Places in the sun : post-colonial dialogues in Europe and beyond PDF
Preview Places in the sun : post-colonial dialogues in Europe and beyond
Places in the Sun Post-Colonial dialogues in Europe and beyond Editors Valentin Luntumbue Philippe Lefevre Brussels, Belgium Brussels, Belgium Stephan Raab Ruxandra Seniuc Nuremberg, Germany Suceava, Romania Adrian Waters Nadya Kamenkovich Rome, Italy Oxford, United Kingdom To cite this book, consider the following: Luntumbue, V., et al (eds.) (2021). Places in the Sun: Post-Colonial Dialogues in Europe and Beyond. Brussels: Institute for a Greater Europe. To cite a chapter in this book, consider the following: Voets, T. (2021). “Reflections on the Black Lives Matter movement in Europe: Keeping the conversation alive”, in Luntumbue, V., et al. (eds.). Places in the Sun: Post-Colonial dialogues in Europe and beyond. Brussels: Institute for a Greater Europe, 4-12. ISBN 978-3-947214-09-9 (eBook and Printed) ©2021 The Institute for a Greater Europe, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 All rights reserved. Cover design by Robin Luntumbue Disclaimer: This book has been produced with the financial assistance of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum e.V. and their donors. The contents of the publication are the responsibility of the Institute for a Greater Europe and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum e.V. or their donors. The opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute for a Greater Europe or the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum e.V. The registered NPO addresses are Avenue de la Couronne 124, 1050 Ixelles (Brussels), Belgium (Institute for a Greater Europe), and 44, Bad St. 13357 Berlin, Germany (EU-Russia Civil Society Forum e.V. ) ii Acknowledgements The Places in the Sun team would like to extend some thanks to our partners at the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum and their Europe Lab project, their sponsors, including the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the other participants of the 2021 Europe Lab for the discussions we had and that nourished our project. We obviously thank all our authors for their work and their valued perspectives. We also thank Dr Madina Tlostanova for meeting with us, and Marcell Ottó Ormándy for helping with the retranscription of the interview and his proofreading efforts across this book. iii Contents Introduction 1 Part I. Decolonialism in the West, Something Old, Something New 1.1 Reflections on the Black Lives Matter movement in Europe: Keeping the conversation alive 4 Thomas Voets 1.2 Brussel eza lola: Belgium and the failure of top-down decolonisation 13 Valentin Luntumbue 1.3 Colonialism Must Fall: Reflections on Student Activism in UK Universities 24 Nupur Patel 1.4 Was Kant a racist?: the public discussion on Germany's belated intellectual 37 decolonisation Robin Schmahl 1.5 Colonial Legacy in the Americas: Effects on Latin American societies 48 Ibrahim Sultan 1.6 “Antiblackness and the unsayable”: A Philosophical Investigation 58 Hannah Joseph Asikhia 1.7 Looking beyond hegemony: the prism of orientalism and soft power 65 Jessica Gosling 1.8 The Cameroonian Diaspora and the "Anglophone Crisis" 79 Hilary Koum Njoh iv Part II. Understanding Post-Socialism through Post-Colonialism 2.1 Post-Colonial Offerings for Post-Soviet Beings: Tools and Tactics 89 for the New World EastEast 2.2 The Eternal Empire: Decolonising Russia 97 David Saveliev 2.3 Russia, Heir to an odd empire 108 Nadya Kamenkovich 2.4 The Aryan Alliance? Nazi Eastern European Imperialism within the 115 censored Dutch Press Jonas Lammens 2.5 On superiority and inferiority in academia: an autoethnography 131 Olga Burlyuk 2.6 How Post-Colonial is Post-Soviet Central Asia? 142 Jakub Stepaniuk 2.7 The abduction of Europa - Europeanness in CEE 150 Valentin Luntumbue Part III. A Dialogue of the Second and Third Worlds 3.1 The Non-Aligned Movement, the Soviet Union and decolonisation in Africa 159 Adrian Waters 3.2 Yugoslavia's place in the Sun? Modernist architecture in Non-Aligned countries 171 Davide Denti & Dino Huseljic v 3.3 Finding your way back: A discussion with Madina Tlostanova 184 Laura Luciani & Valentin Luntumbue 3.4 In search of Basebya Gilbert: Exploring the experience of African students 197 in the USSR through fiction Sandra Muteteri Heremans 3.5 Black Poland: History of the Polish Black Community, current status and 212 perspective Żaneta Kubicka 3.6 “Look East”: the Zimbabwean reaction to neo-imperialism 221 Malaika Magadza 3.7 Russia-India BFFs? - A Conversation on Popular Imagination 233 John Alulis 3.8 From Mapping to Meaning - Visual Perspectives on Postcolonialism 240 Stephan Raab Contributors 254 Partners 260 The Institute for a Greater Europe The EU-Russia Civil Society Forum Europe Lab 2021 Places in the Sun Bodies Unbound Yesterday was Warmer than Today vi 1 Introduction The book you now hold in your hands is the primary offshoot of a project led by a team of writers and editors from the Institute for a Greater Europe (IGE) for the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum’s 2021 Europe Lab. The project also comprises of online publications, events and discussions though the book does act as a sizeable pièce de résistance. The IGE is an independent youth-led think tank with members all around the world, based in Brussels, Europe’s most international city. Our organisation aims at fostering understanding and intellectual cooperation across Europe and beyond, regardless of borders. We privilege decentring narratives, knowledge and perspectives – and it is something we hope to have approached with this volume. Our project was started after the year of Black Lives Matter – or the spectacular resurgence of the 2013 movement, which took the world by storm. Brussels, home to an incalculable number of diasporas, was also the theatre of numerous and intensive conversations on Belgium and Europe’s colonial past – and its present. Grievances echoed by generations of diaspora members prior where finally being put forefront and for a short while, history felt like moving forward. Eastward, a parallel trend could be observed, with an increasing number of academics and writers resorting to decolonial concepts and paradigms, in a wide variety of domains. How to explain this apparent success of decolonial theories in Central and Eastern Europe, a region where so many countries pride themselves in never having colonised anyone? Was it a simple export from the West or a homegrown school of thought? Did it exist independently outside of academia? These were the themes we set out to explore. Most of all we wanted to confront those two trends of the decolonial movement: the “Western” tradition, dealing with the legacy of the overseas empires, and the “Eastern” tradition, which explores similar concepts of exploitation, identity, and alienation in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Our intellectual journey will be divided in three parts. The first part, Decolonialism in the West, something old, something new, examines several facets of the modern decolonial movement, the plight of diasporas, the efforts of activists and the many debates surrounding the legacy of empire in Europe and the Americas. The second part, Understanding Post-Socialism through Post-Colonialism, takes us to Central and Eastern Europe to confront the colonial fallout of a region historically dominated by the Russian and Soviet Empires, to understand how both the population of the post-Socialist region and their former hegemon relate to the idea of empire and articulate their relation to Western Europe. 2 Our third part, A Dialogue of the Second and Third Worlds, does away with the imperial core, and strives to foster discussion and exchanges between the former colonised peoples of the Global South and the inhabitants of post-Socialist states. We will explore both the history of this solidarity and its needed topicality. Our volume wasn’t envisioned strictly as an academic endeavour. True to the spirit of the decolonial tradition, we wanted to explore our subject through different types of essays, conversations, discussions, and fiction. The field is a varied, diverse and multi-layered one and we wanted to reflect that in the way we approached the matter, showcasing multiple perspectives, experiences and worldviews. To that effect, our writing team includes academics, writers, activists and artists from all over the world, whose diverse approaches bring us closer to that goal. Diverse as they are, we also wanted to highlight how common the experiences of colonised peoples across the world can sometimes be, and how remembering that the same sun shines upon places like the Congo or the Caucasus can open new avenues for solidarity. 3 Part I. Decolonialism in the West, Something Old, Something New The year 2020 definitely put the decolonial movement under a new spotlight. Decolonial studies and outlook, with wind in their sails, were given more visibility, but with it also came backlash. For example, most decolonial movements in France or the United Kingdom were often suddenly decried as seditious agitprop copied and pasted from the United States. This uninformed framing both disregards the fact there isn’t one radical group in the US whose members don’t send each other online drives full of pdfs of Frantz Fanon’s works, and the obvious older legacy of the decolonial movement in the West. Though undervalued, this abundant heritage is the result of an incessant and reciprocal transatlantic exchange, and this corpus is still the foundation for decolonial movements the world over. This first part explores different strands of the decolonial struggle in the Western world, be it tackling social justice issues, the decolonisation of institutions like universities and museums, the structural legacy of racism and the role of diasporas. It confronts both the history of colonial Europe and some of the ways people involved in decolonial movements engage with it and its ramifications. In a world changed by worldwide telecommunications, we also briefly question what the future of organising could look like, and how it could bifurcate from the historical tradition of decolonialism in the Western World.
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