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Join us for the book launch of Katrin Sieg's brand new book, titled
Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum.
In this book, Sieg examines efforts by European museums to investigate colonialism as part of an unprocessed past, confront its presence, and urge repair. A flurry of exhibitions and the overhaul of numerous large museums in the last decade signal that an emergent colonial memory culture is now reaching broader publics. Exhibitions pose the question of what Europeans owe to those they colonized.
Katrin Sieg will discuss German museums' efforts to come to terms with the country's colonial past and reckon with colonialism's legacy of racism. How are museums engaging with decolonizing debates, changing exhibitions, and collaborating with curators and communities in the Global South? Sieg will discuss Dr Imani Tafari-Ama's path-breaking exhibition at the Flensburg Maritime Museum for which she curated the acclaimed Rum, Sweat and Tears exhibition as a critical response to Danish colonialism in the Virgin Islands.
Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum shows how museums can help visitors mourn historic violence and identify the contemporary agents, beneficiaries, victims, survivors, and resisters of colonial presence. At the same time, the book treats the museum as part of the racialized power relations that activists, academics, and artists have long protested against. This book asks whether museums have made the dream of activists, academics, and artists to build equitable futures more acceptable and more durable—or whether in packaging that dream for general audiences they curtail it. Confronting colonial violence, this book argues, pushes Europeans to face the histories of racism and urges them to envision antiracism at the global scale.
Followed by drink reception.
RSVP
Dr. Katrin Sieg is Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Washington, Seattle, and taught at UC San Diego and Indiana University, Bloomington, before joining Georgetown University in 2002. Her research focuses on German and European culture, postcolonial and critical race studies, and feminist studies.
Pan-Africanist and Womanist Scholar
Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama, is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. During 2016-17, she served as International Fellow and Curator at the Flensburg Maritime Museum and was a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Anthropology Department at Bridgewater State University, MA. She is the author of the book,
Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line;
Lead in the Veins (poetry) and
Up for Air: This Half has never been Told! (an award-winning novel). She publishes a column in
The Gleaner, Jamaica’s leading newspaper.
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