[prologue-bln]

In our (my) ongoing series on defining buzzwords, I give you today a pinch of postcolonialism. Hito Steyerl, who will also be at the PROLOGUE-BLN seminar, wrote “Can the Subaltern speak German?” in 2001. A longer version is published in a book with the same title together with texts from Patricia Alleyne-Dettmers, Maria do Mar Castro Varela, Luzenir Caixeta, Nikita Dhawan, Fatima El Tayeb, Umut Erel, Grada Ferreira, Cathy S. Gelbin, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Anil K. Jain, Kien Nghi Ha, Annette Seidel-Arpaci, Shirley Tate and Tanya Ury.
“[…] the analysis of postcolonial, feminist, and anti-racist critique means paying attention to the geographical and political context, in which this critique is produced and through which it is formed.”
Hito Steyerl: Can the Subaltern speak German? Postcolonial Critique (in English)
(The German original can be found here)

As with the other blog entries in the “What is” category this is not meant as a definite definition but an ongoing collection of resources of terms.

Eurozine has a series of articles that examine the notion of multiculturalism, what it means today, what the problems are and how to find a way to be respectful of differences but at the same time work towards a more progressive and just way of building a society. The whole dossier looks at the problems from a British perspective, but just from reading the introductory text by Ted Cantle I can see parallels to the situation in Germany.
The texts include:

Ted Cantle
Parallel lives
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Candace Allen, Ted Cantle, Dreda Say Mitchell
Multiculturalism: A failed experiment?
Moris Farhi
All history is the history of migration
Ekow Eshun
Identities and the subversion of borders
Irena Maryniak, Salil Tripathi
Cities of migration