Julia Willén

This project examines the position of the white subject in Africa. Specifically, it examines Nadine Gordimer’s exploration of the notion of whiteness and white Africanity in her fiction and prose, as well as her investigation of the oppressor’s consciousness, and her negotiation and interrogation of her own position as a white South African. In essays and speeches she intervened in debates and voiced feelings and apprehensions that concerned the futurity of whiteness in a shifting political and social context. As I argue, these interventions were made from a new emerging subject position that resulted from the social and political constraints of apartheid and colonialism, inhabiting the interstice of an old, given colonial order, and the decolonial processes of the antiracist, anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles in Africa and Europe which was bringing the colonial era to an end. Through her fiction writing she was able to shape this subject position, which lacked representation and hence existence within the dominant political discourse. Projected into her fiction, the subject position emerges as an object of knowledge within the intellectual history of South Africa.

This project suggests a new research concept. It assumes that aesthetic expressions offer unique methods for inquiring into political emergence. Aesthetic works own this potentiality because they register sociopolitical transformation through voice, embodied experience and subjective expression, comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant, in situations of antagonism and political violence.

– How are collective protests, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism – and their mutualtensions and interdependencies – articulated in contemporary aesthetic presentations and performances?
– In comparison to disciplinary research in the social sciences, what do such aesthetically rendered accounts tell us about the political emergence of collective protest, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism?
– In which ways can the aesthetic dimension improve our understanding of the concept and practices of democracy, in an era of social rearrangement and computational control of collective behavior?

The project engages aesthetics to traverse epistemological boundaries and enables methodological convergences between the social sciences and the aesthetic humanities.

European societies have recently turned toward more austere political regimes. Evidence of this can be seen in budget cuts, management of the labor market and restrictions of welfare systems, as well as in new regimes of migration and citizenship. Against the backdrop of such processes, this project investigates how a current politics of austerity affects our cultural memory. This project seeks to extract the correlation between how minorities, migrants and their descendants are treated by present policies and how memories and experiences of migrants, minorities and colonized peoples are treated in historiography and historical pedagogy. The project is unique in the sense that it brings together social scientists analyzing ethnic relations and migration in contemporary Europe and historians studying Europe?s history and cultural memory. It is also potentially path breaking as it crosses borders between languages and academic traditions and initiates a truly inter-European academic discussion on scholarly and intellectual concerns that are deeply shared by most national communities of Europe but usually studied only in the contexts of the various nation states.