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I think Afropean intends to highlight more clearly this connection between Africa and Europe, by erasing the AfricanEuropean and make it as one single word. I am not the ?rst one using it but, when I wrote it, I had never seen it before. Now I see other persons, in the fashion industry or pop culture for instance, using it, claiming the Afropean as a unique way of de?ning the Black diasporic identities in Europe. According to you, what is the singularity of the Black experience in Europe? The particularity comes precisely from this colonial amnesia: an extraordinary denial scenario that regards the Black body as alien. For instance in the USA, when a Black person is seen, you automatically think he is Afro-American, whereas here when you see a Black person, you see him as being an African, not me obviously, but the o?cial racism in Europe that places this Black body as alien. The absurdity comes from us having always been here in Europe, with more than 800 years of African presence in the Iberian peninsula for instance... The issue is speci?cally strong here, in Germany, where philosophers like Kant and Hegel have been instrumental in the racialization of the world, or in the epistemic separation of Egypt from the rest of Africa. Those constructions are taken for granted in all academic works; people accept those notions without questioning them… Two amazing essays by African philosophers discuss this: Olufemi Taiwo s Exorcising Hegel s Ghost: Africa s Challenge to Philosophy and The Color of Reason by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Kant wrote about races and anthropology, but he never set foot out of Königsberg! And yet racialized the entire planet… This is the foundation of German and world philosophy and aesthetics, imagine that! Decoloniality addresses the singularity of the Black experience in Europe. Indeed, this diaspora and the trajectories of those existences in continental Europe have always been silenced, as well as the involvement in the enslavement trade, such as the Scandinavian involvement in that matter. How do artistic practices resonate with this experience? In all di?erent ways… Through historical re-enactments and epistemic re-appropriations of hegemonic spaces that are considered neutral… Those spaces are being intervened ? for example ? in the work Black Magic at the White House by Jeannette Ehlers, for instance, where in a voudoun dance, she appears and disappears in the o?cial summerhouse of the prime minister of Denmark, a house that was built with ?nancial gains from the enslavement trade. What does it take to organize such a transdisciplinary event, bringing together artists, scholars, activists? A lot o f madness! I am myself a transdisciplinary person and I believe in the dismantling of disciplines. I have met people that are knowledgeable on Black studies that do not necessarily write about art, and my concern is to bring together those persons to discuss the work of Black diaspora artists. In their works, there are di?erent levels of meaning that can be decoded properly in this arena by specialists on Black global histories, as opposed to the specialists in the art world that don t get it or would put it in a special box where all this knowledge has been codi?ed in a racist, demeaning and patronizing way. For them, only art that comes from Europe is universal... The rest has to be Caribbean or African or you name it... ? which I claim absolutely. Call me a Caribbean theorist, or please call me a Dominican theorist, I love that.
Volume 5 July - September 2013
www.creativeindustriesexchange.com
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