{"id":1347,"date":"2026-11-03T10:13:07","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T10:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1347"},"modified":"2026-11-03T14:27:35","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T14:27:35","slug":"silences-as-pre-text-tabea-nixdorff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1347","title":{"rendered":"Silences as Pre\/Text \u2014 Tabea Nixdorff"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Take a walk at night. . . . Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes:<\/s> Who is silenced, who is heard, who is politically included and who is not, who gets cited and who does not, who is admitted into academic settings, and who is made to leave: all of that is political. . . .<\/s> Silence can be understood as a structural feature of colonially constituted forms of communication.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sylvia Wynter:<\/s> Rather than only voicing the \u201cnative\u201d woman\u2019s hitherto silenced voice we shall ask: What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as \u201cnative\u201d women?3<\/a><\/sup> Of what mode of speech is that absence of speech both as women (masculinist discourse) and as \u201cnative\u201d women (feminist discourse) as imperative function?<\/s><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Audre Lorde: I am constantly asking you, what has<\/s> your silence4<\/a><\/sup> bought you within this arrangement?\u2014Are you rich, are you happy, are you secure, are you well-to-do, are you comfortable? We have the illusion that if we perform as we are expected within this machine, we will be given sanction.<\/s><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: Focusing on ways of reading different<\/s> types of silence I have encountered in the testimony of Afro-Germans on the issue of race, I<\/s> examine silences that are not so much moments of quiet or narrative pause; rather,<\/s> reading silences as provocatively filled expressions, I engage them as a narrative phenomenon I call<\/s> \u201cloud silence.\u201d Instead of seeing<\/s> silences as a lack or a void, my analysis explores how<\/s> they \u201cspeak,\u201d what they in fact \u201csay,\u201d and how<\/s> they often \u201crace\u201d rather than \u201cerase\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> the life histories of my Afro-German narrators.<\/s><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Note on Form<\/strong>

The following text, or, rather, collection of quotes from texts, is an attempt to bring five different authors into conversation with each other, whose writings, when read together, form compelling alliances. It is an effort to disrupt, if not reverse, the hierarchy between the major text and everything that\u2014especially in academic writing circles\u2014is considered supplementary, para-, or sub-text. In a rigorous academic tradition, quotations and footnotes are meant to support one\u2019s own thoughts, invoke authority or endorsement through established thinkers, or attest to intellectual reference proficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first point of contact with an anti-<\/em>rigorous citational practice was through reading Walter Benjamin\u2019s Arcades Project<\/em> (1927\u20131940), an unfinished research project consisting of an extensive and eclectic collection of quotations ranging from philosophical-scholarly sources to literary and popular ones, tracing the rise of capitalism through the study of nineteenth-century Paris. Although the Arcades Project<\/em> was probably intended to be published in its surviving form, this is speculative due to the author\u2019s premature death while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. What it taught me, as a student at the art academy in Leipzig, was to embrace a practice of gleaning texts from all areas of life as interconnected knowledge carriers and to expand the idea of writing through this broader understanding of references or engagement with primary sources. However, this learning took place within the typical Eurocentric framework of critical theory, and it was only upon leaving the academy that I started to encounter a different, decolonial queer feminist lineage of thought, in which, as feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed has formulated, \u201ccitation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.\u201d She writes this in her book Living A Feminist Life<\/em> (2017) and shares her citation politics in the introduction: \u201cIn this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> Philosopher, essayist, and novelist Sylvia Wynter is one of those whom Ahmed cites, and to whom decolonial and feminist theory is indebted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this text, written during and after my participation in the Plot(ting) reading group, for which participants spent several months collectively reading Wynter\u2019s work, I was interested in writing my reading<\/em> as a movement, as a tracing of what moved me, and in this approach, to think across different writers and interweave their ideas by bringing them into conversation with each other, quite literally. I assembled quotes as if they were voices responding to each other in a room, while leaving my own writing in the margins, as someone witnessing this fabulated conversation from my own situatedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note on Situatedness<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the texts that is brought into conversation here is the academic paper \u201cLebensraum<\/em>, geopolitics and race\u2014 Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,\u201d co-authored by researchers Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes (2023). They guided me toward Ahmed\u2019s thoughts on citation practice by summarising: \u201cSara Ahmed describes citation as a \u2018successful reproductive technology\u2019 that reiterates the world around certain bodies and existing power structures, while excluding others from its educational physical and epistemic territory. Ahmed\u2019s analysis and critique of exclusion thus mirrors physical elimination through scientific and institutional exclusion.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything I have read over the past two and a half years was through the lens of witnessing, from afar, an increasingly brutal genocide in Palestine; through witnessing acts of physical elimination live-streamed on our phones; and through witnessing how it is reflected, in Germany, by the scientific and institutional exclusion of knowledge (production) about Palestine, as well as the demonisation and criminalisation of those who publicly speak up against this genocidal war waged by Israel, primarily supplied by US and German weaponry. This is why the contribution that I initially intended to write didn\u2019t materialise. It should have become a text around orality, a liminal space between music and language that can act as a source for unruly knowledges that are excluded from the Eurocentric conception of \u201chistory\u201d\u2014as anything that can provide, or produce, a material or written trace. Instead, I found myself thinking about the weaponisation of silence and how one must consider the suppression of orality, of speaking up, and of voicing dissent as a longstanding practice within the colonial tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since most of our reading group members where white and European, but above all because of my own confrontation with a collectively imposed silence in Germany about Israel\u2019s crimes, and how this current silence connects to my ancestors\u2019 silence and complicity in previous centuries regarding acts of genocide, I was drawn to reading Wynter\u2019s work alongside introspective analyses of German and European forms of supremacy and systemic violence. Regarding Wynter, it is her essay \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman\u2019\u201d (1990) that engages most deeply with the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two other writers I bring into conversation with Wynter are Tina Campt\u2014with her groundbreaking oral history study of Black Germans experiencing the Nazi era, published as Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em> (2005)\u2014and Audre Lorde, whose stay as a professor and community organiser in West-Berlin allowed her to analyse and challenge the unacknowledged racism of postwar-generation white German feminists, published posthumously in Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em> (2019) and in her preface to Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out<\/em> (1992).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the works of Al-Taher and Younes, Campt, and Lorde reflect on silences and silencing within specific historical or contemporary contexts, Wynter takes a literary text, Shakespeare\u2019s play The Tempest<\/em>, as a foundational illustration of Western Europe\u2019s rise to global hegemony, serving as a template to critique the absent presence of Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous women, in cultural productions. Their othering and obliteration are depicted in The Tempest<\/em> through European \u201cexplorers\u201d living on a remote island. In it, the character Caliban is the sole representation of \u201cthe native other,\u201d and Indigenous women are entirely absent from the story, setting the focus on Caliban as monstrous and sub-human, who endangers the white woman character Miranda. Wynter theorises this as the basis for the formation of a secularised human order that legitimises occupation and oppression, enabling the colonial project that renders Indigenous communities as sub-human. In that sense, the story produces a new order in which men don\u2019t rule primarily over women anymore, but \u201cEuropean white man\u201d over \u201cEuropean white woman\u201d over \u201cnative (Black) man\u201d over \u201cnative (Black) woman.\u201d This new order, as Wynter suggests, creates the \u201cdemonic ground,\u201d the position of those who are erased from the humanist narration yet whose existence is foundational to western modernity. Wynter\u2019s notion of unsilencing the \u201cdemonic ground\u201d explores the revolutionary potential of challenging the binary, linear narration of modernity with its patriarchal and racist foundation.

Reading Al-Taher, Younes, Campt, and Lorde alongside Wynter\u2019s essay \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman\u2019\u201d reveals each of their different writing (or speaking) modes, but also allows us one to recognise a broader, collective decolonial feminist critique that threads through all of the texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Who is silenced, who is heard, who is politically included and who is not, who gets cited and who does not, who is admitted into academic settings,8<\/a><\/sup> and who is made to leave: all of that is political. . . . Silence can be understood as a structural feature of colonially constituted forms of communication.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Sylvia Wynter: Rather than only voicing the \u201cnative\u201d woman\u2019s hitherto silenced voice we shall ask: What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as \u201cnative\u201d women? Of what mode of speech is that absence of speech both as women (masculinist discourse) and as \u201cnative\u201d women (feminist discourse)10<\/a><\/sup> as imperative function?11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Audre Lorde: I am constantly asking you, what has your silence bought you within this arrangement?\u2014Are you rich, are you happy, are you secure, are you well-to-do, are you comfortable? We have the illusion that if we perform as we are expected within this machine, we will be given sanction.12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n

Tina M. Campt: Focusing on ways of reading different types of silence I have encountered in the testimony of Afro-Germans on the issue of race, I examine silences that are not so much moments of quiet or narrative pause; rather, reading silences as provocatively filled expressions, I engage them as a narrative phenomenon I call \u201cloud silence.\u201d Instead of seeing silences as a lack or a void, my analysis explores how they \u201cspeak,\u201d what they in fact \u201csay,\u201d and how they often \u201crace\u201d rather than \u201cerase\u201d the life histories of my Afro-German narrators.13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: As analyzed by bell hooks, different forms of oppression reinforce each other: the silence and silencing around Palestine and Palestinians is thus consequential for feminist theorization at the same time that silence is pivotal for the functioning of colonialism and the maintenance of white Lebensraum.<\/strong><\/em>14<\/a><\/sup> Epistemic oppression very often works through \u2018silence\u2019 and, broadly speaking, we made out different types of silence showing the personal and political apparent discomfort of German speaking audiences: there is silencing as a re-\/action of voices that do speak and then there is silence as re\/action to the voices that are deemed too \u2018radical\u2019 or as crossing the lines beyond \u2018acceptable\u2019 academic discourse.15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sylvia Wynter: The essays [in Out of the Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature<\/em>] are projected within the system of interference-making of the discourse of Feminism, at the level of the sub-text which both haunts and calls in question the presuppositions of the major text, the very attempt to redefine the term feminist with the qualifier \u201cwomanist,\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> expresses the paradoxical relation of Sameness and Difference which the writers of these essays, as members of the Caribbean women intelligentsia, bear to their Western European and Euroamerican peers.17<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Silence in the audience<\/em>)18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Audre Lorde: . . . why aren\u2019t you speaking? I am also afraid of the forces rising in Europe, in North America, here in Germany. This is why I speak of power, because the only thing that can turn the tide around is all of us acting out of our fear rather than turning away from it or being immobilized. There is nothing wrong with power, it is rather a question of how it is being used.19<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Who is<\/em> speaking?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sylvia Wynter<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hanna Al-Taher and Anna Younes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audre Lorde<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tina M. Campt<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Sylvia Wynter: I want to argue in this After\/Word20<\/a><\/sup> [to Out of the Kumbla<\/em>], from its projected \u201cdemonic ground\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> outside of our present governing system of meaning, or theory\/ontology . . . that it is precisely the variable \u201crace\u201d which imposes upon these essays the contradictory dualism by which the writers both work within the \u201cregime of truth\u201d of the discourse of feminism at the same time as they make use of this still essentially Western discourse to point towards the epochal threshold of a new post-modern and post-Western mode of cognitive inquiry; one which goes beyond the limits of our present \u201chuman sciences,\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> to constitute itself as a new science of human \u201cforms of life.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: The work [Other Germans. Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em>] looks at how in the Third Reich, power worked through racialization and gendering to produce different forms of both docile and resistant subjects in ways that at times worked against the grain of and in contradiction to the regime\u2019s aims. . . . The history of [Black Germans in the Third Reich] opens up alternative ways of conceiving of racial and gender formation and adds new levels of complexity to interpretations of race and gender in the historiography of German colonialism, the Holocaust, and National Socialism as well as for theorizing memory, oral history, and the African diaspora.24<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Younes, Hanna Al-Taher: In this article [Lebensraum<\/em> . . . ],<\/em> we discuss Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia. Within the limitations of the theoretical and methodological scope of this paper, we examine whether and how German colonialism that endeavored to \u2018rule through science\u2019 might continue to be manifested and operationalized in German-speaking academia and higher education.25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: Underlining the fact that despite its truncated colonial history, Germany depended as much as any other European nation on the distinction from non-European populations in the constitution of national identity.26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sylvia Wynter: To put it in more directly political terms, the absence of Caliban\u2019s woman [in Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/em>], is an absence which is functional to the new secularizing schema by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimated their global expansion as well as their expropriation and their marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe, including, partially, some of their own national groupings.27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: Connecting the Nazi ideology of racial purity and public discourse on Black Germans to earlier discourses on Black Germans both within and beyond the boundaries of the German nation in the years preceding the establishment of the NS state plays a crucial role in explaining the power and efficacy of such discourses within the Third Reich. . . . What is most remarkable about the relationship between discussions about and discourse on Black Germans in the colonies following World War I and in the Third Reich is the discursive echoes that recurred in each context. These echoes of the dangerous specter posed by a Black German population link the very different historical events of each of these periods and demonstrate the resilience of the perceived threat of racial mixture.28<\/a><\/sup> At the same time, these echoes show how the discourse of nation was and remains an inherently gendered and racialized discourse that relies on gender and race to incite and sustain its efficacy.29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Given the role of higher education in building and reproducing \u2018the nation\u2019, exclusions in academia reproduce exclusions in the ideological structures of the state and vice versa. The silencing of Palestinian knowledge in German-speaking institutions of higher learning hinges upon power and access, which is conditionally conferred and thus translates into an absence of institutional support and personal de-solidarization. . . . In one of the responses we received, for instance, a German-Palestinian scholar recounts his experience as a Political Science student in the early 2000s. In a lecture on Palestine, Israel, and terrorism he attempted to discuss the relevance and legitimacy of Palestinian armed struggle in the context of the class. Instead of a critical or controversial discussion of the topic at hand, he recalls that \u2018everyone was against [him]\u2019 and that his classmates accused him of being an anti-Semite. . . . The hostile reactions Palestinians often receive when speaking about Palestine lead to an absence of Palestinian knowledge in academic institutions.30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Silence in the audience<\/em>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Audre Lorde: But if you have nothing to say, why are you still sitting here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audience: I didn\u2019t fully understand what you mean by hyphenated people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audre Lorde: African-American, Afro-German, African-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, Turkish-German.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Call from the audience: German-German!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audre Lorde: But you don\u2019t usually say that. You say, I am German. Most people expect me to say I am American but that is a gross simplification because, as it has been pointed out to me over and over again, I am U.S. American to begin with and African-American. That is a factor of who I am in the same way that multiple identities represent a factor for each of us who shares a double heritage, a double culture, a double life. The hyphenated people, we have a particular power as well as particular pains.31<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: \u201cThe<\/em> silence that surrounds the phrase \u2018Auschwitz was the extermination camp\u2019 is not a state of mind, it is a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined.<\/em>\u201d [Here, philosopher and sociologist Jean-Francois] Lyotard describes silence as a sign of something left over in excess of or escaping representation, something that remains to be articulated, though not necessarily unspecified, unsaid, or unexpressed. Silence here is a gap or lack and at the same time functions as an excess of meaning.32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Audre Lorde: Too often, I have met an immobilizing national guilt in white German women which serves to keep them from acting upon what they profess to believe.33<\/a><\/sup> Their energies, however well intentioned, are not being used, they are unavailable in the battles against racism, antisemitism, hetero-sexism, xenophobia. Because they seem unable to accept who they are, these women too often fail to examine and pursue the powers relative to their identity. They waste that power, or worse, turn it over to their enemies. Four decades after National Socialism, the question still lingers for many white German women: how can I draw strength from my roots when those roots are entwined in such a terrible history?34<\/a><\/sup> That terror of self-scrutiny is sometimes disguised as an unbearable arrogance,35<\/a><\/sup> impotent and wasteful. The words of these Black German women [in Showing Our Colors<\/em>]36<\/a><\/sup> document their rejection of despair, of blindness, of silence. Once an oppression is expressed, it can be successfully fought.37<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: I focus on a very different question than that posed by many studies of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: What happens when we view the Holocaust not through the history of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews but through the ideology of racial purity? In this way, I emphasize how, in the service of racial purity, this regime produced the same subjects it regulated, administered, and indeed ultimately sought to destroy.38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Today, we come to find that German academia still needs to facilitate a much-needed discussion on the origins and continued attraction of ideas and practices based on racial purity as well as spatial inclusion and exclusion.39<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Silence<\/em>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Audre Lorde:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you getting tired of feeling?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you want to get up and stretch?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you want to get up and stretch?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you tired of feeling?40<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Scholars of settler colonialism in Palestine, in particular Palestinian scholars, have long pointed out the intricate mechanisms of race and racism within modern colonial Zionist space-making and, in particular, land-and-nation-building claims based on white European identity-making. In relation to German land-and-space-politics, Zo\u00e9 Samudzi notes for the genocide in Namibia41<\/a><\/sup> as well as in Europe that the concept of Lebensraum,<\/em> a<\/em> space for a<\/em> race, has been fundamental for shaping German (colonial) politics: \u201cThe logics for racial management in both German genocides are rooted in colonial claims to land-based sovereignty defined by bounded territorialisations of identity.\u201d42<\/a><\/sup> In Germany, these same territory-based claims, reminiscent of Lebensraum ideology, remit an engagement with Palestine that defines the latter through various and at times quite wondrous articulations of nationalist exceptionalism\/-s, depending on political affiliations. Utterances range from claims that a topic like \u2018Palestine\u2019 or Palestinian freedom, \u2018doesn\u2019t belong to Germany\u2019,43<\/a><\/sup> or that it \u2018can\u2019t be articulated as such in Germany\u2019 or that it needs to be phrased differently or in more palpable, \u2018less political\u2019 ways.44<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tina M. Campt: Like the category of gender, race is a category both lacking any essential meaning and overdetermined by the meanings attributed to it in society. These attributions (which have historically claimed the status of essential, biological, or natural attributes) lend race the semblance of excessive meaning. In this way, race often comes to overdetermine an individual\u2019s meaning and status in society. By the same token, the representation of the Holocaust, both in narrative accounts and historical analyses, can be read as having a similar plurality of meanings because it is a phenomenon of race par excellence.45<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Audre Lorde: What is it that you hope for, for yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do I have to do with your survival?46<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Silence<\/em>)47<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Audre Lorde: I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.48<\/a><\/sup> And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.49<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Sylvia Wynter: . . . a \u201cnative women\u201d intelligentsia . . . has enabled the move, however preliminary, on to the \u201cdemonic\u201d and now unsilencing trans-\u201cisms\u201d ground of Caliban\u2019s woman. This terrain, when fully occupied, will be that of a new science of human discourse, of human \u201clife\u201d beyond the \u201cmaster discourse\u201d of our governing \u201cprivileged text,\u201d and itssub\/versions. Beyond Miranda\u2019s meanings.50<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Tabea Nixdorff<\/strong> is an artist, typographer and researcher currently based in Arnhem. Her artistic practice involves (self)publishing, writing, sound and language-based performances, collaborative learning and social gatherings. Often working with\/in archives or libraries, Nixdorff\u2019s works delve into micro-histories while touching upon broader themes such as omissions and distortions in historical narratives, embodied knowledges, queer belonging and a feminist poetics of error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Pauline Oliveros, \u201cNative,\u201d in Sonic Meditations,<\/em> no. 5 (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1971). Oliveros first published her scores for Sonic Meditations in 1971, bringing her lesbian feminist activism and work as a musician and composer closer together. I keep returning to an observation she made in a late interview on her lifelong practice that she coined as \u201cDeep Listening,\u201d and which can be read as an elaboration on the meditation no. 5: \u201cSpeech and alphabet are profoundly wonderful tools of communication but what is sacrificed is the knowledge that comes from sound, and from actually listening to everything, rather than just speech.\u201d Pauline Oliveros,\u201cRadiance: Pauline Oliveros Part 1, Deep Listening,\u201d Radiance: Meditation Talk Show, YouTube(16 January, 2016), www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0NCCNlu30r8<\/a>.
    \u00a0
    Oliveros has paved the way for many artists and activists toward a notion of sound that encompasses listening to both silences as well as non-verbal and non-human sounds, which are all as meaningful as speech and thereby expand one\u2019s conception of knowledge to an embodied level. However, Oliveros also stands in a tradition of white lesbian feminism that tends to appropriate Indigenous knowledges by \u201cvoicing\u201d or \u201cgiving voice to\u201d them without providing further acknowledgment. What, for example, does the meditation\u2019s title \u201cNative\u201d stand for? Which Indigenous knowledges or practices did Oliveros build on? This text contribution suggests especially listening to the kinds of silences or willful omissions that embody and reproduce systemic injustices.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race\u2014Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,\u201d Ethnography<\/em> 25, no. 2 (2023), 9, 11.

    Over the last two and a half years, I have listened to a figurative silence that hangs over countless art and cultural spaces and events in Germany which are otherwise politically articulate. In these spaces, the echo of the digitally transmitted screams and explosions from Gaza are heard but ignored, or deliberately silenced through the deplatforming of those who want to amplify the utterances of Palestinians suffering from, and resisting, Israel\u2019s genocidal violence. This discrepancy of urgent unbearable sounds met with an elusive silence can perhaps be explained in part by Oliveros\u2019s distinction between hearing<\/em> as a physical process or technology, which is often passive and involuntary, and listening<\/em> as a conscious, psychological process of giving attention to that which is heard, processing its effect on one\u2019s body and assigning it meaning. Or, in her own words: \u201cListening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.\u201d Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening<\/em> (London: Ignota, 2022), 30.
    \u00a0
    The questions that remain are: What is the systemic function of this refusal to listen, or the effort to silence? What forms of meaning-making are sought to be prevented, both individually and collectively when it comes to Palestine, particularly in Germany? And how can one apply deep listening to reading? When reading theory or academic texts, it\u2019s especially easy to retreat into a culturally familiar mode that follows and understands a text intellectually, while suppressing a more scattered, embodied, and far less linear approach to reading. My attempt to incorporate these digressions while reading, prompted by a single word or line, to enter the text\u2014be they personal reflections or contextualising research on the text or the author\u2014is indicated by words in the quotations that are set in bold type, as my emphasis, which then refer to a (side)note here in the margin.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. Sylvia Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman\u201d in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature,<\/em> Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 365. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. Audre Lorde, Dream of Europe. Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em>, ed. Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro (Oak Park, Ill.: Kenning Editions, 2019), 63\u201364. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em> (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 18.
    \u00a0
    In examining my own silences, there\u2019s this rift that only opened for me after 7 October, 2023, which reveals what is colonial in my experience of time: It took the murdering and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis and the subsequent, completely disproportionate and dehumanising response from Israel for me to fully recognise the inherently colonial nature of Zionism. So, the counting from this date as the beginning of a genocide, or as the beginning of my witnessing, in a way, repeats the violence that is produced by the unequal attention given to the killings of people from one group compared to another. While even many Palestinians, who are confronted daily with the brutal reality of Israel\u2019s systemic racism and occupation, expressed their disbelief at the extent of violence, and particularly at the western powers\u2019 unconditional support for Israel, any Palestinian or decolonial activist knew long before 7 October that the erasure of Palestine and its people has been integral to the state of Israel from the beginning. I now register my former lack of understanding as a \u201cloud silence\u201d that I could afford not to hear because of my whiteness.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  6. Sara Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15\u201316. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  7. Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cLebensraum:<\/em> geopolitics and race \u2013 Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia\u201d Ethnography<\/em> 25, no. 2 (2023): 16. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  8. Al-Taher and Younes, both German Palestinian scholars, have experienced countless instances of being ghosted or disinvited, often because institutions, journals or universities were afraid to be framed as antisemitic for publishing their academic research on Palestine. It in fact took them three years to find a journal for their paper \u201cLebensraum<\/em>, geopolitics and race\u2014Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,\u201d due to those mechanisms, as they explain in an online conversation when asked about barriers and instances of censorship in academia. Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cPalestine as a feminist issue: Geopolitics and race. With Anna Younes & Hanna Al Taher,\u201d virtual discussion, [decoco] decolonial research group, YouTube (19 February, 2024), www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lwZZQUwDmgs<\/a>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  9. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 9, 11. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  10. Wynter\u2019s essay \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman,\u2019\u201d was first published as an afterword in the anthology Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature<\/em> (1990), edited by Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. I found this book after our reading group discussed Wynter\u2019s critical stance on feminism, and in hopes of finding more readings on the topic, I searched for her name in the online catalogue of Amsterdam\u2019s oldest feminist library, now called Atria. I borrowed the book, and the first part that resonated with me was the printed dedication: \u201cTo the many unsung women who write, sing, tell stories and struggle to make their voices heard.\u201d After renewing the loan too often, co-reader of our group Moosje M. Goosen forwarded me a link to a used copy I could purchase. Here, it was the half-title page that caught my attention: an Ex Libris stamp with the name Rosi Braidotti, hand-signed, and the year 1993. Braidotti co-founded the Women\u2019s Studies Program at Utrecht University in 1988, making it intriguing to consider the discussions surrounding this book at that time in the Netherlands. There was already a vibrant conversation about whiteness within feminism in Dutch contexts then, led by scholars such as Gloria Wekker, who joined the faculty of the Women\u2019s Studies department in Utrecht around that period, and it made me wonder in what ways Wynter\u2019s work left traces in Dutch feminist circles back then (and what led Braidotti to giving her copy away). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  11. Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 365. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  12. This and most of the following citations from Lorde are from the book Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em> (2020).<\/em> The seminars and interviews given by Lorde during her time at the Free University in West-Berlin and in cities throughout Germany were archived as audio recordings by Dagmar Schultz and transcribed by the editor of the book, Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro. While reading the book, I was particularly struck by the carefully transcribed non-verbal reactions of the students in the classroom or from the audience during a talk, especially the silences: by reading the word \u201csilence\u201d in brackets, the uncomfortable pauses become not only part of the historic record, but also of the reading experience. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  13. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 18. Campt\u2019s analysis published in Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em> was highly dependent on interpreting silences, as she describes in the introduction. The conversations she held with Black Germans who lived through the Nazi era often only brought up issues of race and gender through initial silence or narrative pauses or gaps. The self-definition Afro-German (or Afro-deutsch<\/em> in German language) first came up in the 1980s through Lorde\u2019s presence in Berlin and her consciousness raising community work with Black German women. See Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 17 and 8, and Audre Lorde, \u201cFarbe bekennen. Introduction, 1984\u201d in: Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out,<\/em> ed. May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), xxii. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  14. Younes and Al-Taher (re)introduce the term Lebensraum<\/em> (living space) to describe a specific German settler-colonial ideology (\u201ca<\/em> space for a<\/em> race\u201d) that endeavored to \u201crule through science,\u201d and examine how this ideology might continue to be manifested and operationalised in German-speaking academia as an educational ideology, for example by making territory-based claims that Palestinian freedom \u201ccan\u2019t be articulated as such in Germany\u201d because of the Nazi past. The term \u201cLebensraum\u201d popularised in 1901 and set the ideological foundation for German imperialism. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  15. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 9, 11. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  16. Wynter contextualises the term \u201cwomanist\u201d further in her essay. It was introduced in the 1970s by Alice Walker, who wanted to point at the challenges that she and all Black women and women of colour writers face when identifying as \u201cfeminist\u201d when mainstream feminism historically excluded race from the frame of reference and centred white Western-European and Euroamerican issues. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  17. Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 355\u2013356. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  18. This insertion, and the following \u201csilences\u201d in brackets in Lorde\u2019s quotations, are transcriptions of long, often awkward silences in the audience after Lorde posed a question or was hoping for participation of her students or audiences. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  19. Audre Lorde, Dream of Europe. Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em>, ed. Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro (Oak Park, IL: Kenning Editions, 2020), 250.

    I have to think of Dagmar Schultz, a white German sociologist who, in 1981, used her privilege of being a professor of women\u2019s studies in Berlin to invite and arrange for Lorde to come as a guest professor to the Free University. Lorde accepted the invitation to Berlin and led creative writing and Black women\u2019s poetry seminars in 1984, having a lasting impact by empowering young Black Germans, both inside and outside the university, encouraging them to give voice to their experiences and organise among themselves. It is also thanks to Schultz\u2019s efforts to audio-record Lorde\u2019s classes and talks that they could be made accessible for all by Rodr\u00edguez Castro as transcripts. Further projects by Schultz to document and spread the impact of Lorde\u2019s work in Germany can he found on the website \u201cAudre Lorde\u2013The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992,\u201d www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  20. Wynter was invited to provide an afterword for an anthology that was to be the first edited collection of critical works on Caribbean women\u2019s writing. One of the editors, Carole Boyce-Davies, recounts that Wynter initially submitted a manuscript of over ninety pages long, which was later shortened, \u201cwith her permission, to a manageable afterword length\u201d of 12 pages. See Carole Boyce-Davies, \u201cOccupying the Terrain: Reengaging \u2018Beyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/Silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s Woman,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 70,<\/em> no. 4 (December 2018), 838.

    The initial unwieldy response, as well as Wynter\u2019s decision to name her contribution \u201cAfter\/Word,\u201d hints at her investment in deconstructing or challenging the very format of literary and scholarly text production. It might indicate both Wynter\u2019s formal-literary and political-theoretical endeavour to unsettle the frame of reference of western being\/feeling\/knowing and \u201cpoint towards the epochal threshold of a new post-modern and post-Western mode of cognitive inquiry.\u201d Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 356.
    What if Wynter\u2019s \u201cAfter\/Word\u201d was written so lengthy also to subvert the idea of being a supplement for the end of the book? The initial length of her piece can also gesture towards the refusal to shorthand-theorise about the \u201contological absence\u201d of women indigenous to the land that Europeans and Euroamericans colonised and continue to colonise.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  21. It is in this essay that Wynter first explains and conceptualises her understanding of \u2018demonic ground\u2019. The concept sees the \u2018demonic ground\u2019 as the space created by systems of oppression into which racialised women are pushed, while emphasising that the very same space becomes a site of potential agency and resistance from which histories and experiences can be un-silenced, if radically transgressing the \u201cmaster\u2019s discourse\u201d. (Wynter 1990, 366) This is also alluded to in the title \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s meaning\u201d, so beyond a feminism that perpetuates the ontological absence of Indigenous women, as it is enacted in Shakespeare\u2019s play The Tempest.<\/em> As Wynter analyses, Miranda, being the only female character in the play, plays a crucial role in legitimising, through her whiteness, the enslavement of Caliban, who is native to the island, or so-called New World, to which Miranda and her father arrive. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  22. Wynter hints here at the need for a decolonisation of the humanities. This is also strongly articulated in Al-Taher and Younes\u2019 paper, pointing to the colonial tradition in which academia at large stands, with universities always having profited from imperial \u201cextraction of capital, labour, art, and knowledge.\u201d (Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,\u201d 9.) \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  23. Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 356. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  24. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 2, 5. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  25. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 2. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  26. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 6\u20137. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  27. Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 361. The phenomenon of European governments or regimes marginalising and persecuting \u201ctheir own national groupings\u201d has been theorised by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire as the \u201dcolonial boomerang.\u201d C\u00e9saire argues that the repressive and violent practices of domination developed in colonies will eventually be applied domestically. This makes me return to an online conversation on Germany and Zionism with Abdaljawad Omar, in which he reflects on what this means for commemorating the German Nazi crimes: \u201cA lot of that singularity and uniqueness with which the Holocaust is treated has to do with this rupture of the enlightenment moment in European history. . . . It\u2019s considered a shameful event because of where<\/em> it happened [within the boundaries of Europe] and against whom<\/em> it happened [Europeans].\u201d Abdaljawad Omar, \u201cZionism, Germany and the Politics of Debt,\u201d Electronic Intifada Podcast, YouTube (29 December, 2023), www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Qasw2CfHLpM<\/a>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  28. On the cover of Campt\u2019s Other Germans<\/em>, an archival document features a photograph of two women smiling and hugging each other. One of them is a white woman, the other Black. They are wearing festive 1920s outfits. In Blackletter, a racist propaganda slogan is set over the photo, stating in German: \u201cThe Result \u2013 racial pride vanishes.\u201d It seems difficult to imagine how this lovely image of the women\u2019s friendship or romance could have a repellent effect on white Germans at the time. Then again, seeing the effects of dehumanisation playing out in real time now, it actually is possible to imagine. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  29. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 6\u20137. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  30. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 13, 14.\u00a0 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  31. Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 209. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  32. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 16. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  33. It is painful to read Lorde\u2019s observation from 1984 and realise so little has changed in terms of the whiteness of universities in general, who gets to sit in the classrooms, and whose histories are introduced. In her letter inviting Lorde to come to Berlin as a guest professor at the Free University, Schultz writes, \u201cI come from a country which at this point in history experiences the ultimate triumph of National Socialism, namely the effects of erasing a people\u2019s history after having committed genocide on them, the fact that the old generation doesn\u2019t speak and the young don\u2019t know and can\u2019t see the importance of knowing what their own history is.\u201d (Lorde, Dreams of Europe,<\/em> 13.) Reflecting on Schultz\u2019s observation, what changed for me, born in Germany in 1986, is that I have learnt a lot about my \u201cown history\u201d in school, thanks to the political revolt within Schultz\u2019s own and my parents\u2019 generation, against their parents\u2019 or grandparents\u2019 silence on a direct or indirect complicity in genocide, having been young adults during the Nazi era. Thanks to a leftist postwar generation who insisted on remembering, I did attend history lessons about the political transition of democracy into fascism, namely National Socialism, and about the scapegoating of Jewish and communist Germans (although significantly less about the persecution of Sinti and Roma, or of disabled, queer, and so-called \u201c(mentally) ill\u201d people). We were told about the widespread indifference or consent within German society with the Nazi\u2019s racist politics. In these history lessons, it wasn\u2019t minimized that ordinary Germans often actively participated in genociding millions of people based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability, or sexual orientation, including, as the largest group, European Jews. What wasn\u2019t addressed in a self-reflecting way, was the ideology which led these German ancestors to becoming fascist perpetrators. The focus was on empathizing, if not identifying, with the victims. Aside from high school education, also through novels, films, exhibitions, and all kinds of cultural and political educational events, so much effort has been put into remembering the victims of the Holocaust as people with \u201cnormal\u201d lives in Germany and Europe, as people who could have been our neighbors, our classmates, our parents\u2019 colleagues, who might have sat in the shop next door, whose books we read, and who teaches us to play the piano.
    \u00a0
    One could expect that through all these acts of commemorating the victims of German National Socialism, through reconnecting the abstract and monstrous number of its murdered Jews with individual lives and experiences, heightened perceptions of dehumanization would alert Germans to Israel\u2019s systematic oppression and mass-murdering of Palestinians, and that alarms of outrage would go off. In journalist and author M. Gessen\u2019s words, \u201cFrom the earliest days of Israel\u2019s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away.\u201d M. Gessen, \u201cIn the Shadow of the Holocaust. How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today,\u201d The New Yorker,<\/em> 9 December, 2023,     www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-weekend-essay\/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust<\/a>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  34. Having grown up in (West-)Germany, in families with Nazi backgrounds, I now understand more and more that large parts of the (white) German left, through which I became politicized in my 20s during the 2010s, have answered this question by foregrounding the founding of the state of Israel as a necessary response to the pervasive antisemitism in Germany and Europe. My parents were confronted with their parents\u2019 ignorance toward their ancestors\u2019 collectively committed genocide. It feels as if the confrontation with my generation consists of countering the arrogance of a politically informed intellectual left which insists that the Holocaust as a singular historic event is incomparable to other crimes committed to any other people in the world, and that Zionism can\u2019t possibly constitute a form of colonialism. Hereby the German left reproduces, in essence, a joint German-Israeli exceptionalism. I wonder if the shadow of both generational positionalities causes the lingering silence: a silence playing out as a not-knowing through ignorance (\u201cWe didn\u2019t know\u201d), and a silence playing out as actively silencing those who know \u201ctoo much\u201d (\u201cYou can\u2019t know that\u201d).
    \u00a0
    As Abdaljawad Omar puts it, \u201cModern German identity, after WWII, is constructed around the memory of the Holocaust, but is also constructed persistently around the security of the Jews, or of Israel, in this case. So, you have a state that says part of my existence, part of the justification for the existence of a German nation, is not the German language or culture, or perhaps history, it\u2019s the existence and security of another state, outside of even the boundaries of Europe itself. This is what modern Germany is proclaiming \u2013 to be part of the rationale, tied to this politics of memory, and tied to this notion that there is a debt relationship here, where the Germans and the European collectivity has to pay a debt to the Jewish people, and in this instance, the Jewish people are represented by the state of Israel. . . . This is, as many have pointed out, a conflation between Jews and Zionism, which is a conflation that is in and of itself antisemitic because it basically says that all Jews are Zionists, which is not the case.\u201d Omar, \u201cZionism, Germany and the Politics of Debt,\u201d at 0:15:53.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  35. Reading Lorde\u2019s observations, along with the transcripts of her seminar sessions in Berlin, a mix of feelings surfaces regarding the presence of German silences. On the one hand, they feel close: I imagine myself sitting in her class and wondering how I would respond to the questions that were so often met with silence. The mode of being met with or retreating into silence (as a refusal to speak or respond), whether in class, at a family gathering, or in random encounters on the street, is a familiar modus operandi in Germany. It\u2019s as if silence can signal a sense of superiority when it reflects a reluctance to think and engage with the other, with oneself, with anything that might unsettle one\u2019s standpoint. This links to what Campt refers to as \u201cloud silences.\u201d \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  36. Lorde describes these haunting encounters with white German women in her preface to the book Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte<\/em> (1986), later re-published in the new preface to the English translation of the book, Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out<\/em> (1992). The book is a result of Lorde\u2019s presence in Berlin, as she was offered the opportunity to publish a book with a feminist publishing house, but instead of accepting the offer passed it on to two Black German women who attended her seminar: May Ayim, then 22, and Katharina Oguntoye, then 24 years old. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  37. Lorde, Showing our Colors<\/em>, viii. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  38. Campt, Other Germans<\/em>, 5. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  39. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 16. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  40. Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 39. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  41. The Herero and Nama genocide committed by the German Empire in present day Namibia, then called Deutsch-S\u00fcdwestafrika, from 1904\u20131908, is considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, and, in many ways, was a horrific precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide. German settler colonial violence escalated in 1904 after the Indigenous peoples\u00a0 uprisings against the German colonisers. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  42. Zo\u00e9 Samudzi, \u201cParadox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism,\u201d Postmodern Culture<\/em> 31 (September 2020 and January 2021), www.pomoculture.org\/2021\/09\/23\/paradox-of-recognition-genocide-and-colonialism\/<\/a>.
    \u00a0
    In the article that Al-Taher and Younes are citing here, Zo\u00e9 Samudzi builds on Wynter\u2019s critique of what is considered \u201chuman\u201d to argue that the \u201cexistence of an anti-Black exception to acknowledgements of genocide\u201d is necessary, \u201cyielding a paradox in our understandings of recognizing genocide that renders Black death necessary.\u201dCited from abstract of Samudzi, \u201cParadox of Recognition.\u201d

    Al-Taher and Younes\u2019s use of the term \u201cLebensraum<\/em>\u201d might be interesting to read alongside Wynter\u2019s theorisation of the term \u201cplot.\u201d Both terms are linked to colonial space-making that have shaped identity-making. Lebensraum<\/em> exposes the ever expanding entitlement to land as paramount to settler colonial ideology, which, according to Al-Taher and Younes, operates today in Germany by giving people in power a sense of entitlement to rule over space and race through science and an interpretive authority over knowledge. The plot, or plots, as theorised by Wynter, expose the spacial confinement and impasse that people experienced under the enslavement of plantation owners. Even their own survival as the enslaved was capitalised on by assigning small plots of land in proximity to the plantation, on which food was grown in order for them to sustain themselves. At the same time, these plots became sites of resistance, where a rehumanisation through secret cultural practices could take place.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  43. The crowdsourced online initiative Archive of Silence<\/a> documents instances of voices being silenced and deplatformed in Germany for expressing solidarity with Palestine. The initiative\u2019s chronicle makes painstakingly clear how silencing is indeed used to prevent, by all available means, any form of mobilisation or awareness-raising for Palestinians\u2019 struggle against oppression and occupation. To quote but a few:
    \u00a0
    29 July 2025: \u201cThe work of composer Ada Gomiz, in collaboration with Ana Dueri, a Colombian-Palestinian composer, as part of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, was censored. Course participants were warned that parts of the artwork containing the statements \u201cStop Genocide\u201d and \u201cFree Palestine\u201d would either have to be removed, or the entire final presentation of the artistic works at the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt would be canceled.\u201d
    4 December 2024: \u201cAn event series titled The Art of Memory in Times of Trauma and Grief<\/em>, featuring films, lectures and discussions on memory, trauma, and repression, was abruptly and indefinitely \u201cpostponed\u201d by the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The program included works by Kurdish and Palestinian artists, and critiques of rigid memory culture in Germany, particularly regarding Holocaust remembrance and Palestinian perspectives. In a statement from December 5th, Rothberg wrote: \u2018A lecture that was part of a series organized to bring attention to the restriction of academic freedom and freedom of expression in Germany was instead itself restricted and used as an opportunity to defame, once again, Palestinian perspectives.\u2019\u201d
    15 October 2024: \u201cAfter pressure from the city, euro-scene Leipzig canceled the performance And Here I Come<\/em> by the Freedom Theatre from the West Bank, which was to take place on November 6th and 7th. Leipzig\u2019s Department of Culture had initially announced that it would investigate a refund of a proportion of the festival\u2019s funding budget while Schauspielhaus Leipzig had considered canceling the rental agreement with euro-scene.\u201d
    17 April 2024: \u201cThe district office Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg closed down the two girls* facilities Alia and Phantalisa over workers\u2019 social media activity and activism in solidarity with Palestinians.\u201d
    9 April 2024: \u201cFrankfurt\u2019s independent leftist center ExZess agreed to give students of the Goethe University Frankfurt a space for an event on the condition that Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal was not allowed to enter or speak. The students refused the offer.\u201d
    13 December 2023: \u201cOn December 13, 2023, the Heinrich B\u00f6ll Foundation Berlin and the Heinrich B\u00f6ll Foundation Bremen canceled the award ceremony of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to this year\u2019s laureate M. Gessen. Gessen, born in 1967 in Moscow as a descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors, is a journalist and writer based in New York. Gessen, they wrote, implies \u2018that Israel\u2019s goal is to liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto. This statement is not an offer for open discussion, and it does not help to understand the conflict in the Middle East. This statement is not acceptable to us and we reject it.\u2019\u201d
    20 October 2023: \u201cA talk by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir at a University of Potsdam workshop at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin was canceled due to her pro-Palestinian social media activity.\u201d
    13 October 2023: \u201cOn October 13, 2023, German literary association, Litprom, announced the cancellation of the October 20th ceremony that was to be held as a celebration of Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli\u2019s winning of the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual award for women authors from the Global South. As the reason for this decision, they referred to \u2018the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.\u2019 Shibli was to be honored at the Frankfurt Book fair for her book Minor Detail,<\/em> a novel which focuses on the Nakba and well-documented atrocities committed by the Israeli army during the founding of the state of Israel.\u201d     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  44. Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 8. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  45. Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 17. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  46. Here, Lorde\u2019s often quoted question to fellow feminists comes to mind: \u201cPerhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself\u2014a Black woman warrior poet doing my work\u2014come to ask you, are you doing yours?\u201d Audre Lorde, \u201cThe Transformation of Silence into Language and Action\u201d in Your Silence Will Not Protect You<\/em> (London: Silver Press, 2017), 41. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  47. Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 39. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  48. In her article on Lorde\u2019s position on Palestine, scholar Marina Magloire shared her archival research tracing Lorde\u2019s correspondence with fellow Black lesbian poet June Jordan, and their \u201cfeminist falling-out over Zionism.\u201d June Jordan was outraged by Lorde\u2019s backing of Jewish lesbian writer and poet Adrienne Rich, who defended Zionism in a co-signed open letter in 1982. Magloire recounts, \u201cWhen both were participating in an anti-apartheid poetry reading in New York in 1986, Jordan approached Rich and said, I completely and absolutely detest your views on Israel and I love you.\u201d Marina Magloire, \u201cMoving Towards Life: Exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Marina Magloire assembles an archive of a Black feminist falling-out over Zionism\u201d Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em> (7 August, 2024),lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/moving-towards-life\/<\/a>.

    It was only later on in the 1980s that Lorde, Rich, and many other Jewish and Black feminists followed Jordan\u2019s anti-Zionism and unwavering solidarity with Palestine. Tracing archival stories such as this one is so helpful in navigating the varied paces and paths, various starting points from which each of us departs in learning and unlearning about Palestine, in relating these to other struggles against oppression and breaking with one\u2019s silences.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  49. Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You<\/em>, 41. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  50. Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 366. This is the closing paragraph of Wynter\u2019s essay, and it reads like an embrace of the radical potentials of decolonial feminist critique demonstrated by the contributors to the anthology Out of the Kumbla.<\/em> It also reads as an invitation to further explore the \u201cdemonic ground\u201d as a site for transcending oppressive forms of knowledge production by those who have been excluded from the \u201cmaster\u2019s discourse.\u201d It reminds me of queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz theorisation of academic writing from a minoritarian position. In his paper \u201cEphemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,\u201d he emphasises that re-thinking what rigour and evidence mean inevitably entails also exploring \u201calternate modes of textuality and narrativity.\u201d Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, \u201cEphemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,\u201d Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory<\/em> 8, no. 2 (1996), 10. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Take a walk at night. . . . Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears. Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Who is silenced, who is heard, who is politically included and who is not, who gets cited and who does not, who is admitted into academic settings, and who is made to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Pauline Oliveros, \u201cNative,\u201d in Sonic Meditations,<\/em> no. 5 (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1971). Oliveros first published her scores for Sonic Meditations in 1971, bringing her lesbian feminist activism and work as a musician and composer closer together. I keep returning to an observation she made in a late interview on her lifelong practice that she coined as \u201cDeep Listening,\u201d and which can be read as an elaboration on the meditation no. 5: \u201cSpeech and alphabet are profoundly wonderful tools of communication but what is sacrificed is the knowledge that comes from sound, and from actually listening to everything, rather than just speech.\u201d Pauline Oliveros,\u201cRadiance: Pauline Oliveros Part 1, Deep Listening,\u201d Radiance: Meditation Talk Show, YouTube(16 January, 2016), www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0NCCNlu30r8<\/a>.
    \u00a0
    Oliveros has paved the way for many artists and activists toward a notion of sound that encompasses listening to both silences as well as non-verbal and non-human sounds, which are all as meaningful as speech and thereby expand one\u2019s conception of knowledge to an embodied level. However, Oliveros also stands in a tradition of white lesbian feminism that tends to appropriate Indigenous knowledges by \u201cvoicing\u201d or \u201cgiving voice to\u201d them without providing further acknowledgment. What, for example, does the meditation\u2019s title \u201cNative\u201d stand for? Which Indigenous knowledges or practices did Oliveros build on? This text contribution suggests especially listening to the kinds of silences or willful omissions that embody and reproduce systemic injustices.\",\"id\":\"979269a0-7f51-48ec-8d31-f213cacf5470\"},{\"content\":\"Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race\u2014Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,\u201d Ethnography<\/em> 25, no. 2 (2023), 9, 11.

    Over the last two and a half years, I have listened to a figurative silence that hangs over countless art and cultural spaces and events in Germany which are otherwise politically articulate. In these spaces, the echo of the digitally transmitted screams and explosions from Gaza are heard but ignored, or deliberately silenced through the deplatforming of those who want to amplify the utterances of Palestinians suffering from, and resisting, Israel\u2019s genocidal violence. This discrepancy of urgent unbearable sounds met with an elusive silence can perhaps be explained in part by Oliveros\u2019s distinction between hearing<\/em> as a physical process or technology, which is often passive and involuntary, and listening<\/em> as a conscious, psychological process of giving attention to that which is heard, processing its effect on one\u2019s body and assigning it meaning. Or, in her own words: \u201cListening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.\u201d Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening<\/em> (London: Ignota, 2022), 30.
    \u00a0
    The questions that remain are: What is the systemic function of this refusal to listen, or the effort to silence? What forms of meaning-making are sought to be prevented, both individually and collectively when it comes to Palestine, particularly in Germany? And how can one apply deep listening to reading? When reading theory or academic texts, it\u2019s especially easy to retreat into a culturally familiar mode that follows and understands a text intellectually, while suppressing a more scattered, embodied, and far less linear approach to reading. My attempt to incorporate these digressions while reading, prompted by a single word or line, to enter the text\u2014be they personal reflections or contextualising research on the text or the author\u2014is indicated by words in the quotations that are set in bold type, as my emphasis, which then refer to a (side)note here in the margin.\",\"id\":\"c547b4f4-47b1-46e8-aceb-18b62302fa51\"},{\"content\":\"Sylvia Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman\u201d in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature,<\/em> Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 365.\",\"id\":\"0d6bf12c-7fd0-44a7-b042-864c7f40a9cc\"},{\"content\":\"Audre Lorde, Dream of Europe. Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em>, ed. Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro (Oak Park, Ill.: Kenning Editions, 2019), 63\u201364.\",\"id\":\"e9ddf5e2-88d4-4de7-96e6-db75131edc3b\"},{\"content\":\"Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em> (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 18.
    \u00a0
    In examining my own silences, there\u2019s this rift that only opened for me after 7 October, 2023, which reveals what is colonial in my experience of time: It took the murdering and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis and the subsequent, completely disproportionate and dehumanising response from Israel for me to fully recognise the inherently colonial nature of Zionism. So, the counting from this date as the beginning of a genocide, or as the beginning of my witnessing, in a way, repeats the violence that is produced by the unequal attention given to the killings of people from one group compared to another. While even many Palestinians, who are confronted daily with the brutal reality of Israel\u2019s systemic racism and occupation, expressed their disbelief at the extent of violence, and particularly at the western powers\u2019 unconditional support for Israel, any Palestinian or decolonial activist knew long before 7 October that the erasure of Palestine and its people has been integral to the state of Israel from the beginning. I now register my former lack of understanding as a \u201cloud silence\u201d that I could afford not to hear because of my whiteness.\",\"id\":\"b2ab4748-a3cc-46e3-a2c2-2370463aacec\"},{\"content\":\"Sara Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15\u201316.\",\"id\":\"996a5559-7d3d-48c2-98f5-b982ad7fd768\"},{\"content\":\"Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cLebensraum:<\/em> geopolitics and race \u2013 Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia\u201d Ethnography<\/em> 25, no. 2 (2023): 16.\",\"id\":\"2a5d4d45-9ab0-493b-9964-cccdc6a0900b\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, both German Palestinian scholars, have experienced countless instances of being ghosted or disinvited, often because institutions, journals or universities were afraid to be framed as antisemitic for publishing their academic research on Palestine. It in fact took them three years to find a journal for their paper \u201cLebensraum<\/em>, geopolitics and race\u2014Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,\u201d due to those mechanisms, as they explain in an online conversation when asked about barriers and instances of censorship in academia. Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes, \u201cPalestine as a feminist issue: Geopolitics and race. With Anna Younes & Hanna Al Taher,\u201d virtual discussion, [decoco] decolonial research group, YouTube (19 February, 2024),     www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lwZZQUwDmgs<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"618561c8-d76c-4e7c-9fe6-5985c0337919\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 9, 11.\",\"id\":\"4eeda28e-d096-441d-9dee-2ec51f783eaf\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter\u2019s essay \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s \u2018Woman,\u2019\u201d was first published as an afterword in the anthology Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature<\/em> (1990), edited by Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. I found this book after our reading group discussed Wynter\u2019s critical stance on feminism, and in hopes of finding more readings on the topic, I searched for her name in the online catalogue of Amsterdam\u2019s oldest feminist library, now called Atria. I borrowed the book, and the first part that resonated with me was the printed dedication: \u201cTo the many unsung women who write, sing, tell stories and struggle to make their voices heard.\u201d After renewing the loan too often, co-reader of our group Moosje M. Goosen forwarded me a link to a used copy I could purchase. Here, it was the half-title page that caught my attention: an Ex Libris stamp with the name Rosi Braidotti, hand-signed, and the year 1993. Braidotti co-founded the Women\u2019s Studies Program at Utrecht University in 1988, making it intriguing to consider the discussions surrounding this book at that time in the Netherlands. There was already a vibrant conversation about whiteness within feminism in Dutch contexts then, led by scholars such as Gloria Wekker, who joined the faculty of the Women\u2019s Studies department in Utrecht around that period, and it made me wonder in what ways Wynter\u2019s work left traces in Dutch feminist circles back then (and what led Braidotti to giving her copy away).\",\"id\":\"ec6d8c47-d016-49ca-ab39-f0412b5018e6\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 365.\",\"id\":\"85684876-128a-4c88-9a0b-01357029da86\"},{\"content\":\"This and most of the following citations from Lorde are from the book Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em> (2020).<\/em> The seminars and interviews given by Lorde during her time at the Free University in West-Berlin and in cities throughout Germany were archived as audio recordings by Dagmar Schultz and transcribed by the editor of the book, Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro. While reading the book, I was particularly struck by the carefully transcribed non-verbal reactions of the students in the classroom or from the audience during a talk, especially the silences: by reading the word \u201csilence\u201d in brackets, the uncomfortable pauses become not only part of the historic record, but also of the reading experience.\",\"id\":\"bd18f5f3-54ce-4bb7-8041-486dc5ca54d1\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 18. Campt\u2019s analysis published in Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich<\/em> was highly dependent on interpreting silences, as she describes in the introduction. The conversations she held with Black Germans who lived through the Nazi era often only brought up issues of race and gender through initial silence or narrative pauses or gaps. The self-definition Afro-German (or Afro-deutsch<\/em> in German language) first came up in the 1980s through Lorde\u2019s presence in Berlin and her consciousness raising community work with Black German women. See Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 17 and 8, and Audre Lorde, \u201cFarbe bekennen. Introduction, 1984\u201d in: Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out,<\/em> ed. May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), xxii.\",\"id\":\"62bd248c-3d90-4580-9cd7-7806465a3a8c\"},{\"content\":\"Younes and Al-Taher (re)introduce the term Lebensraum<\/em> (living space) to describe a specific German settler-colonial ideology (\u201ca<\/em> space for a<\/em> race\u201d) that endeavored to \u201crule through science,\u201d and examine how this ideology might continue to be manifested and operationalised in German-speaking academia as an educational ideology, for example by making territory-based claims that Palestinian freedom \u201ccan\u2019t be articulated as such in Germany\u201d because of the Nazi past. The term \u201cLebensraum\u201d popularised in 1901 and set the ideological foundation for German imperialism.\",\"id\":\"57f73802-8b7d-4fe7-a187-bc531227e93c\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 9, 11.\",\"id\":\"5231075c-5414-4635-aa81-1b80d10f9431\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter contextualises the term \u201cwomanist\u201d further in her essay. It was introduced in the 1970s by Alice Walker, who wanted to point at the challenges that she and all Black women and women of colour writers face when identifying as \u201cfeminist\u201d when mainstream feminism historically excluded race from the frame of reference and centred white Western-European and Euroamerican issues.\",\"id\":\"25128fe4-9ded-46ef-80ba-7bfe1209d732\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 355\u2013356.\",\"id\":\"23e10ef6-5e09-44dc-bc7a-4e53626b3dee\"},{\"content\":\"This insertion, and the following \u201csilences\u201d in brackets in Lorde\u2019s quotations, are transcriptions of long, often awkward silences in the audience after Lorde posed a question or was hoping for participation of her students or audiences.\",\"id\":\"45ca68fc-a103-4930-97bf-f770cbed2e9e\"},{\"content\":\"Audre Lorde, Dream of Europe. Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984\u20131992<\/em>, ed. Mayra A. Rodr\u00edguez Castro (Oak Park, IL: Kenning Editions, 2020), 250.

    I have to think of Dagmar Schultz, a white German sociologist who, in 1981, used her privilege of being a professor of women\u2019s studies in Berlin to invite and arrange for Lorde to come as a guest professor to the Free University. Lorde accepted the invitation to Berlin and led creative writing and Black women\u2019s poetry seminars in 1984, having a lasting impact by empowering young Black Germans, both inside and outside the university, encouraging them to give voice to their experiences and organise among themselves. It is also thanks to Schultz\u2019s efforts to audio-record Lorde\u2019s classes and talks that they could be made accessible for all by Rodr\u00edguez Castro as transcripts. Further projects by Schultz to document and spread the impact of Lorde\u2019s work in Germany can he found on the website \u201cAudre Lorde\u2013The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992,\u201d www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com.\",\"id\":\"7d6e8e22-63de-4cde-ba7f-3bb82fd9ac51\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter was invited to provide an afterword for an anthology that was to be the first edited collection of critical works on Caribbean women\u2019s writing. One of the editors, Carole Boyce-Davies, recounts that Wynter initially submitted a manuscript of over ninety pages long, which was later shortened, \u201cwith her permission, to a manageable afterword length\u201d of 12 pages. See Carole Boyce-Davies, \u201cOccupying the Terrain: Reengaging \u2018Beyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings: Un\/Silencing the \u2018Demonic Ground\u2019 of Caliban\u2019s Woman,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 70,<\/em> no. 4 (December 2018), 838.

    The initial unwieldy response, as well as Wynter\u2019s decision to name her contribution \u201cAfter\/Word,\u201d hints at her investment in deconstructing or challenging the very format of literary and scholarly text production. It might indicate both Wynter\u2019s formal-literary and political-theoretical endeavour to unsettle the frame of reference of western being\/feeling\/knowing and \u201cpoint towards the epochal threshold of a new post-modern and post-Western mode of cognitive inquiry.\u201d Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 356.
    What if Wynter\u2019s \u201cAfter\/Word\u201d was written so lengthy also to subvert the idea of being a supplement for the end of the book? The initial length of her piece can also gesture towards the refusal to shorthand-theorise about the \u201contological absence\u201d of women indigenous to the land that Europeans and Euroamericans colonised and continue to colonise.\",\"id\":\"9d690782-4498-4618-8b54-22eff5960017\"},{\"content\":\"It is in this essay that Wynter first explains and conceptualises her understanding of \u2018demonic ground\u2019. The concept sees the \u2018demonic ground\u2019 as the space created by systems of oppression into which racialised women are pushed, while emphasising that the very same space becomes a site of potential agency and resistance from which histories and experiences can be un-silenced, if radically transgressing the \u201cmaster\u2019s discourse\u201d. (Wynter 1990, 366) This is also alluded to in the title \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s meaning\u201d, so beyond a feminism that perpetuates the ontological absence of Indigenous women, as it is enacted in Shakespeare\u2019s play The Tempest.<\/em> As Wynter analyses, Miranda, being the only female character in the play, plays a crucial role in legitimising, through her whiteness, the enslavement of Caliban, who is native to the island, or so-called New World, to which Miranda and her father arrive.\",\"id\":\"8e1294cf-081e-4269-9f0a-3127a6cdcdf4\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter hints here at the need for a decolonisation of the humanities. This is also strongly articulated in Al-Taher and Younes\u2019 paper, pointing to the colonial tradition in which academia at large stands, with universities always having profited from imperial \u201cextraction of capital, labour, art, and knowledge.\u201d (Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,\u201d 9.)\",\"id\":\"ae13c619-8bcf-4797-a812-cd992f47e313\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 356.\",\"id\":\"3367d919-5140-4809-b8a8-b900034e88be\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 2, 5.\",\"id\":\"6f5d7aa3-d7e0-4190-883f-6459457ef72e\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 2.\",\"id\":\"491fc4d0-52a0-4997-8cd1-740be823eaee\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 6\u20137.\",\"id\":\"dc3a616f-741c-40c2-be71-c5416b833e32\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 361. The phenomenon of European governments or regimes marginalising and persecuting \u201ctheir own national groupings\u201d has been theorised by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire as the \u201dcolonial boomerang.\u201d C\u00e9saire argues that the repressive and violent practices of domination developed in colonies will eventually be applied domestically. This makes me return to an online conversation on Germany and Zionism with Abdaljawad Omar, in which he reflects on what this means for commemorating the German Nazi crimes: \u201cA lot of that singularity and uniqueness with which the Holocaust is treated has to do with this rupture of the enlightenment moment in European history. . . . It\u2019s considered a shameful event because of where<\/em> it happened [within the boundaries of Europe] and against whom<\/em> it happened [Europeans].\u201d Abdaljawad Omar, \u201cZionism, Germany and the Politics of Debt,\u201d Electronic Intifada Podcast, YouTube (29 December, 2023),     www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Qasw2CfHLpM<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"eb219624-41d9-4575-bc54-8ceef7addce1\"},{\"content\":\"On the cover of Campt\u2019s Other Germans<\/em>, an archival document features a photograph of two women smiling and hugging each other. One of them is a white woman, the other Black. They are wearing festive 1920s outfits. In Blackletter, a racist propaganda slogan is set over the photo, stating in German: \u201cThe Result \u2013 racial pride vanishes.\u201d It seems difficult to imagine how this lovely image of the women\u2019s friendship or romance could have a repellent effect on white Germans at the time. Then again, seeing the effects of dehumanisation playing out in real time now, it actually is possible to imagine.\",\"id\":\"549ac2be-b215-4593-9cf5-2bcfbe4fb7d9\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 6\u20137.\",\"id\":\"8667b407-7565-496e-aac2-c0022475c48c\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 13, 14.\u00a0\",\"id\":\"6a6541ce-35b7-4840-a78d-30f7e884c8f3\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 209.\",\"id\":\"e325feba-637f-4388-bd84-1cba47e45e8b\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 16.\",\"id\":\"2933eddb-46f1-468e-ad9c-73b4f172fe87\"},{\"content\":\"It is painful to read Lorde\u2019s observation from 1984 and realise so little has changed in terms of the whiteness of universities in general, who gets to sit in the classrooms, and whose histories are introduced. In her letter inviting Lorde to come to Berlin as a guest professor at the Free University, Schultz writes, \u201cI come from a country which at this point in history experiences the ultimate triumph of National Socialism, namely the effects of erasing a people\u2019s history after having committed genocide on them, the fact that the old generation doesn\u2019t speak and the young don\u2019t know and can\u2019t see the importance of knowing what their own history is.\u201d (Lorde, Dreams of Europe,<\/em> 13.) Reflecting on Schultz\u2019s observation, what changed for me, born in Germany in 1986, is that I have learnt a lot about my \u201cown history\u201d in school, thanks to the political revolt within Schultz\u2019s own and my parents\u2019 generation, against their parents\u2019 or grandparents\u2019 silence on a direct or indirect complicity in genocide, having been young adults during the Nazi era. Thanks to a leftist postwar generation who insisted on remembering, I did attend history lessons about the political transition of democracy into fascism, namely National Socialism, and about the scapegoating of Jewish and communist Germans (although significantly less about the persecution of Sinti and Roma, or of disabled, queer, and so-called \u201c(mentally) ill\u201d people). We were told about the widespread indifference or consent within German society with the Nazi\u2019s racist politics. In these history lessons, it wasn\u2019t minimized that ordinary Germans often actively participated in genociding millions of people based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability, or sexual orientation, including, as the largest group, European Jews. What wasn\u2019t addressed in a self-reflecting way, was the ideology which led these German ancestors to becoming fascist perpetrators. The focus was on empathizing, if not identifying, with the victims. Aside from high school education, also through novels, films, exhibitions, and all kinds of cultural and political educational events, so much effort has been put into remembering the victims of the Holocaust as people with \u201cnormal\u201d lives in Germany and Europe, as people who could have been our neighbors, our classmates, our parents\u2019 colleagues, who might have sat in the shop next door, whose books we read, and who teaches us to play the piano.
    \u00a0
    One could expect that through all these acts of commemorating the victims of German National Socialism, through reconnecting the abstract and monstrous number of its murdered Jews with individual lives and experiences, heightened perceptions of dehumanization would alert Germans to Israel\u2019s systematic oppression and mass-murdering of Palestinians, and that alarms of outrage would go off. In journalist and author M. Gessen\u2019s words, \u201cFrom the earliest days of Israel\u2019s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away.\u201d M. Gessen, \u201cIn the Shadow of the Holocaust. How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today,\u201d The New Yorker,<\/em> 9 December, 2023,     www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-weekend-essay\/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"e64b81b6-85ad-4bb3-827b-4f46253ebfde\"},{\"content\":\"Having grown up in (West-)Germany, in families with Nazi backgrounds, I now understand more and more that large parts of the (white) German left, through which I became politicized in my 20s during the 2010s, have answered this question by foregrounding the founding of the state of Israel as a necessary response to the pervasive antisemitism in Germany and Europe. My parents were confronted with their parents\u2019 ignorance toward their ancestors\u2019 collectively committed genocide. It feels as if the confrontation with my generation consists of countering the arrogance of a politically informed intellectual left which insists that the Holocaust as a singular historic event is incomparable to other crimes committed to any other people in the world, and that Zionism can\u2019t possibly constitute a form of colonialism. Hereby the German left reproduces, in essence, a joint German-Israeli exceptionalism. I wonder if the shadow of both generational positionalities causes the lingering silence: a silence playing out as a not-knowing through ignorance (\u201cWe didn\u2019t know\u201d), and a silence playing out as actively silencing those who know \u201ctoo much\u201d (\u201cYou can\u2019t know that\u201d).
    \u00a0
    As Abdaljawad Omar puts it, \u201cModern German identity, after WWII, is constructed around the memory of the Holocaust, but is also constructed persistently around the security of the Jews, or of Israel, in this case. So, you have a state that says part of my existence, part of the justification for the existence of a German nation, is not the German language or culture, or perhaps history, it\u2019s the existence and security of another state, outside of even the boundaries of Europe itself. This is what modern Germany is proclaiming \u2013 to be part of the rationale, tied to this politics of memory, and tied to this notion that there is a debt relationship here, where the Germans and the European collectivity has to pay a debt to the Jewish people, and in this instance, the Jewish people are represented by the state of Israel. . . . This is, as many have pointed out, a conflation between Jews and Zionism, which is a conflation that is in and of itself antisemitic because it basically says that all Jews are Zionists, which is not the case.\u201d Omar, \u201cZionism, Germany and the Politics of Debt,\u201d at 0:15:53.\",\"id\":\"facacc73-8569-4a35-9343-c0b3e8fad77e\"},{\"content\":\"Reading Lorde\u2019s observations, along with the transcripts of her seminar sessions in Berlin, a mix of feelings surfaces regarding the presence of German silences. On the one hand, they feel close: I imagine myself sitting in her class and wondering how I would respond to the questions that were so often met with silence. The mode of being met with or retreating into silence (as a refusal to speak or respond), whether in class, at a family gathering, or in random encounters on the street, is a familiar modus operandi in Germany. It\u2019s as if silence can signal a sense of superiority when it reflects a reluctance to think and engage with the other, with oneself, with anything that might unsettle one\u2019s standpoint. This links to what Campt refers to as \u201cloud silences.\u201d\",\"id\":\"8f4e87f4-032b-4965-b4bd-46e79a68a1cc\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde describes these haunting encounters with white German women in her preface to the book Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte<\/em> (1986), later re-published in the new preface to the English translation of the book, Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out<\/em> (1992). The book is a result of Lorde\u2019s presence in Berlin, as she was offered the opportunity to publish a book with a feminist publishing house, but instead of accepting the offer passed it on to two Black German women who attended her seminar: May Ayim, then 22, and Katharina Oguntoye, then 24 years old.\",\"id\":\"830ee20d-ad4d-49b2-bc3c-81577dca7845\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde, Showing our Colors<\/em>, viii.\",\"id\":\"5a649def-05ca-47c2-b766-47324b59fb4f\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans<\/em>, 5.\",\"id\":\"82cea635-3a27-4984-a619-9a314aa13ee6\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 16.\",\"id\":\"9bba9d4a-ba57-45a0-a0ba-7c93aeb56371\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 39.\",\"id\":\"47529088-9b04-4c85-bca2-9c22b175746c\"},{\"content\":\"The Herero and Nama genocide committed by the German Empire in present day Namibia, then called Deutsch-S\u00fcdwestafrika, from 1904\u20131908, is considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, and, in many ways, was a horrific precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide. German settler colonial violence escalated in 1904 after the Indigenous peoples\u00a0 uprisings against the German colonisers.\",\"id\":\"b16662de-9c51-44cd-a4ab-2bf4c41b555e\"},{\"content\":\"Zo\u00e9 Samudzi, \u201cParadox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism,\u201d Postmodern Culture<\/em> 31 (September 2020 and January 2021),     www.pomoculture.org\/2021\/09\/23\/paradox-of-recognition-genocide-and-colonialism\/<\/a>.
    \u00a0
    In the article that Al-Taher and Younes are citing here, Zo\u00e9 Samudzi builds on Wynter\u2019s critique of what is considered \u201chuman\u201d to argue that the \u201cexistence of an anti-Black exception to acknowledgements of genocide\u201d is necessary, \u201cyielding a paradox in our understandings of recognizing genocide that renders Black death necessary.\u201dCited from abstract of Samudzi, \u201cParadox of Recognition.\u201d

    Al-Taher and Younes\u2019s use of the term \u201cLebensraum<\/em>\u201d might be interesting to read alongside Wynter\u2019s theorisation of the term \u201cplot.\u201d Both terms are linked to colonial space-making that have shaped identity-making. Lebensraum<\/em> exposes the ever expanding entitlement to land as paramount to settler colonial ideology, which, according to Al-Taher and Younes, operates today in Germany by giving people in power a sense of entitlement to rule over space and race through science and an interpretive authority over knowledge. The plot, or plots, as theorised by Wynter, expose the spacial confinement and impasse that people experienced under the enslavement of plantation owners. Even their own survival as the enslaved was capitalised on by assigning small plots of land in proximity to the plantation, on which food was grown in order for them to sustain themselves. At the same time, these plots became sites of resistance, where a rehumanisation through secret cultural practices could take place.\",\"id\":\"83fd438b-6425-4e7e-b8bc-7a7acd58327b\"},{\"content\":\"The crowdsourced online initiative     Archive of Silence<\/a> documents instances of voices being silenced and deplatformed in Germany for expressing solidarity with Palestine. The initiative\u2019s chronicle makes painstakingly clear how silencing is indeed used to prevent, by all available means, any form of mobilisation or awareness-raising for Palestinians\u2019 struggle against oppression and occupation. To quote but a few:
    \u00a0
    29 July 2025: \u201cThe work of composer Ada Gomiz, in collaboration with Ana Dueri, a Colombian-Palestinian composer, as part of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, was censored. Course participants were warned that parts of the artwork containing the statements \u201cStop Genocide\u201d and \u201cFree Palestine\u201d would either have to be removed, or the entire final presentation of the artistic works at the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt would be canceled.\u201d
    4 December 2024: \u201cAn event series titled The Art of Memory in Times of Trauma and Grief<\/em>, featuring films, lectures and discussions on memory, trauma, and repression, was abruptly and indefinitely \u201cpostponed\u201d by the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The program included works by Kurdish and Palestinian artists, and critiques of rigid memory culture in Germany, particularly regarding Holocaust remembrance and Palestinian perspectives. In a statement from December 5th, Rothberg wrote: \u2018A lecture that was part of a series organized to bring attention to the restriction of academic freedom and freedom of expression in Germany was instead itself restricted and used as an opportunity to defame, once again, Palestinian perspectives.\u2019\u201d
    15 October 2024: \u201cAfter pressure from the city, euro-scene Leipzig canceled the performance And Here I Come<\/em> by the Freedom Theatre from the West Bank, which was to take place on November 6th and 7th. Leipzig\u2019s Department of Culture had initially announced that it would investigate a refund of a proportion of the festival\u2019s funding budget while Schauspielhaus Leipzig had considered canceling the rental agreement with euro-scene.\u201d
    17 April 2024: \u201cThe district office Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg closed down the two girls* facilities Alia and Phantalisa over workers\u2019 social media activity and activism in solidarity with Palestinians.\u201d
    9 April 2024: \u201cFrankfurt\u2019s independent leftist center ExZess agreed to give students of the Goethe University Frankfurt a space for an event on the condition that Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal was not allowed to enter or speak. The students refused the offer.\u201d
    13 December 2023: \u201cOn December 13, 2023, the Heinrich B\u00f6ll Foundation Berlin and the Heinrich B\u00f6ll Foundation Bremen canceled the award ceremony of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to this year\u2019s laureate M. Gessen. Gessen, born in 1967 in Moscow as a descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors, is a journalist and writer based in New York. Gessen, they wrote, implies \u2018that Israel\u2019s goal is to liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto. This statement is not an offer for open discussion, and it does not help to understand the conflict in the Middle East. This statement is not acceptable to us and we reject it.\u2019\u201d
    20 October 2023: \u201cA talk by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir at a University of Potsdam workshop at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin was canceled due to her pro-Palestinian social media activity.\u201d
    13 October 2023: \u201cOn October 13, 2023, German literary association, Litprom, announced the cancellation of the October 20th ceremony that was to be held as a celebration of Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli\u2019s winning of the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual award for women authors from the Global South. As the reason for this decision, they referred to \u2018the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.\u2019 Shibli was to be honored at the Frankfurt Book fair for her book Minor Detail,<\/em> a novel which focuses on the Nakba and well-documented atrocities committed by the Israeli army during the founding of the state of Israel.\u201d\",\"id\":\"e2230c56-dc65-4d79-b290-a8a5bda7af50\"},{\"content\":\"Al-Taher and Younes, \u201cLebensraum,<\/em> geopolitics and race,\u201d 8.\",\"id\":\"8720737e-4d55-46db-bc8f-aa43682effe3\"},{\"content\":\"Campt, Other Germans,<\/em> 17.\",\"id\":\"f4b1d118-d804-4940-8cad-1950e8ad87cc\"},{\"content\":\"Here, Lorde\u2019s often quoted question to fellow feminists comes to mind: \u201cPerhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself\u2014a Black woman warrior poet doing my work\u2014come to ask you, are you doing yours?\u201d Audre Lorde, \u201cThe Transformation of Silence into Language and Action\u201d in Your Silence Will Not Protect You<\/em> (London: Silver Press, 2017), 41.\",\"id\":\"a4d5a3c5-058a-4b7a-833a-3a59e0243392\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde, Dream of Europe<\/em>, 39.\",\"id\":\"75b2bf12-ff87-46d7-b01b-463e6271ade4\"},{\"content\":\"In her article on Lorde\u2019s position on Palestine, scholar Marina Magloire shared her archival research tracing Lorde\u2019s correspondence with fellow Black lesbian poet June Jordan, and their \u201cfeminist falling-out over Zionism.\u201d June Jordan was outraged by Lorde\u2019s backing of Jewish lesbian writer and poet Adrienne Rich, who defended Zionism in a co-signed open letter in 1982. Magloire recounts, \u201cWhen both were participating in an anti-apartheid poetry reading in New York in 1986, Jordan approached Rich and said, I completely and absolutely detest your views on Israel and I love you.\u201d Marina Magloire, \u201cMoving Towards Life: Exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Marina Magloire assembles an archive of a Black feminist falling-out over Zionism\u201d Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em> (7 August, 2024),    lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/moving-towards-life\/<\/a>.

    It was only later on in the 1980s that Lorde, Rich, and many other Jewish and Black feminists followed Jordan\u2019s anti-Zionism and unwavering solidarity with Palestine. Tracing archival stories such as this one is so helpful in navigating the varied paces and paths, various starting points from which each of us departs in learning and unlearning about Palestine, in relating these to other struggles against oppression and breaking with one\u2019s silences.\",\"id\":\"2c612714-7f7c-4044-981e-629d6213003d\"},{\"content\":\"Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You<\/em>, 41.\",\"id\":\"ce38a6a2-e879-440d-a926-8dc538673c01\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter, \u201cBeyond Miranda\u2019s Meanings,\u201d 366. This is the closing paragraph of Wynter\u2019s essay, and it reads like an embrace of the radical potentials of decolonial feminist critique demonstrated by the contributors to the anthology Out of the Kumbla.<\/em> It also reads as an invitation to further explore the \u201cdemonic ground\u201d as a site for transcending oppressive forms of knowledge production by those who have been excluded from the \u201cmaster\u2019s discourse.\u201d It reminds me of queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz theorisation of academic writing from a minoritarian position. In his paper \u201cEphemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,\u201d he emphasises that re-thinking what rigour and evidence mean inevitably entails also exploring \u201calternate modes of textuality and narrativity.\u201d Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, \u201cEphemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,\u201d Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory<\/em> 8, no. 2 (1996), 10.\",\"id\":\"6eb371d2-52e6-40c6-a7cc-87b8af50ff20\"}]"},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1347"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1426,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}