'postmodern' strategies to counter the still lingering stereotypical
notion of a 'vanishing race' with an 'aesthetics of survivance' (Gerald Vizenor): Instead of bemoaning the cultural
absence of Native Americans in Western constructs of the 'Indian,' this strategy stresses a 'Native presence' resisting
appropriation. One example, Anna Lee Walters's novel Ghost Singer, combines a Native American cosmological
worldview with the genre of the ghost story to draw attention to the ongoing conflict between 'white' institutional
policies and indigenous claims regarding the treatment of Native human remains – as remains not as artifacts.
It specifically focuses on differing modes of perception, spectrality, and temporality. Drawing on Diana Taylor's
distinction between archive and repertoire, the talk illustrates how Walters's narrative emphasizes the presence
of the other as 'survivance' that gestures beyond a specific political problem as well as the confines of reason.
The novel shows that the encounter with cultural otherness does not only consist in rational recognition, but also
requires a certain epistemological humility that accepts the uncognizable. Ultimately, the talk thus raises a more
general question concerning (written) language and historicity in connection to ethics and aesthetics exceeding
the analysis of Ghost Singer and pertinent to the discussion of postcolonial justice at large: in how far does the
obligation toward the other require us to unlearn how to recognize in order to learn how to perceive?
Florian Tatschner is currently working on his dissertation project with the working title 'The Other Presences: Negotiating the Parameters of a Transnational Aesthetic in Contemporary North American Literature.' His scholarly
interests include poststructuralist theory, twentieth century German philosophy, and nineteenth and twentieth
century American and German literature.
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Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Hanna Teichler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Reconciliation: Aspirin or Amplifier?
In June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of his government to the indigenous population
of Canada for a politics which had aimed to forcibly assimilate children of Canadian Aboriginals and unfolded with
manifold mental, emotional and physical abuse. Claims for retribution and (monetary) compensation have led to the
establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2010. This approach towards reconciliation
resounds in the international realm of transitional justice; commissions like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of South Africa have already made available a 'toolbox' of concepts and rituals how to come to terms with a difficult
historical legacy. As the South African example (among others) has shown, reconciliation as a concept and truth
commissions as an approach cannot live up to their 'task' as universal remedies to cure (post)colonial injustice.
However, it is the aim of this presentation to offer another possible aspect of the concept of reconciliation: A wide
range of cultural productions has dealt with the treatment of the indigenous Canadian population. Novels such as
Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) or Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road (2008) appear to be quite clear
about the (im)possibility of 'flat-out' reconciliation. The discourse surrounding court cases, apologies and commissions
has triggered a revisiting of the national narrative, a reframing of national and cultural identity, and has sparked a
controversial debate about a country's past which unfolds emphatically within the sphere of cultural productions.
This paper would like to broaden the common conceptual scope of morally and ethically untainted reconciliation
towards its powerful ability to work as a trigger, a catalyst, an amplifier.
Hanna Teichler was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate in Frankfurt in December 2011 (New Literatures in English). Her
dissertation project examines possibilities of reconciliation in a postcolonial context and focuses in particular on
performative aspects of memory, identity and history in a more and more complex media landscape.
Jens Temmen, Universität Potsdam
Overwriting and Disavowing Hawai'i:
Liliuokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen and the Morgan Report
This paper is part of a larger project that analyzes the overlappings of law and literature in the negotiation
of the Native American presence in United States territory. The texts analyzed under the theoretical premise
of 'literary evidence' laid down by Peter Schneck are marked by attempts to either overwrite or carve out
spaces of dissent to legal and narrative self-renderings of a U.S. national identity, which, according to Mary
Dudziak, considers American identity as characterized by the 'rule of law.' Recent scholarly work has shifted focus to the legal texts that allowed for the creation of Native American spaces as 'spaces of exception,'
designed—from the white settler perspective—to both justify the treatment of Native Americans 'outside
normal U.S. jurisdiction,' and to simultaneously create a 'jurisdictional imaginary' in which the exception
does not unsettle the ideal of an American of democracy and law, but rather emphasizes it. My PhD project
proposes that this strategy was also employed in the textual negotiation of the colonization and annexation of territories beyond continental United States. This paper will present how the U.S. Congress' Morgan
Report overwrites U.S. and Hawaiian jurisdiction to create the island as a legally Native American space,
thereby legitimizing the staged revolution in Hawaii and U.S. annexation. In Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's
Queen, the author engages in claiming the strategy of overwriting expressed in the Morgan Report to
locate Hawaii outside U.S. jurisdiction and to create legal evidence against annexation.
Jens Temmen currently holds a teaching appointment at the Universität Potsdam and is working on his PhD
project on 'Overriding Native American Nationhood: Transnational and Legal American Spaces (1788-present) (working title).'
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Petra Tournay-Theodotou, European University Cyprus
'I lived to tell this story':
Britain's Slavery Past in Jackie Kay's Neo-Slave Narrative The Lamplighter (2007)
Many years after the first female slave narratives appeared in the United States, several Black British women
writers published neo-slave narratives to mark the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the African slave
trade in Britain. Jackie Kay's The Lamplighter (2007), which has been described as a dramatised poem, a
multi-layered epic poem or simply as a play, focuses on the female experience of enslavement and the particular forms of dehumanization the female slave had to endure. Apart from stressing the capacity of memory
and providing silenced female voices with an identity and a past, Kay makes it a point to commemorate how
the slave trade financed and powered the industrial revolution and how both Britain and her native Scotland
profited and prospered from the slave trade. Based on extensive research, The Lamplighter is a conscious
effort of writing back at history, of setting the record straight and exposing Britain's and Scotland's major implication in the slave trade. However, the play serves not only as a powerful reminder of the evils of the past;
Kay simultaneously wishes to make her drama resonate for the present when she has one of her characters
state: 'My story is the story of Great Britain, The United Kingdom, the British Empire' (81) and thus reminds
her readers/audience that modern Britain owes much of its wealth to enslaved Africans. The Lamplighter can
hence also be regarded as a warning against present and future forms of human exploitation and as an act
of resistance to commodification. This essay will examine the ways in which Kay's drama exemplifies how the
production of wealth has been both a motivation and a justification behind colonial expansion - and here,
more specifically, behind the institution of the slave trade.
Petra Tournay-Theodotou is Associate Professor of English, where she teaches Postcolonial, British, and
African-American literature.
James Tar Tsaaior, Pan-Atlantic University Lagos
After the Drumbeats of War: Telling the Truth, Telling the Nation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
In 1994, Rwanda became a boiling cauldron where ethnic Hutu and Tutsi nationalists were engaged in a
bitter conflict in what has become known as the Rwandan genocide. Post-genocide Rwandan reconciliation
has been agonistic and traumatic as the genocide itself especially with the social and cultural politics of
truth-telling among individual subjectivities/group identities and the public institutions which have framed
relations after the conflict. This paper, therefore, engages post-conflict Rwandan nationhood with particular attention to forms of justice in relation to institutional mechanisms which have re/shaped the people's
responses to the dynamic of a violent history and history of violence. In concrete terms, the paper interrogates settled questions about Rwandan history as a way of recuperating the past and summoning it for the
contingencies of present and future history. For instance, what are the alternative possibilities and routes
taken and not taken to prevent the genocide and which, if not taken now, may trigger a recrudescence?
In what ways have imperial and (post)colonial histories impacted on Rwandan social, political and cultural
habits before and after the genocide? What is the role of (oral) traditions/histories and re/memory in the
truth and reconciliation trajectory and the process of individual and collective remembering and healing?
How strategic have state institutions and the International Court of Justice been to the reconciliatory process and how have these institutions been perceived by the people? Do local cultural practices and juridical systems function as a therapeutic herb to the wounds of history?
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Abstracts
in alphabetical order
David Turnbull, University of Melbourne
Postcolonial Injustice: Rationality, Knowledge and Law in the Face of Multiple Epistemologies
and Ontologies – A Spatial Performative Approach
Five leading examples of global injustice are territorial dispossession, gender inequality, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and the enclosure of the knowledge commons. The central problem is
that these mal-distributions of wealth, power and knowledge have come about under systems of law
coproduced with the economies and colonising processes that conduce to them. Any attempt to develop
a postcolonial framework to deal with these issues faces an interlocking set of reflexive problems. In order
to present the issues I have appealed to a universal principle of equity, and to universal structures such as
legal systems and economies all of which are spatially and ontologically diverse; and just to make things really problematic I have implicitly invoked a form of rationality, the very rationality that the notion of justice
depends on. The approach to the problem of postcolonial injustice taken in this paper is to frame rationality, knowledge, and law, spatially and performatively. It proposes the creation of a conceptual space that
gives generative life to the scalar tensions between the universal and local.
David Turnbull is a Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) in the Architecture
Faculty at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include cartography, working with differing
ways of knowing and the co-production of knowledge and space. Currently he is working on a project 'Of
String, Boats, and Stories: Rethinking Narratives of Prehistory.'
Monica van der Haagen-Wulff, Universität zu Köln
De-cloaking Invisibility: Remembering Colonial South-West-Africa
From 1904 to 1907 the German Reich carried out a colonial war in South-West Africa that resulted in the
death of an estimated 80% of the Herero, 50% of the Nama and a large proportion of the Damara and San
indigenous populations. According to the United Nations Whitacker Report of 1985, the colonial war on
the Herero, Nama, Damara and San is officially categorised as the first genocide of the 20th Century. In
2004, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Hereo Uprising, the German Government moved to recognise the South-West African colonial war as an act of genocide (Völkermord) and as a war crime (Kriegsverbrechen). The Government also made an official apology, but declined to give financial compensation to
the victim's families. My aim in this paper is to tentatively explore the web of tangled historical narratives
of guilt and responsibility that are such an integral part of German national and historical consciousness.
It would appear that the aftershocks of the Holocaust combined with the relatively short time-span of
German colonial history have colluded to make the colonial war in South-West Africa and its devastating
consequences all the more historically invisible. I will examine this particular postcolonial entanglement
with a special focus on the diplomatic fiasco surrounding the return of the skeletal remains, and the parliamentary debates in relation to the issues of repatriation and the realization of justice.
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Christine Vogt-William, Humboldt-Universität Berlin
HeLa and The Help: Considering Justice for African American Women in White Women's
Narratives through a Postcolonial Gender Lens
Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Kathryn Stockett's The Help are two recent
narratives that declare an interest in modes of justice for African American women, who are exploited in
the American South in the 1950s. Both narratives, published in 2010, will be read through a postcolonial
gender framework, which interrogates the motives for such projects undertaken by these contemporary
white writers – indeed the process of writing as a means of breaking silences and conferring agency will be
of import here. A striking aspect that bears scrutiny is the role of the amanuensis that these white writers
seem to take in telling black women's stories – a characteristic resonating with the genre of the slave narrative. At the same time, the feasibility of a postcolonial approach in reading these American texts will be
an additional element to be examined.
Christine Vogt-William is currently holding a guest professorship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
for one year with the American and English Studies department with a focus on Postcolonial Studies and
Gender Studies.
Jennifer Wawrzinek, Freie Universität Berlin
Revisioning Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative
Eighteenth-century European travel narratives have often been criticised for the way in which they frequently created an imperial order for their European readership. As Mary Louise Pratt argues in Imperial
Eyes, many of these accounts 'made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to citizenries of the
imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few' (3). In the
summer of 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed with her maid and her infant daughter to what was then
considered the frontier of civilisation – Scandinavia. She had recently been in Paris where she had seen
many of her friends executed under Robespierre's reign of terror and by the time she arrived in Norway
her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was near its end. Wollstonecraft was disillusioned with
the possibility of any meaningful relation with others. Yet the book that resulted from this journey, A Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark is arguably the most accomplished of her works for the way it
depicts a relation with otherness that remains inherently ethical despite the author's concern with political
justice and social progress. Contrary to the argument by some critics that A Short Residence instates an
imperialist project of commercial recovery, colonial exploration and the acquisition of knowledge through
the colonising gaze, I shall argue that Wollstonecraft critiques and disrupts the colonising gaze via the
epistolary mode and the process of skeptical enquiry, both as modes of narration that configure justice as
ethical relation rather than justice as dogma.
Jennifer Wawrzinek is Junior Professor in British Romanticism at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her current
project examines the concept of radical passivity in British Romanticism at the end of the long eighteenth
century.
72
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Carsten H. Wergin, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Postcolonial Justice from Below: The Fight for James Price Point, Western Australia (2009-2013)
The case draws on the struggle of a localized community against the development of a $45 billion AUD
Liquefied Natural Gas Facility (LNG) 50km north of the Australian tourist town of Broome, on the Indian
Ocean coast. From March 2012 to Mai 2013, I spent 15 months of fieldwork in the Kimberley and enquired
about the different 'worlds' (Muecke) that came together to oppose this large-scale industrial development in a culturally and environmentally sensitive area called James Price Point/Walmadany. These worlds
included those of Aboriginal traditional owners, environmentalists, casual travellers and influential media
representatives, but also those of international business executives and a state government interested in
profit maximization. In this presentation, I discuss how indigenous knowledge functioned as a catalyst that
helped to align worlds in a collective opposition to the industrialization project that was to be superimposed
on the community. Shared attachment to Aboriginal 'living country' led to new alliances between environmentalists and local community members, tourists and travellers, groups who might previously contest
their authorities of speaking for or even being 'on country'. This generated a postcolonial justice that was
not implemented from above but derived from below – not from a mere strive for economic 'opportunity',
but an acknowledgement of the 'particularities of place' (Escobar). In light of this, I argue that, in Australia, development and reconciliation might be conceived of differently: not as modernist projects that put
faith in apologies by Prime Ministers, but as ecological projects of biocultural hope that take indigenous
knowledge seriously.
Carsten Wergin, Dr. Phil., is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology. His
general interests are in the areas of globalisation, media and transcultural studies with a focus on ethnographic research in the age of the Anthropocene.
Russell West-Pavlov, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Entangled Negative and Affirmative Biopolitics in the Texts of Kim Scott
This paper reads several texts by the Australian Indigenous writer Kim Scott, a Nyoongar novelist, activist,
academic and language retrieval project leader from Western Australia. The paper reads in counterpoint
Scott's two most recent novels, the now-classic Benang (1999) which takes a very bleak view of the legacy
of colonial native policy, mapping the effects of colonial biopolitics upon several generations of Nyoongar
people up to the present, based loosely upon Scott's own family and archival material; and the more
recent That Deadman Dance (2010), which in a sense imagines the pre-history of Benang, looking at the
first-contact period on the South-Western Australian coast, focussing on the way indigenous hospitality
gradually faltered as colonial acquisitiveness and non-reciprocity came to dominate the colonial frontier;
and Scott's collaborative oral history with Hazel Brown, Kayang & Me (2005). The paper suggest that such
texts, with their various generic affiliations and their varying emphases upon past, present and future,
optimist and pessimism, etc, can be read as the multifarious fabric of commentary and participation in
mutually intertwined negative and positive biopolitics extending from the colonial first contact period to
the present moment.
Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of English at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and Research
Associate at the University of Pretoria.
73
Kai Wiegandt, Freie Universität Berlin
Shame and Guilt in Zoë Wicomb's and Antje Krog's Negotiations of South Africa's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) operated under the assumption that the publication or voicing of truth would lead not only to reconciliation but also to a sort of justice. The chair of
the Commission, Desmond Tutu, stressed that the perpetrators were not required to express remorse or
to ask forgiveness but only to make a full disclosure of their crimes in order to qualify for amnesty – a fact
that prompted the criticism that a mere admission of atrocities did not further the aim of justice. Others,
amongst them J. M. Coetzee, suggested that 'looking into the heart' of those on trial would be a preposterous endeavour usurping religious confession. In my paper I want to consider the moral feelings of those
complicit with the perpetrators and of those complicit with the victims, in particular the interplay between
feelings of guilt and of shame as represented in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story – a novel about the Cape
Coloureds that obliquely addresses the TRC – and in Antje Krog's Country of my Skull – a lyrical reportage
on the TRC from the perspective of an Afrikaans poet. Wicomb's and Krog's books, I argue, are about the
reallocation of guilt and shame from their displaced to their proper positions, and try to reinstitute justice
through the performative and experiential qualities of literature.
Kai Wiegandt is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department. In his essays he analysed works by Shakespeare,
Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach and Nadine Gordimer.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, University of Cambridge and Humboldt Universität Berlin
Other Hostages:
Postcolonial Justice and the Politics of Repatriation in the Case of Montezuma's Crown
At the intersection of object biography and the history of political collecting and colonizing this paper
analyses claims for postcolonial justice through the repatriation case of Montezuma's Crown / Penacho,
the oldest surviving feather headdress, today among the most contested museum claims between Europe
and the Americas. Most recently a hostage crisis was mediated between the museum in Vienna and various Mexican governments that have made claims to their people during elections that they will get the
Penacho back. Interviews with the ambassadors and other parties responsible provides one basis for this
study of the Mexicans' offer of Emperor Maximilian's carriage in exchange for the Penacho, in the failed
hope of securing the hostage-object for a temporary exhibition in the Museo Nacional de Antropología.
This paper will include fictocritical perspectives, including the memories of the spectators of Maximilian
circling Mexico City in the open carriage to take possession of the realm. It sets how the Penacho deflected
Austrian guilt for having served the Nazis off the long-running demands for the crown of the last Aztec
emperor, which have become an instrument in Mexico's fight for postcolonial justice. Ultimately the voices
gathered through literary, historical, and anthropological research reflect the global relationships between
parties with conflicting desires for Austria's colonial past in Mexico.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is a Humboldt and British Academy Newton Fellow. She holds a PhD in the
History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and her monograph Art in the Time of Colony appeared in Ashgate's series on Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-2000.
74
Poster
Session
Abstracts
in alphabetical order
Friday, 30 May - Berlin, Werkstatt der Kulturen
ASNEL and GASt believe in sharing ideas and promoting discussion at early stages of development. To
foster this kind of exchange, the poster session invites scholars at every level of academic activity to
present emerging projects for feedback and discussion.
First Nations Counter-Narratives in Transcultural Spaces - Visualizing Tribal Diversities in the
Canadian Exhibition Beat Nation
The poster presents examples of how Indigenous post-Indian artists use contemporary and traditional
knowledge, materials, and formats to represent tribally diverse narratives, challenging Eurocentric knowledge
production on First Nations cultures.
Amina Grunewald, M.A., PhD Candidate, Deptartment of English and American Studies, Humboldt-Universität
zu Berlin
Seeing Through the Schoolbook: The Representation of Indigenous Peoples in Twentieth-Century
Canadian and Australian History Textbooks
Examining four sets of case studies of history textbooks authorised in the Canadian provinces of British
Columbia and Ontario and in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria between 1900 and
2000, this project traces changes and continuities in linguistic and visual representations of Indigeneity and
assesses the roles Aboriginal peoples have been assigned in narratives of national and regional histories.
Stefanie Land-Hilbert, MA, Freie Universität Berlin, is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University
of Potsdam
Poets of Postcoloniality? New Transcultural Formations of (National) Identity, Space, Culture
and Belonging in Rap-Music from England, New Zealand and Ghana
My research project carries out an exemplary analysis of the role of rap-music for the articulation of new
understandings of postcoloniality in the societies of the former British Empire.
Anne Loeber is a PhD candidate at the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, IEAS, Goethe
University, Frankfurt
The Poetics of the Real and Aesthetics of the Reel: Exploring Visuality in the Indian English Novel
Between 'Real' World and 'Reel' World, Aesthetics and Poetics
The thesis seeks to allocate and analyse the phenomenon of literary visuality in the context of three media
― photography, cinema film and virtual reality ― that shape(d) the Indian English novel.
Anna Maria Reimer is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of English Studies at the University of Potsdam and
was a visiting scholar at the University of Delhi in 2012
Overriding Native American Nationhood: Transnational and Legal American Spaces
My research project analyzes both Native American literature and texts of United States law, and their
shared strategies in negotiating the legal status of Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century.
Jens Temmen, M.A., PhD candidate, Department of English and American Studies, University of Potsdam
75
Potsdam - Neues Palais
Thursday 29 May, Saturday 31 May, Sunday 1 June
The University of Potsdam was newly founded in 1991 and is now, with almost 20 000 Students,
Brandenburg‘s largest university. Though relatively young many parts of the university are located in
historical buildings that have been named as World Heritage Sites of the UNESCO. Am Neuen Palais is
one of the three university campuses and enjoys a unique location right next to the Park of Sanssouci.
The eighteenth century baroque buildings, which disguise their former purpose as the Palace‘s offices
and service rooms with staircases, porticos, cupolas, and rich ornamentation, are currently home to
the university‘s Faculty of Arts.
From Berlin Tegel Airport to Potsdam
... Arcona Hotel
1. Bus 109 (Zoologischer Garten) to S-Bahnhof
Charlottenburg
2. Train RE 1 or RB 21 (Magdeburg or Brandenburg) to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
or: S-Bahn S7 (Wannsee) to Wannsee and
change to S1 (Potsdam Hauptbahnhof)
Zeppelinstraße 136 , 14471 Potsdam
Telephone: +49 331 9815 – 0
From Berlin Schönefeld Airport
to Potsdam
1. Train RB 22 to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
or: Train RE 1 (Dessau) to Wannsee and S-Bahn
S1 to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
From Berlin City Center To Potsdam
1. Train RE 1 or RB 21 (Magdeburg or Brandenburg) to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
or: S-Bahn S7 (Wannsee) to Wannsee and
change to S1 to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
From Potsdam Central Station to ...
1. Bus 580 (Am Betriebshof, Bad Belzig) or Bus
631 (Werder,Havel) to Bahnhof Charlottenhof
or: train RE1 (Brandenburg Hbf), RB 21/22 to
Bahnhof Charlottenhof
2. 5min. walk, left-hand side
... Kongresshotel am Templiner See
Am Luftschiffhafen 1, 14471 Potsdam
Telephone: +49 331 9070
1. Tram 91 to Bahnhof Pirschheide (last station)
or: Train RB2 (Michendorf) to Potsdam-Pirschheide
2. Bus 631 (Werder, Havel) to Luftschiffhafen
or: 5min. walk
... Gästehaus Hochland
... Neues Palais
Holzmarktstr. 12, 14467 Potsdam
Telephone: +49 331 270 0836
1. Bus 606 (Alt-Golm) or 605 (Wissenschaftspark Golm) or 695 (Bhf Pirschheide) to Neues
Palais
1. Tram 99 (Fontanestraße) to Holzmarkstraße
2. 5min. walk along Holzmarkstraße, left-hand
side
76
Conference
Venues
Campus/Lindenallee
9
8
Neues Palais
77
Berlin - Werktstatt Der Kulturen
Friday 30 May
Werkstatt der Kulturen (WdK) is the only not for profit organisation in Berlin which focuses exclusively
on the vast field of transcultural arts. The WdK regularly provides space for performances, exhibitions
and discussions across the spheres of music, film, dance and literature.
Werkstatt der Kulturen
Wissmannstraße 32, 12049 Berlin
Telephone: +49 30 60 97 700
From Potsdam Central Station
From Potsdam Charlottenhof
1. S-Bahn S 1 (Oranienburg) to Yorckstraße
2. U-Bahn U 7 (Rudow) to Hermannplatz
3. 5min. walk to Werkstatt der Kulturen
1. Train RE1 or RB21 (Berlin) to Alexanderplatz
2. U-bahn U8 (Boddinstraße) to Herrmannplatz
3. 5min. walk to Werkstatt der Kulturen
Kot
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sse
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Dam
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Sonnenallee
U7
Hermannplatz
Hermannplatz
Urbanstrasse
Hasenheide
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Imprint
Sponsors
DFG
ASNEL
GASt
Philosophische Fakultät der Universität Potsdam
Universitätsgesellschaft Potsdam e.V.
Australian Embassy in Berlin
Alnatura
Verdener Keks- und Waffelfabrik
Imprint
Publisher:
Editorial Team:
Layout:
Universität Potsdam
Institut für Anglistik und
Amerikanistik
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
pocojust@uni-potsdam.de
Anke Bartels
Lars Eckstein
Louisa Lorenz
Carolina Mazza
Anja Schwarz
Anne Spaller
Nicole Waller
Dirk Wiemann
Anne Spaller
Prof. Dr. Lars Eckstein
Prof. Dr. Anja Schwarz
Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller
Prof. Dr. Dirk Wiemann
Cover:
'The Taming of the Beasts'
Mural by Faith47, Shanghai
Run: 350
Print:
www.wir-machen-druck.de
79
The Team
Organisers
Public Relations
Support Special Events
Lars Eckstein
Anja Schwarz
Nicole Waller
Dirk Wiemann
Melanie Kagels
Anna-Lena Stahl
Jens Temmen
Verena Adamik
Anke Bartels
Lisa Bigalk
Christopher Downing
Josephine Drygalla
Katia Fonsaca
Melanie Kagels
Silke Kämmerer
Stefanie Land-Hilbert
Elisabeth Nechutnys
Carly McLaughlin
James Ogone
Harald Pittel
Miriam Redzewsky
Anna Maria Reimer
Christoph Senft
Anna-Lena Stahl
Jens Temmen
Logistics
Lina Fricke
Marie-Christin Hoffmann
Elisabeth Nechutnys
Anna von Rath
Christoph Senft
Programme
Louisa Lorenz
Carolina Mazza
Tatiana Bogacheva
Anne Spaller
Layout
Finances
Anne Spaller
Peggy Audörsch
Simone Heinze
Florian Schybilski
Video Documentation
Communications
Sophie Oliver
Johannes Schlegel
Christoph Senft
Louisa Lorenz
Carolina Mazza
Sara Pereira
Paula Seemann
Translations and Subtitling
Sophie Oliver
Johannes Schlegel
Anke Bartels
Josephine Drygalla
Katia Fonsaca
Johanna Fromm
Sebastian Kozlowski
Carolina Mazza
Carly McLaughlin
Sara Pereira
Kelly Robbins
Anne Spaller
Facebook
Contact Publishers
Sebastian Kozlowski
Anna von Rath
Silke Kämmerer
Josephine Drygalla
Registration
Johannes Schlegel
Jens Temmen
Webpage
80
Project Postcolonial
Potsdam
Lina Fricke
Melanie Kagels
Elisabeth Nechutnys
Anna von Rath
Miriam Redzewsky
Paula Seemann
Anna-Lena Stahl