Discussion

James Clifford is Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clifford has held visiting professorships at Yale and Stanford University, in Paris, London, and Berlin. He is an important historical critic of European systems of thought, particularly the concepts of “culture,” “man,” the “primitive,” and the “exotic.” His work has combined perspectives from a variety of disciplines. With books like Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986) and The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988), he played a central role in the debates of the mid-1980s that changed anthropological research practices and intellectual dispositions. His most recent book is Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

Susanne Leeb is an art historian and Professor for Contemporary Art with a focus on transcultural art histories at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, from where she is also directing the Kunstraum (in collaboration with Ulf Wuggenig) and the Leuphana Arts Program. She published her PhD The Art of the Others: “World Art” and the Anthropological Configuration of Modernity in 2015. In addition, she is editor of the section “Transcultural Art History” of the online review journal Kunstform, co-editing the book series PolYpeN with b_books, and is part of the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst. In 2017, she co-edited the issues Wir sind Ihr (We are you) and Idiom, both of which include her essays.

Kerstin Stakemeier
To the biography...

Part of the conference Deep Time and Crisis, c. 1930