CROSSING OCEANS DISCUSSION AND PERFORMANCE WEEKEND ON (POST-)COLONIALISM, IDENTITIES, AND DIVERSITY
Panel Discussion:
BETWEEN IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE DISCUSSION OF A »DEFINING CULTURE«
Ho Rui An (Singapore) | Suli Kurban (Munich) | Mamela Nyamza (Cape Town) | June Tan (Kuala Lumpur) | Mallika Taneja (Delhi) (Delhi)
04.11. 3.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Muffathalle 1
free Entrance
Moderated by Sandra Chatterjee
English with simultaneous translation provided in German
»We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.« That sentence appears in a statement on the 1977 genesis of contemporary, black feminism, and is one of the fundamental declarations in identity politics. Its core utterance is now applied to discussions on sexual identity, class or caste, disability, age, and religion, yet at the same time, it has increasingly been co-opted by right-wing political activity. In a completely different kind of impetus on the assertion of identity, German interior minister Thomas De Maizière in 2017 resurrected the much-discussed and often-criticized concept of a »defining culture« (Leitkultur). De Maizière voiced the idea that giving the increasing number of refugees tips such as using a friendly handshake, or saying »we are not burqa,« would be a sensible way of guiding them toward adapting to »European values.« The questions of how identity and politics can be meaningfully conceived of together; and of how and when, and in accordance with whose ideas a fundamental consensus on living together can be (re)formulated, remains – at least in current public debate in Germany – unanswered.
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