The final conference of the BMBF Research Project “The Americas as Space of Entanglements” will be held from 14 December 2018 to 15 December 2018 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University. The idea of the conference is to capture the Americas as space of entanglement in a diachronic and synchronic way, to ponder beginnings, developments, networks, alliances, routes and ruptures in the interrelations between South and North, concerned with time and temporalities as expressed in utopias and dystopian visions, heritage politics and practices, and the related dynamics in the Americas. The purpose is to explore past and present forms of knowledge, memory, exchange, translation, negotiation, alliance, and vision that create(d) hegemonic structures and those that push(ed) for the emancipation from hegemonic hierarchies in the Americas.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2018

9:00 Registration, Coffee

9:15 Welcome, Opening of the Conference

9:30 Keynote: Javier Sanjinés (Michigan): “Whither Modernity? Latin
America, an ‘Entanglement of Spaces?’”

10:30 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 PANEL I Entangled Temporalities: Concepts and Politics of Time
and Memory in the Americas

Joachim Michael (Bielefeld): “Present Pasts in Latin America: Literary Challenges of Time”

Carolina Crespo (Buenos Aires): “Memorias en el espacio público. Itinerarios en el tiempo y el espacio en torno a los monumentos de Juana Azurduy y Cristóbal Colón en Argentina”

Heike Raphael-Hernández (Würzburg): “Dreaming about the Right to Freedom: Ernst Bloch`s not-yet and Early Eighteenth Century Slave Societies in the Danish West Indies and Dutch Suriname”

Chair: Kirsten Kramer

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:15 PANEL II Addressing Persistent Colonial Hierarchies and Decolonial Futures

Claudia Rauhut (Berlin/Leipzig): “Envisioning a Shared Future of Global Reparatory Justice: Why Caribbean Activists Claim Slavery Reparations from Europe”

Ulrike Schmieder (Hannover): “Memories of Slavery in France and the French Afro-Antillean Diaspora and the Entanglements with British and US-American Images of Slavery and Debates on Reparations”

Julia Roth (Bielefeld): “‘The First Global Players’: Re-Thinking Germany from the Americas”

Moderation: Albert Manke

15:15-15-45 Coffee Break

15:45-17:00 Roundtable: “Hip Hop, Education, and Social Transformation”

Nicole Schwabe, Julian Voloj (graphic novel author), Rebeca Lane (rapper)

17:00-17:15 Break

17:15-18:15 PANEL III Memories, Heritage and Retro-Topias: Idealizing, Commodifying, and Re-Viving the Past

Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld): “Ahead to the Past: Refeudalization in the Americas”

Giselle Anatol (Kansas): “Zootopia’s Utopia: Distorted Visions of Racial Harmony”

Chair: Daniela Noll-Opitz

19:00 Kulturamt Bielefeld (Kavalleriestraße 17, 33602 Bielefeld)
Reception, Rap-Performance Rebeca Lane

20:00 Dinner (in town: L’arabesque, August-Bebel-Straße 47, 33602 Bielefeld)

afterwards: Party with DJ Matti Steinitz @Cutie (Große-Kurfürsten-Straße 81, 33615 Bielefeld)

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2018

10:30-12:45 PANEL IV Utopian Practices – Past and Present

Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld): “Utopia Reloaded? Political Art Practices and Public Space from Zapatista to Occupy”

Jeroen Dewulf (Berkeley): “’It’s our Duty to Help Each Other’: On the Afro-Iberian Substratum in African American Fraternal History”

Yolanda Campos (Guadalajara): “La utopía posrevolucionaria en el cine de Emilio Fernández y los murales de Diego Rivera”

Cornelia Giebeler (Bielefeld): “De- and Re-Constructing Family by InterAmerican Mobility”

Chair: Yaatsil Guevara

12:45-13:45 Lunch

13:45-16:15 PANEL V Revising Histories of Entanglement in the Americas

Film Screening
“Allen Report: Retracing Transnational African Methodism” by Alanna Lockward (Santo Domingo) with introduction by the director

Discussion, Questions and Answers

Moderation: Julia Roth

16:15 Break

16:15-18:00 PANEL VI The Future in Question: Re-envisioning the Social

Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld): “Decolonizing the Anthropocene”

Rüdiger Kunow (Potsdam): “Preemption as Neoliberal Utopia”

Paula Diehl (Bielefeld): “Populism and Narratives of the Past/Visions of the Future”

Chair: Mirko Petersen

18:00 Sum-up, closing remarks, end of conference

19:00 Dinner (in town: Kachelhaus, Hagenbruchstraße 13, 33602 Bielefeld, self-pay)

For further information visit: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/cias/entangled_americas/index.html