Unsettled Earth: The Longue Durée of German Coloniality

Compelled by Germany’s memory culture, this presentation insists on an arc of genocidal German statecraft foundationalized by imperial genocide in Namibia and extending into the geopolitical present. This presentation builds on Samudzi's work which engages German imperialism, Namibian postcoloniality and the 1904-1908 Ovaherero and Nama genocide.

The presentation will be followed by a conversation with Bafta Sarbo examining how these colonial continuities shape and inform racialization and policing within Germany itself.

Zoé Samudzi is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at Ohio State University and a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work contends with genocide memory and denialism, mythologies of the postcolonial African state and the politics of visuality.

Bafta Sarbo studies social sciences and works on the relationship between Marxism and anti-racism. She is politically active, among other things on the board of the Initiative of Black People in Germany, where she works on racial profiling, migration policy and racism in Germany.

Jule Ulbricht is a historian and researcher. She is currently a doctoral fellow in the Global Intellectual History graduate school at Freie University and works on theories and histories of capitalism, war, labor and ideas of circulation in post-war global economy.