Sep 13, 2019
Troubling Epistemics and Postcolonialism
- 12:00 to 13:30
- Reading Group
- Dept. III
- Helen R. Verran
For the first session, we will discuss a recent blog entry by Helen Verran: “A Postcolonial Moment in Engaging Museum Ethnographic Collections." Helen will present this text herself and will discuss it in relation to the following commentary readings:
- Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
- Wynter, Sylvia “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257–337.
- François Dagognet, (1984) Le Musée san Fin, Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon pp. 11–94
- Tony Bennett (2015). “Thinking (with) Museums. From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage,” The International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message (eds.), John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Contact and Registration
Open to all, no registration required. Any questions about this or further sessions can be addressed by sending an email to Marianna Szczygielska at szczygielska@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or by speaking directly to Marianna, Edna Bonhomme, or Helen R. Verran in person.
About This Series
“Troubling Epistemics and Postcolonialism” is a monthly reading seminar interrogating "postcolonial" as an analytic concept in the history of science. The goal is to understand the ethics and mechanisms of our own epistemic practices as they relate to politics and power. We aim to examine the ways that epistemology is both historically contingent and actively produced within the history of science with the goal of troubling our disciplinary positions. For each meeting we list and circulate
- a short ‘provocative text’ to carry the empirical element and to provoke us to go wider in attempting to attend to something that troubles. Everyone is expected to read that text
- two or three "theoretical" or descriptive papers that we feel might be useful in "attending to the trouble." These are optional readings. The idea is that everyone who attends the discussion will have read at least the short provocation paper and bring some "troubles" to the meeting