Episode 5 - Postcolonial Europes.

Episode 5 is an invitation to shift the gaze and think about Europe as a postcolonial space. Together with Miguel Cardina and Gerlov van Engelenhoven, we delve into the implications that colonialism has had (and continues to have) on Europe’s identities and current realities, as well as contestations thereof. We also address the issue of (post)colonial memory, exploring both its meaning and its relevance for what is commonly assumed to make Europe “Europe”.

Bios:

Miguel Cardina is a historian and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He was an European Research Council (ERC) Grantee - project: «CROME - Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence. The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times» (2017-2023). He is the author or co-author of several books, book chapters or papers on colonialism, anticolonialism and the colonial wars; political ideologies in the sixties and seventies; and the dynamics between history and memory.

Gerlov van Engelenhoven is an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). His research concerns postcolonial memory and heritage, law and culture, and cultural interaction. He also teaches various courses on these topics. His research methodology combines participatory research with discourse analysis and (auto)ethnography.

Further Information & Readings:

12:00 Postcolonial Memory-Cultural/Collective Memory Studies

• Talk by Sakiru Adebayo
• Postcolonial Memory – Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform
• also see below: Book by Gerlov

16:00 Former Holocaust Transit Camps in the Netherlands being used as “Repatriation camps”: Repatriation Camp – Kamp Westerbork

20:00 Activism-removal Debate about the Jan Pieterszoon Statue in Hoorn. Netherlands: Statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn

24:00 Amílcar Cabral’s impact on Portuguese democracy

• Interview with Peter Karibe Mendy on Amílcar Cabral,  The Socialist Agronomist Who Helped End Portuguese Colonialism
• Maria Poblet on Revolutionary Democracy, Class-Consciousness, and Cross-Class Movement Building: Lessons from Amílcar Cabral

25:45 The term Slow Violence was coined by Rob Nixon in 2011: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Definition: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” 

31:00 Banda Islands Genocide

• Katharine McGregor and Ana Dragojlovic (2024): Songs from another land: Decolonizing memories of colonialism and the nutmeg trade
• Multimedia journal: https://thebandajournal.org/

34:05 Gloria Wacker (2016): White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

36:45 Herbert Marcuse (1969): Repressive Tolerance

46:45 Notion of the Combatant. Book from Inês Nascimento Rodrigues and Miguel Cardina (2023): Who is the combatant? A diachronic reading based on Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe

50:00 Gerlov on Silence: ‘There’s a great deal to be said about silence’

• See also Book (2023): Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands: Meaningful Voices, Meaningful Silences

1:01:00 Museum on the History of Dutch Slavery