#decolonization

#decolonization

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

Eskil, one of the sons of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982), notes that his father was at once well-known and not known. Lam's life, like his work, was complex and therefore difficult to summarize and classify, which led him to be treated for a long time as a marginal figure within the history of Western art, despite being one of the pioneers of modernism. Now, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York wants to pay him the well-deserved tribute he never received in his lifetime.

As a framing term, just transition offers a critical awareness of the historical context of colonialism and extraction, as well as the baked-in systemic violence of our current systems and the necessary personal transformations required for tangible, meaningful change. Like any term, "just transition" is at risk of being co-opted or sanitized. There is also no consensus on what a just transition is.

Decolonization does not happen by changing a few street names, political scientist and human rights activist Joshua Kwesi Aikins told DW after it was announced on Friday that a central Berlin street will not have its racist name changed after all. The road had been slated to be renamed in honor of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Black German Enlightenment philosopher, who in 1734 became the first Africa-born scholar to receive a European doctorate. That was in 2020.

This volume brings together abstract theoretical questions regarding liberation with descriptions of concrete practices of liberation-struggles for change that have produced tangible manifestations and yet reflect theory.