Black Lives Matter = All Lives Matter
On the connections in our (post) modern world
The murder of 46-year-old African American George Perry Floyd on May 25, 2020 by executive power in Minneapolis (in the state of Minnesota) triggered a wave of outrage and indignation that continues to this day, not only within American civil society but worldwide and especially in Austria. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged as a reaction and response to this straw that broke the camel’s back of American shame. In Austria alone, around 50,000 people went to the Human Rights Square in Vienna to protest. The Austrian police even had an electronic board mounted on a police car with the words “Black Lives Matter” to show solidarity. The Black Lives Matter movement has led civil societies around the world not only to question the foundations of American societies, but above all to question and re-examine the foundations of their respective societies and, above all, to shake and shake the cultural history of (nano)racism, exclusion and economic exploitation.
In such a geopolitical situation, culture, art, literature and science have (more than ever) a role to play in connecting societies and peoples. Their task is to inscribe a humane idea of humanity into the social. The AFRIEUROTEXT initiative association is firmly convinced that culture, art, literature and science not only build bridges between cultures, but also create social peace. Austria is an EU country and maintains different relationships with other countries in the world. It is therefore an added value for our valuable social and cultural field of Austria if the connections in our world are made visible to people living in Austria in a differentiated and understandable way in the sense of a culture of dialogue, exchange and peace. This year’s event program also aims to incorporate the new questions about our coexistence raised by the COVID pandemic into the debates. Because this pandemic, which seems to establish a differentiated coexistence, implicitly raises questions about our current world: questions of the fair redistribution of (health) resources, questions of (inter)dependencies, questions of the right to (survival).
The aim of this project is therefore to raise awareness among the broad Austrian and European civil society – in the sense of educational participation – of the connections in our present through cultural, scientific and artistic events of different designs and types. This enables traditional, encrusted ways of thinking to be broken down. It is about triggering a process of rethinking.
This project is embedded in the vision and mission of AFRIEUROTEXT to make a lasting contribution to a culture of exchange, dialogue, peace and differentiated thinking and action throughout Austria and Europe. AFRIEUROTEXT places great value on texts and the “textuality” of our world. This is one of the essential characteristics of a democratic culture.
COMING SOON: WHEN DEMOCRACY CARRIES THE COLONY WITHIN ITSELF AND THE COLONY WEARS DEMOCRACY AS A MASK
September 30, 2021, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
(Online lecture and discussion – the link to log in will be here soon
The overthrow of President Alpha Conde on Sunday, September 5, 2021 in the West African country of Guinea Conakry by an elite military force that he himself founded to originally fight terrorism is currently causing turmoil in civil society in Guinea Conackry, across the entire African continent and around the world. Guinea Conakry is the world’s first producer of bauxite, a red-colored raw material that is essential in the production of aluminum. The effects of this precarious situation in the resource-rich country of Guinea Conakry can be felt in stock exchanges around the world, where the bauxite and aluminum index has fallen to skyrocketing. China is the country that consumes the most aluminium from Guinea, followed by EU countries. On the other hand, we live in an age in which using the figure of the culturally other or foreigner to spread propaganda has become a job like any other. In an age of political and psychological fantasies of a society without the other, hostility has become the fundamental feature of contemporary democratic imagination, or rather, weakness. In his latest essay, entitled Politiques de l’inimitié (2016) (Politics of Hostility), the Cameroonian historian and political scientist Achille Mbembe delves into the pharmacy of the psychiatrist from Martinique (Frantz Fanon) to propose a psychoanalytic cure for our present. Achille Mbembe’s thinking and writing also addresses conditions that have been entrenched in US society during and since the era of the slave trade. The motto of this panel discussion is “Dialogue, acceptance and tolerance as guarantees of peaceful coexistence”. The aim of the panel discussion is to explore ways out of the ongoing logic of hostility in order to rethink the political, cultural and economic sensitivities and constellations of our present day in a new and different way.
This online event takes place within the framework of the AFRIEUROTEXT project “INTERDEPENDENCIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY (2021)”
THE FOLLOWING EVENTS HAVE ALREADY TAKEN PLACE:
Event 1: POLITICS OF ENMAGERY or WHOM “GERMAN” (IN-)VESTIGATES THE BUSH
20 May 2021, 5 p.m.
(Online lecture and discussion)
The peoples of Africa are “among those who have also suffered the violence of history in their flesh, their conscience and their soul. The visible and invisible consequences of this long history continue. Because of this long experience, through the voices of our writers, poets, thinkers, artists and intellectuals, we have something urgent and precious that we can and want to share with all of humanity – concerning human experience of suffering, spiritual healing and reparation in the world.” These passages come from the letter African intellectual (from May 2020) addressed to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier, on the occasion of the so-called Mbembe debate that flared up in Germany in spring 2020 – triggered by baseless and insane accusations of anti-Semitism by Mr. Felix Klein, the Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life, against the Cameroonian historian and political scientist Prof. Achille Mbembe.
The cultural scientist Daniel Bitouh and the publicist Simon INOU had translated this letter from French into German and are taking this online discussion as an opportunity to get to the heart of the matter. This online event was embedded in the double AFRIEUROTEXT projects “3RRR -Restitution – Rehabilitation and Reconciliation” on the one hand and the project “Interdependences in the 21st Century” (2021) on the other. Furthermore, this online discussion was part of the lecture series entitled “The German debate about Achille Mbembe in context. Highlights on memory cultures and history policies in the 21st century” at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck.
Speaker:
Daniel Bitouh, literary and cultural scientist, director of AFRIEUROTEXT Vienna
Moderator:
Eric Burton, assistant professor for global history, Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck