Research Seminar, Existence as resistance. A postcolonial/decolonial theory building of artistic strategies
With guest Dr. Azadeh Sharifi

• Tuesday 8 April, 14.15-16.00. 

• Please up here

Biography
Azadeh Sharifi is a culture and theatre scholar, who has pioneered research on postmigrant performance practices in Germany. She is co-editor of Theaterwissenschaft postkolonial/dekolonial: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme (Transcript, 2022). She studied at the Institut for Cultural Policy Hildesheim, where her 2009 dissertation followed and investigated the pioneering but eventually failing postmigrant project of then artistic director Karin Beier at Schauspiel Köln, which predated the transformative innovations of Berlin’s much celebrated Maxim Gorki Theater. She has been Visiting Professor at FU Berlin, the University of Toronto, and LMU Munich, resident researcher at ITI Germany, and a Fellow of the research centre Interweaving Performance Cultures at FU Berlin.

How do race, migration, and coloniality shape the art of racialized and migrantized artists? What kind of artistic practice and strategies of resistance do these artists apply to resist ascriptions while simultaneously contributing to a postcolonial/decolonial artistic discourse? And how does their sheer existence and artistic practice reflect the broader social and political discourse in Western and Northern European countries?   

Western and Northern European countries' colonial past and their traces in contemporary societies have, in recent years, produced nuanced discourses on race and coloniality while, at the same time, increased migration from former colonies and/or affected by colonialism, is claimed to amplify right-wing populist sensationalism and ethnonationalist movements. Within these divergent debates, the racialized Other is still produced as either violent or as one whose presence justifies violence/sanctions. This ongoing topoi of the “unruly black woman” or the “violent brown muslim man” can be delineated back to colonialism and its systematic dehumanization. 

Racialized and migrantized artists play a crucial role in exposing these narratives and the embedded epistemic violence while simultaneously facilitating cultural transformations through their artistic practice by creating counter-narratives and broading the cultural and aesthetic discourse. In the presentation, I will engage with Jeanette Ehlers's work on Denmark's colonial past and Yahya Hassan’s poetry on the coloniality of the current state, which Murat Dikenci, who produced a lecture performance about Hassan, has called “the tenderness of violence”.  Their multifaceted and interdisciplinary work serves for the critical interrogation of migrantized and racialized artistic practice and strategies of resistance. The analysis of their work facilitates a foundation for theory-building through which hegemonic narratives will be subverted and a vocabulary and grammar beyond the epistomological premises enabled.