Michaela Ott

Clarissa Vierke

Patrick Oloko

Peter Simatei

This book features writing by 17 authors from Germany and from African and Latin American countries on highly diverse aesthetic phenomena as seen from their own different points of view. The texts in this volume all deal with the imperative of ‘decolonization’: they try to highlight aesthetic strategies for the (re)discovery of unthematized, misappropriated, transcultural and even transcontinental histories and memories and aesthetic practices that are absent from or too little perceived within national consciousnesses. Novels, poems and musical performances from the East African region are analysed as intertwined histories of the Indian Ocean and its different languages. Artworks of the Black Atlantic and perceptions of Africa are discussed from, for example, Brazilian perspectives. Within the German context, decolonisation strategies in exhibition practices in ethnological or art museums developed by Nigerian artists are evaluated; new terms such as ‘dividuation’ are proposed to describe these contemporary composite-cultural entanglements, and so on. A stimulating, wide-ranging and heterogeneous portrait of contemporary interwoven world cultures!

Modes of Relating

Decolonial Aesthetics II

This book offers an epistemological critique of the concept of the individual and of individuality. It argues that because of our bio(techno)logical entanglements with non-human others, billions of microorganisms and our multiple (in)voluntary participations in socio(techno)logical processes, we have to conceive of ourselves no longer as individuals, but as dividuations. This dividual character which enforces simultaneous and multidirectional participations in different spheres is also apt for other living beings, for entities such as the nation state, for single cultures, production processes and works of art. The critique of individuality in the book is also elaborated in critical re-readings of classical philosophical texts from Plato up to today; the new concept of dividuation is a modified and semantically enriched version of certain concepts of the French philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze.

Theories of Participation

Dividuations

Thomas Weber

Cultural communities are shaped and produced by ongoing processes of translation understood as aesthetic media practices - such is the premise of this volume. Taking on perspectives from cultural, literary and media studies as well as postcolonial theory, the chapters shed light on composite cultural and heterotypical translation processes across various media, such as texts, films, graphic novels, theater and dance performances. Thus, the authors explore the cultural contexts of diverse media milieus in order to explain how cultural communities come into being.

Michaela Ott

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