Paper short abstract:

This proposal examines the contestations that anti-racist collectives have with the Christopher Columbus monument in Barcelona. The ethnographic approach to their political practices identifies counter-memories that suggest the need for transformation and decolonisation of public space.

Paper long abstract:

Europe's former metropolises have many sites of memory in their urban landscape that aim to remember with honor and nostalgia the legacies of former empires. These sites also serve to commemorate past traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and genocide. The purpose of this proposal is to critically examine the contestations that anti-racist collectives have with the imperial monumentality represented by the Christopher Columbus monument in Barcelona. The ethnographic approach to their discourses, affects and political and artistic practices identifies counter-memories that register as anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, heterodisident and anti-capitalist. These counter-memories are mainly elaborated by racialised women and post-colonial migrants. These 'memory complexes' are understood as 'sites of racial pain' by subjects who resent colonial oppression, and become transcendental milestones in the transformation and decolonisation of public space, where senses of belonging, democracy, citizenship and social justice are renegotiated.

The tensions between these 'underground memories' and the dominant narratives of official memories and authoritative heritage discourses suggest the need to re-elaborate collective memories aligned with liberation movements. Multiple and entangled memory approaches invite us to re-imagine national scenarios and identities, to dismantle colonial temporalities, and to diminish the effects of public amnesia. The formulation of decolonial futures requires a re-framing of the power structures that perpetuate historical inequalities, including those materialized in imperial monuments and memories.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to find answers to how Azerbaijani women of transition remember the Soviet past, how collective memory has de- and re-constructed their collective identity, as well as how rethinking colonial past can deter Russia’s ultimate goal in the post-Soviet space, especially the Caucasus.

Paper long abstract:

By the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the social, political and economic transformation had a major impact on Azerbaijani society that was part of the 'empire' for seventy years. The way in which subjects recall the colonial past is as essential as the perspectives offered by the field of sociological history. This paper examines the gendered collective memory of the Soviet to post-Soviet transition in Azerbaijan and de- and re-construction of collective identity. The qualitative data draws upon the ethnographic fieldwork that was implemented in four cities of Azerbaijan in 2022 by conducting biographical interviews with women who experienced life under the Soviet regime, have gone through transformation in 1990's and are currently based in Azerbaijan. The account of first-hand life stories suggests that collective memory of the Soviet past and transition encompasses both nostalgic sentiments and cultural trauma. By applying comparative analysis, I aim to explore historical consciousness and political awareness from a gender perspective. The objective of this research is to highlight the importance of memory studies in careful analysis of the current geopolitical situation in the region, namely the Caucasus. Understanding how gender inequality correlates with political unawareness underlines the significance of women's participation in politics, especially the peace-building process in the South Caucasus. It is a matter of the utmost importance to investigate how collective memory of the colonial past predicts the future of political and social relations between Azerbaijan and Russia, especially the latter being a key player in the ongoing Karabakh conflict.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation addresses questions of memory, heritage, and kin-making in the transnational context of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Ottoman Turkey, by analysing the curatorial practices that reconfigure local Muslim genealogies in the Effendi Room exhibition of the Bo-Kaap Museum.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the constructions and contestations of the Ottoman past in South Africa by examining the Effendi legacy in Cape Town. Abu Bakr Effendi (1814-1880) arrived in Cape Town in 1962 as the emissary of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz to teach Islamic law and resolve the religious conflicts within the Muslim community. The nineteenth century Muslim community of Cape Town was mainly composed of the political exiles and slaves brought from the East Indies by the Dutch colonial authorities. The legacy of Abu Bakr Effendi’s religious authority is a site of contestation and competition in today’s South Africa. Turkish governmental bodies and heritage entrepreneurs have recently put tremendous amount of effort in ‘preserving’ his memory by renovating his tomb, incorporating it in the museums of Islamic heritage in Cape Town, and most remarkably, by granting exceptional citizenship to his descendants. This presentation addresses questions of memory, heritage, and kin-making in the transnational context of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Ottoman Turkey. More specifically, it focuses on the curatorial practices that reconfigure South African Muslim genealogies in the Effendi Room exhibition of the Bo-Kaap Museum. In doing so, it examines how the reworking of Ottoman memory within the framework of decolonising a museum that was founded on apartheid ideology remains tethered to dominant narratives of nation and imperial legacy in Turkey.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how memories of empire and race shape how people relate to each other in ethno-racially diverse urban spaces of postcolonial Europe. Building on fieldwork in Brixton (London), it scrutinises what happens when White denizens are increasingly affected by Black imperial memories.

Paper long abstract:

As a critical point of settlement for post-war/postcolonial immigration, the South London district of Brixton is known for its Black population as well as for its history of Black anti-racist activism. For a long time, violent local-cum-global histories of empire and (anti-)racism have only circulated within these Black communities. Black memories and historical perspectives have remained overshadowed by dominant White British ones. However, through recent Black counter-memory work particularly present in Brixton, these dominant perspectives have been increasingly and publicly challenged. Thus, White Brixtonians increasingly encounter and engage with Black memories/histories, too. I explore how these ‘histories’-and-‘memories’ shape their ‘historical consciousness’ and, as such, re-articulate their relations to their Black neighbours.

I argue that these changing historical consciousnesses reproduce 'race' (including Whiteness) in close dialogue with Brixton's spatial configurations. Discussing ongoing local Black (counter-)memory work, I expose the entangled role of history, space, and 'race' in the articulation of its everyday relations. First, I demonstrate how Brixton’s 'Black Histories' have become spatially materialised and have taken an increasingly central place in Brixtonians' imagination of the district. Zooming in on two sets of spaces and local historical narratives, I then show how White Brixtonians’ spatially embedded historical consciousness manifests itself in various ways but consistently reproduces 'race' as a structuring element of Brixton’s everyday life. Sometimes, it generates cross-racial solidarity. Yet, in a context of growing gentrification, it also gets co-opted, aestheticised, and commercialised, resulting in the very re-institutionalisation of Whiteness and withholding the district from a ‘decolonial future.’

Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the presence of African servants throughout the 20th century in Barcelona with the aim to put into circulation counter/memories of African experiences in Spain.

Paper long abstract:

The study of oral, written and documentary sources shows that some Spanish colonists brought Equatorial Guineans to the metropolis as servants, taking advantage of the prerogatives of colonial hierarchies given that some of them were not fully emancipated. This is a very unknown story that, however, fitted well into the colonial rhetoric that justified the civilization of Africans, although even today it has not been the object of reflection and study as the Njais Indies of Royal Netherlands were (Stoler 1989, Aalderink 2020).

My interest of this case study is greater due to its coexistence with the powerful and rich Krió Fernandino elite who, established in Barcelona, lived between Africa and Europe (Aixelà-Cabré 2023). This community traveled with their own African servants, in addition to those Spaniards they hired in Barcelona given their needs in the large mansions they bought or rented. This Fernandino community strongly questioned the Spanish race seams and maintained a certain sociability with the Catalan bourgeoisie.

This paper will analyze the contradictions that generated the coexistence of both practices, to make known an unknown historical reality of some Africans in Spain thank to these counter/memories that allow new herstories and histories emerge to decolonize the early modern past, in addition to highlighting that the racialization that classified people, enhancing or curtailing their rights by skin color, was something that, as we will see, was crossed with the variables of class and gender, giving contradictory but complementary results.

Paper short abstract:

The Yemanyá Festivity performed by the Chilean Afrodescendant People, has developed strategies to construct counter-narratives of memory. We will analyze the ways in which the official historical memory is disputed, from the rescue of the repertoire of family, collective and embodied memories.

Paper long abstract:

The former President of the Chilean Republic, Ricardo Lagos, at the Regional Preparatory Conference of the Americas against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2000), declared: "there are no black people in Chile because they died of cold". This episode is crucial for the national Afro-descendant movement, due it served as an incentive for awareness-raising, self-identification and visibility actions, which led to the recognition of the Chilean Afro-descendant Tribal People in 2019 (Law 21.151).

The denial of the Afro-descendant presence in Chile responds both to a colonial apparatus of power and to internal colonialism, reinforced by the nation-state after the Pacific War (1879-1883), in which Peruvian and Bolivian territories were annexed, with a high presence of descendants of the transatlantic trade, whose identity was "bleached" during the post-war "Chileanization" process.

Our presentation is located in Arica, frontier city next by Peru and epicenter of that historical stage, to analyze the Yemanyá Festivity performed by the Afro-descendant community since 2010, in addition to the practices of the continental diaspora. However, due to the particularities of the territory, in principle this does not related with the Yoruba cult, but rather a strategy of visibility, to shows a continuity in the historical memory, from a rooted repertoire into the family, collective and embodied memory, which have allowed the construction of counter-narratives, in the community and outside it, which are still in dispute.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the memory politics regarding an institute for eugenics and racial anthropology in Berlin, I discuss the potentials and appropriation risks concerning the institutionalization of counter/memory initiatives that tackle histories of racism and German imperialism.

Paper long abstract:

Physical and biological anthropology played a crucial role in the racialization of human difference, with important political consequences. In Germany, anthropologists were not only tightly entangled with the formulation of eugenicist policies during National Socialism but also, decades before, enmeshed in German colonial regimes. This paper analyses the process of memorialization of an important site of the anthropological making of race that connects these different histories of German imperialisms. Opened in Berlin from 1927 until the end of the Second World War, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) convened a large number of racial researchers and was founded by Eugen Fischer, after he had made a career from researching what he called “racial mixture” in German South West Africa. The KWI-A’s building later became part of the Freie Universität Berlin. I examine different student-led counter/memory initiatives that tackled the histories of the KWI-A since the 1980s, including a project started by myself ten years ago. I discuss the potentials and effects of these bottom-up, counter/memory initiatives as well as the tensions embedded in the recent institutionalization of a memorial site project, which aims to commemorate the KWI-A and its victims through a participatory, multidirectional memory approach. I argue that memory sites can potentially serve the interests of the institution that might appropriate them for its own interest (in this case, the Freie Universität Berlin), while I contend that the political openings for such memory processes can also be fruitful for institutional change and future mobilizations.

Paper short abstract:

Through a critical, intersectional, transnational, and transhistorical approach, I will explore different narratives and counternarratives of Blackness in contemporary Morocco, focusing on the connections between local meanings of race and global imaginaries of Blackness.

Paper long abstract:

My paper, which is located at the intersection of visual/digital anthropology and critical race studies, aims to investigate the images and imaginaries of Blackness in contemporary Morocco. In the popular imagination, as well as in academia and the art world, Africa is often separated into two disconnected worlds: North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This geographical and epistemological separation, reified and institutionalized in the colonial era, is first of all a racial fracture. Under the French colonial administration, the Sahara became a sort of "color line" separating the "White" Africa (Afrique blanche) from the "Black" one (Afrique noire). The "Saharan Divide" is also linked to historical dynamics within the continent, such as the trans-Saharan slave trade. Morocco played a major role in the slave trade but slavery and its legacies (in terms, for example, of anti-Black prejudices) are still a taboo in Morocco which represents itself as a color-blind society with no racism. Nevertheless, in the past few years, Blackness has become a crucial political and cultural issue, taking on different meanings and embracing new (counter)narratives. The question of "race" is thus a complex and controversial topic in contemporary Morocco, which touches on many aspects (from economics to religion, from geopolitics to national identity to cultural and artistic expressions and gender issues). Through a critical, intersectional, transnational, and transhistorical approach, I will explore different figures of Moroccan Blackness (Gnawa, Sub-Saharan migrants, Black Moroccan activists, and artists), focusing on the connections between local meanings of race and global imaginaries of Blackness.