The inauguration of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin has sparked a controversy about the long ignored German colonial history, and shows how societies still struggle to deal adequately with the legacy and especially the material traces of colonialism. In recent times, both social and academic debates have focused increasingly on the emotional impact of (post)colonial history: How did disparagement and humiliation – as constituent elements of material colonial practices – helped fashion colonial politics of shaming and persisted in the cultural memories of the post-colonial present? Through which processes and actions did colonial objects and media acquire and change their social and emotional meaning? How can they be treated ethically today without perpetuating their inscribed colonial patterns of shaming, Othering and degradation? The international conference “(Post)colonial Shaming”, a collaboration between the Dresden Collaborative Research Center „Invectivity”, the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig (Leipzig Museum of Ethnology) and the Saxon State Library Dresden State and University Library (SLUB) aimed at examining these questions.

The conference covered a broad spectrum of colonial practices including colonial infrastructure, architecture and urban planning, media such as photography, films and monuments, artifacts like guns, as well as objects in European ethnological museums. The speakers analyzed former colonial areas including today’s Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Indonesia, while their disciplines and approaches ranged from cultural studies, material culture and postcolonial studies to history and museum studies.

The conference used the concept of Invectivity, developed by the eponymous Dresden Collaborative Research Center, as a central analytical approach.1 This perspective proved to be productive, since invectivity can be seen as a central social mechanism which sets transformational dynamics in motion. The close reading of (post)colonial practices affirmed that through acts of invectivity, social asymmetries or hierarchies, identities of individuals or groups, inclusions and exclusions, discursive power, affective dynamics and emotional regimes are reinforced or varied. These dynamics of social hegemony formation are often based on objects that are used as vehicles and/or ‘amplifiers’ of exercises of power and recoding, particularly under colonial conditions. As ELISABETH TILLER (Dresden) and DAGMAR ELLERBROCK (Dresden) highlighted in their introduction, a central question at the interface of invectivity and materiality is to what extend these objects and practices have been emotionally loaded and functionalized as methods of power by colonial regimes.

The panel Materialities focused on infrastructure and architecture in colonial settings and their potential to shape, structure, and control societies. Looking at the first phase of European expansion in Africa, DIRK VAN LAAK (Leipzig) identified infrastructure – perceived as an embodiment of science and technology – as a key element of the European self-image of superiority. As a prerequisite for modern nation states, it carries its shaming potential far into post-colonial times, and becomes an indicator of “bad” or “good” governance.

VERA SIMONE BADER (Munich) observed the Eritrean capital Asmara through the different stages of Italian colonization and identified increasingly defined social boundaries along the markers of class/race. As she convincingly argued, the rise of Fascism and the implementation of racial laws heavily influenced urban planning and created a visible hierarchical structure of the city. From a postcolonial perspective, the UNESCO-heritage site, which is listed as an “extraordinary modernist city”, is often reduced to the aesthetical aspects of the Fascist/modernist design of its city center and perceived as “dormant” and “frozen” city – even though, since then, continuously lived in, used and transformed by the Eritreans.

In his take on Visual Dimensions of Colonial rule, MARKUS WURZER (Halle) spoke about amateur photographs and snapshots taken by Italian soldiers during the 1935–1941 Italo-Ethiopian war and their different levels of use and meaning. While in Ethiopia during the war they were used as trophies for self-fashioning and appropriating foreign- or otherness, they turned into media of memory back in Italy. The visual legacy of these formerly „private“ collections not only became a matter of family memory, but also a difficult cultural heritage in the post-colonial public sphere in Italy which raises, as an object of scientific (and political) reflection, questions of historical reappraisal, national identity and restitution.

SOPHIE JUNGE (Zurich) analyzed a supposedly very different type of colonial photographs depicting colonized cities like Batavia or Surabaya. She highlighted how at first glance, these photographs, taken by Europeans and now displayed in hotels and museums in Indonesia, were dealt with as “innocent” during the colonial era. However, they erased the local population, their lives and the violence of colonial rule. In an innovative approach, she interpreted the today’s display of those „empty“ colonial cities and their missing elements not as a political “amnesia”. Instead, she persuasively presented it as an act of Indonesians reappropriating their own history through retaking ownership and sovereignty of interpretation, while disregarding European historical categories such as colonial/postcolonial.

SABINE KÜNTZEL (Dresden) opened the Panel (Post)Colonial Framing by analyzing representations of the civil population in different media produced by Nazi soldiers during the North African campaign in 1941. While the Germans depicted the mission as an exciting adventure in the Orient and as a relatively “hate-free” war, Küntzel identified the intersection of Nazi-ideology and long standing colonial practices of Othering and degradation inherent in these visual representations. The effective invective and stereotypical depictions of supposedly wild, infantile and at the same time fascinating people, she argued, included several levels of shaming and paved the way for racialized and military violence.

CARMEN BELMONTE (Florenz / Rome) followed the traces of three looted objects (the so-called Obelisk of Dogali, the Lion of Judah, the Axum Stele) that were turned into monuments celebrating the Italian colonialism. Belmonte identified the shaming potential in both their presence and their absence: Used by the Italian colonial power as a means of reinterpreting and glorifying the defeats and crimes in Ethiopia, the artifacts were partially restituted later on, but “left a gap in a politically charged space” instead of provoking a broader critical debate in contemporary Italy.

Both SAHEED ADERINTO (Cullowhee) and FELIX BRAHM (Bielefeld) traced the material, cultural, symbolic and legal dimensions of guns in colonial contexts. In his presentation focusing on colonial Nigeria, Aderinto highlighted that guns actively shaped the class, gender and racial identity of the colonizers and the colonized. As a symbolic object, guns were not a mere instrument of violence, but also served as an everyday object for hunting, a display of wealth and a ritual object in ceremonies. On the other hand, as explained by Felix Brahm, colonial arms legislation could also disrupt its initial role of perpetuating racial discrimination and imperial domination: The strict gun regime implemented by the German colonial power in Tanzania and its material consequences for the indigenous population sparked a crisis in environmental control and acted as a trigger moment for anti-colonial resistance.

While NANCY RUSHOHORA’s (Dar es Salaam) research is located in the same area and refers to similar events, her approach deals with the consequences of said colonial context. In her impressive paper, she spoke about historical trauma and shame as a persistent political, racial and cultural instrument of oppression. Through delineating the fate of two actors of the Maji-Maji-War, Hassan bin Omari Makunganya and Nduna Mkomanile, she explained how even the dead were not spared from shaming. The degrading treatment of Tanzanian forefathers, as Rushohora highlighted, still continues by means of German archives and museums that deliberately open up their inventory including photographs of lost remains and borrow objects to the indigenous communities, but often refrain from restituting them.

Shifting the focus from the African context back to the European perception, GAIA GIULIANI (Coimbra) emphasized the links between the current crises of western self-representation and colonial processes of Othering. Concentrating on postcolonial visual archives, she identified colonial tropes of threat such as invasion of the monstrous “out there” as key elements to define the western ‘we’, an imagined community in the face of disaster. She took up a clear political stance and reflected upon possibilities of De-Othering by (re-)introducing care (of the other, the community, the environment) as a means of “epistemological resistance”.

NIKITA DHAWAN (Dresden) described different approaches to dealing with degrading and shaming language from a philosophical perspective and dedicated her paper to the complex controversy around hate speech and free speech. Going back to the origins of the latter, she explained its philosophical and cultural implications as a key element of enlightenment, empowerment, and democratic tradition, while contrasting it to strategies of legitimization of degrading language towards minorities today. She also took into account the role of satire and the influence of capitalism in thinking about regulations of free expression.

Berlin writer and activist SHARON DODUA OTOO (Berlin) performed a reading of her 2019 novel Adas Raum, [Ada’s Room] where a golden bracelet functions as a link between the storylines as well as a symbol of violence, exploitation and injustice through history. On the other hand, as the writer explained to moderator Elisabeth Tiller, she didn’t want to write a violent, dark or pessimistic book. Her activist approach focuses on showing different versions of “situatedness” in the world. Through her narrative choices – for instance the four historically distinct storylines of women named Ada, the use of a non-human and therefore socially non-situated narrator, the description of resistance instead of violence – she seeks to recount discrimination without reproducing it. In both her novel and her insightful considerations during the public reading, Otoo illustrated postcolonial life in Europe and clearly referred to the core issues of the conference, the entanglements between invectivity, materiality and colonialism. The restitution debate about the Berlin Benin Bronzes, mentioned by the author as a pressing issue while writing the book, provided a strong connection between the lecture and the GRASSI museum tour.

FRIEDRICH VON BOSE (Leipzig) gave insight into the ongoing transformation process Reinventing GRASSI.SKD, while guiding the participants through the exhibits. Open spaces such as the care room and the prep room aim to show how people actually work in ethnology today, on the other hand, several rooms now take into account the violent history of the discipline. While the permanent exhibition still is structured by region as a stereotypical “tour around the world”, the reinterpretation process is been made transparent and opened up for discussion. The curators question themselves – and the audience – about matters of reframing and dismantling, storage and exhibition, and, most prominently, of restitution. As this also includes the difficult legacy of ancestory remains, the museum actively seeks to collaborate with the communities of origin, provides spaces for commemoration and thus involves the emotional dimensions of loss, hurt and responsibility.

Especially during the final roundtable moderated by Dagmar Ellerbrock, the participants stressed the need of an ongoing debate about the connection between shaming, materiality and (post)colonial memory culture. As DAVID SIMO (Yaoundé) argued, artifacts still should be exhibited in Europe, but with clear information how they were obtained, and remain there as a symbol of shame, thus reversing the roles. GEORGE ABUNGU (Moka) on the other hand insisted on the restitution of looted objects and stated that neither the diasporic communities should claim those artifacts, whose materiality often is closely linked to specific rooms, persons and actions in their regions of origin. He also criticized the ongoing disparity in power, financial means and influence between European and African scholars, museums and institutions. As discussed with regard to violence and photography during various presentations and in relation to literature, Abungu also reinforced the question on how material that is meant and created to discriminate, subjugate, shame and showcase people should be treated today. From the curator’s perspective, Friedrich von Bose stressed the importance of the audience as a driving force which has to be identified, catered to, but also created. Sharon Dodua Otoo illustrated this point through sharing her experience of not being seen and not being represented as audience and Person of Color in European museums.

In her final remarks, KATJA KANZLER (Leipzig) recapitulated the broad range of disciplines and cases presented during the conference and highlighted that approaching colonial constellations through the lens of invectivity showed the importance of shame as central technology of colonization. Kanzler stressed that colonial degradation is “a doing, a practice that has thickened into a structure”, and that colonial material responsible for subjugating people keeps circulating while emotions like shame still “stick” to these objects.

Conference overview
Gerd Schwerhoff (Dresden): Greetings

Dagmar Ellerbrock / Elisabeth Tiller (Dresden): Welcome and Introduction

Panel 1. Materialities
Chair: Sabine Küntzel (Dresden)

Dirk van Laak (Leipzig): Infrastructures as a Benchmark of Modernity

Vera Simone Bader (Munich): Shaping Colonial Society: Architecture and Urban Planning in Asmara

Panel 2. Visual Dimensions
Chair: Elisabeth Tiller (Dresden)

Markus Wurzer (Halle): Between Intervention and Restitution: Postcolonial Approaches to the Visual Legacy of Colonialism in Contemporary Italy (Live-Stream Presentation)

Sophie Junge (Zurich): Silencing as a Weapon of Power in (Post)Colonial Indonesia

Panel 3. (Post)Colonial Framing
Chair: Dagmar Ellerbrock (Dresden)

Sabine Küntzel (Dresden): A War Without Hate? The North African Campaign and Colonial Shaming

Carmen Belmonte (Florence / Rome): Colonial Heritage in Italy: Displaced Monuments, Travelling Memories (Live-Stream Presentation)

Panel 4. Legal Discrimination
Chair: Dagmar Ellerbrock (Dresden)

Saheed Aderinto (Miami (FL)): Good Guns, Bad Guns: Race and Firearms Regulation in Colonial and Postcolonial Nigeria (Live-Stream Presentation)

Felix Brahm (Bielefeld): Deprived of Rights and Material: New Research into Gun and Hunting Politics and Anticolonial Resistance in Tanzania, 1880s to 1910s

Sharon Dodua Otoo (Berlin): Book Presentation and Reading: Adas Raum (Saxon State and University Library Dresden – SLUB)

Panel 5. Ongoing Shaming? Consequences of Colonial Contexts
Chair: Felix Brahm (Bielefeld)

Nancy Rushohora (Dar-es-Salaam): Shaming the Dead, Haunting the Living and Those yet to be Born

Gaia Giuliani (Coimbra): The Monster at the Border: The Shaming of the Postcolonial Other in Europe in the Time of Anthropocenic Crises

Nikita Dhawan (Dresden): The Right to Provoke: Free Speech, Hate Speech and the Politics of Censorship

Round Table: Shaming in Memory Cultures
Chair: Dagmar Ellerbrock (Dresden), GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Zimeliensaal

Panelists: Friedrich von Bose (Leipzig); Sharon Dodua Otoo (Berlin); George Abungu (Moka), via Zoom; David Simo (Yaoundé)

Final Remarks: Katja Kanzler (Leipzig)

Unfortunately, due to illness/pandemic reasons Mia Fuller, Yagmur Karakis, Torsten König und Léontine Meijer-van Mensch could not read their papers.

Anmerkungen:
1 Dagmar Ellerbrock u.a., Invektivität - Perspektiven eines neuen Forschungsprogramms in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, in: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 2 (2017), 1, S. 2–24. DOI: 10.2478/kwg-2017-0001.