Spectral-White: Keynotes
Rosalind C. Morris, Ciraj Rassool
Admission included in the exhibition ticket
4 pm
Rethinking the Ethnographic in Museums in South Africa and Germany: Mimicry, Violence and the Challenges of Decolonization
In his keynote Ciraj Rassool, Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, discusses the rethinking of the ethnographic in museums in South Africa and Germany as well as its relationship with physical anthropology. How do these processes connect with demands for restitution and decolonization?
5 pm
No Looking Back: Julius Lips, Laughter and the Limits of Mimesis
In her keynote Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, considers the reception and legacies of Julius Lips’s book The Savage Hits Back (1937), in and for the critique of Eurocentrism. Two main issues will be addressed: on the one hand, the notion of mimesis and mimicry, and on the other, the force of laughter. By examining discourses of Black radicalism within which laughter is not reducible to the alienation effect of mimicry (in parody, satire or mere mockery), the lecture will pose the question of whether the notion of the return gaze and thus inversive ethnography, can escape the longing for recognition and the self-consolidation of whiteness.
