Decolonization in Action Podcast Decolonization in Action Podcast

During this final episode of the season, Edna Bonhomme spoke with Zoé Samudzi.

This is Edna's last episode with the podcast after which Edna will continue to focus more on writing essays and books. You can get updates about Edna's work from www.ednabonhomme.com, Twitter @jacobinoire, or Substack Newsletter Mobile Fragments https://ednabonhomme.substack.com/


Zoé Samudzi is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Inquiry, Verso, The New Republic, Daily Beast, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and other outlets. She is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. Along with William C. Anderson, she is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press). Samudzi was a 2017 Public Imagination Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California San Francisco.

References
As Black as Resistance: https://www.akpress.org/as-black-as-resistance.html

The Holocaust Analogy: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3908-the-holocaust-analogy

Looking After: https://www.artforum.com/slant/zoe-samudzi-on-museums-and-human-remains-86153

The Paradox of Plenty: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/otobong-nkanga-2-1234583810/

For some info on the Herero and Nama genocide, you can read more about it here: https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/herero-and-nama-genocide

lyonga and Lucas Odahara join edna bonhomme to talk about collectivizing around anticolonial activism of the Coalition of Cultural Workers against the Humboldt Forum (CCWAH) and BARAZANI.berlin and how their activism is oriented towards creating a space of resistance and community, acting in solidarity with long-term calls for repatriation.

The Coalition of Cultural Workers against the Humboldt Forum (CCWAH) formed in the summer of 2020. It is an open and constantly growing alliance of cultural workers based primarily in Berlin. BARAZANI.berlin uses the possibilities of virtual space to locate itself on the empty Schlossplatz in the center of Berlin. It occupies the lost wasteland of 2012 and uses it as a place of resistance; as a place of artistic practice; as a place of listening and creative utopia, where decolonial perspectives meet and are negotiated.

Over the past year, CCWAH and BARAZANI.berlin have been running together the physical space Spreeufer. A space of resistance and community on the riverbank opposite the Humboldt Forum.

https://ccwah.info
https://barazani.berlin

In this episode Edna Bonhomme is in conversation with Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro. Mba Bikoro's work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles & colonial memory focusing on queer indigenous and feminist biopolitics. The artist creates immersive performative environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records. She has developed frameworks of rituals and healing in performance work that often reveal the entangled colonial histories of migration at site-specific spaces to dismantle prejudices and organise accessible levels of consciousness through testimonial archives of local communities to build independant emancipatory tools for liberation, education, consciousness, intimacy and healing.
She is lecturer in Curating Black Visual Cultures & Philosophy at TransArt Institute New York & Fine Arts practice at the University of Liverpool, artistic & curatorial supervisor of the Artists in Training Programme at the UdK and the University of Bergen Norway. She is Artistic Director of Nyabinghi_Lab Collective, recently curating the performance programme 'Radical Mutations' at Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre Berlin with Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio and "Free State Of Barackia: 150 Years of Decolonial Urbanisms, Solidarities and New Berlin Utopias". She moderates the annual Berlinale Film Festival & currently has an Artistic Fellowship from the Goethe Institute In Bahia Salvador and is the TURN2 Award Fellow Curator at NCAI Nairobi. Her work was recently published in ARTE Twists series "Our Colonial Heritage" and Deutsche Welle TV in a series of short films on German Colonialism and Black Resistance. Her work has been featured in several international exhibitions and Biennales including the Havana Biennale (2019), Dak'art Biennale (2012; 2018), Venice Biennale (2016) and La Otra Biennale in Bogota (2013) and RAVVY Performance Biennale Yaoundé (2018).

Fenja and Alina from the Black Student Union (BSU) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin join edna bonhomme to share about organizing the BSU at the university. Expanding on the BSU starting in December 2020 and their first actions which included meeting with the Mittelbau (or department administration) at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Alina and Fenja also share more about the BSU’s current action of an open letter of complaint to hold the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin accountable for anti-Black racism on all levels including the institute’s colonial inception and foundation as well as the ongoing coloniality of its structure and curriculum, everyday student experiences of racism and discrimination, university hiring practices, uses of racialized language within the classroom as well as the German education at large: Open letter of complaint about the conditions in the Seminar for African Studies of the Institute for Asian and African Studies (IAAW) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Fenja and Alina also expand on BSU’s ongoing work which includes launching a mentoring program for new students focused on creating networks of care and ways of sharing experiences at the HU, building community forms of support and exchange, working towards creating a safe pathways for Black students, and publishing stories about being a part of BSU. Fenja and Alina also share more about organizational uses of Blackness and histories of Blackness with an emphasis on contextualizing Blackness, discussing political Blackness in the UK, Blackness in Germany, Blackness in Nigeria, and Black Student Unions in the US (Mississippi Student Union) as well as direct-action, Black student-led organizations (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) during the Freedom Summer campaigns of 1964 and the US Civil Rights Movement.

BSU Website:
https://bsuhu.wordpress.com/

Open Letter of Complaint:
https://www.change.org/p/frau-prof-dr-kunst-wir-fordern-diskriminierungskritische-afrikawissenschaften-an-der-hu-berlin

Discussing the necessity for an ever-expanding intersectional climate justice movement, edna bonhomme and Indigenous lawyer and climate activist Yi Yi Prue are in conversation for this episode, expanding on Prue’s legal actions that took Germany to court for global warming, holding the German state accountable for the ongoing climate catastrophe, a crisis created by the Global North that has already created devastation and unlivable conditions around the world especially in the Global South. Prue shares more about her legal practice in Dhaka, Bangladesh, her journey as a climate activist, and her commitment to practicing climate justice.

Yi Yi Prue is an Indigenous lawyer and climate activist from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prue advocates for the Indigenous perspectives of the Indigenous Marma and Munda Communities of Bangladesh and Nepal, who are heavily affected by climate change-related catastrophes, that are the result of historic colonial and current neocolonial exploitation. In January 2020, she successfully led an appeal at the German Institutional Court against the insufficient German climate protection measures.

Edna Bonhomme interviewed Shay-Akil McLean, Ph.D. (@Hood_Biologist. Shay-Akil is a Queer Trans masculine & gender queer man racialized as Black, on stolen Indigenous land, an educator, organizer, writer, public intellectual, human biologist, anthropologist & sociologist. Shay-Akil earned his Ph.D. from the UIUC School of Integrative Biology’s Program for Ecology, Evolution, & Conservation (PEEC). Shay-Akil studies Du Boisian sociology, STS/HASTS, race/ism, human health demography, evolutionary genetics, & theoretical population genetics. He holds degrees in biological anthropology (BA & MA) & sociology (BA & MA) which he uses to study bioethics, medical ethics, philosophy of biology, population genetics, evolutionary theory, health inequities, & knowledge production. As a scholar, Shay-Akil studies how systems of human practices produce the differential distribution of health, illness, quality of life, and death. He is also the founder of the free political education website decolonizeallthethings.com & the free scientific ethics website decolonizeallthescience.com.