Paper short abstract:

My contribution criticizes the revived understanding of culture as un-divided/ individual and homogenous entity. Since digital globalization made obvious that cultural processes are intertwined with elements of different origins, I propose to talk of ‘dividual’ and ‘composite’ cultures, full of tensions and contradictions to be read as problem and fortune at the same time.

Paper long abstract:

My contribution to the VAD conference will propose and unfold the concept of ‘dividual’ cultures as a counter-concept to their supposedly undivided/ individual and identitarian character. Since in times of digital globalization it has become obvious that cultural processes are necessarily intertwined with elements of different origin, their character should no longer be defined by discursive opposites such as Black vs. White, European vs. African and so forth. The argument therefore goes that the often unacknowledged cultural hybridity needs adequate new terms and that the essenialized self-understanding of culture as homogenous coherence should be replaced by an evaluation of its ‘dividuality’. This term wants to indicate the ‘being part of’, the multidirectionally participative character of cultures; it wants to underline the processual and mutual ‘dividuation’ of cultural elements which, recognized and appreciated as such, could induce also less violent encounters within the respective society.

In order to mirror these interferences, I aim at a short reconstruction of the coinage, transfer and translation of the term ‘culture’ within the European-African-Antillan context from the 1940s up to today. It moves from cultural theories of Leo Frobenius, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sédar Senghor to arguments of Edouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze which both sketch cultural interdependence in images of ‘archipel’ and ‘rhizome’. The anthropologists Marilyn Strathern, Walter Mignolo and others take up the term ‘dividual’ for the description of cultural relations in the global South. The ‘African’ filmmakers Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Jean-Marie Teno on their part thematize cultural hybridity in audiovisual works of art.