TRACES OF DE- AND RECOLONIZATION seminar
Kathrin Golda-Pongratz
Beginning with the term Metropolis –when appearing in a manual of post-colonialism would be described as the parent state of a colony in Greek history or as part of the mother country and certainly as the key term to the concept of centre and periphery– most of our terms of reference are part of a post-colonial discourse when addressing the problems of global culture and the relationships between local identities and global forces. This is basically due to the fact that classical modernity theories ceased to be able to explain certain contemporary multidirectional cultural phenomena.
Discussions on cultural identities, migrations, visible and invisible borders and the concept of place mark our –western and predominantly Eurocentric– contemporary thinking and urban living together. The experience as well as the traumata of colonization are aggressively or elusively persisting, especially in the context of both major capital cities and borderland peripheries. Finally, we all end up being from a colonizing or a colonized nation and might be witnessing the moment, when these roles will be turning around.
The seminar aims at questioning and rethinking current political, cultural and spatial concepts against the setting of the experience of colonization and, at the same time, at discovering and analyzing traces of de- and recolonization.
Based on a first terminological settling of ideas at the beginning of the seminar, three major trains of thought or approaches will seek to address questions and discover traces: first, ideological, political-economic, nation-related concepts; second, social and cultural aspects and their tracing back in an ethnographic approach; and, third, spatial, architectural and urbanistic aspects.
Understanding decolonization as an act or process of dismantling and revealing colonial powers, it will be a content of the seminar to discover its different forms: how western colonial geography is questioned; where the hierarchy of cultures is transformed and the concept of alterity or otherness leads into new forms of hybrid cultures; how the concept of place and displacement might be reinterpreted and how spatial aspects of colonial power relations are confronted with certain strategies of subversion.
On the other hand –embedded into the expanding power of multinational companies and global monetary institutions, a rising duality of the world and an increasing obsession with protection– processes of recolonization have emerged that, with different tools, turn difference or otherness into inequality. The phenomenon will be studied on various scales: how the dynamics of naming are a primary colonizing process, as they appropriate and capture the place in language; what role old and new symbols have and how they determine public space; what forms of urbanism of exclusion and containment can be made out and how large urbanistic interventions and the creation of entire new cities, that we might denominate as programmatic urban development, follow a contemporary interpretation of colony and colonization.
Geographical focuses will be set on the Iberian peninsula and its major port cities Barcelona and Lisbon, from where the conquerors departed to the Americas; on North and South American cities and the running fortified fence between Mexico and the United States; on the European borders, especially the Spanish enclaves in Morocco and the highly protected border that separates the sanctuarized territories from the underdeveloped and developing world.
Facing the flood of cayucos heading from sub-Saharan Africa towards Europe and the subsequent migrational pressure on Europe’s southern edges on the coastlines of the Mediterranean sea, it might make sense to reinterpret the meaning of Seneca’s prophecy for contemporary times: An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed.