Calendar

Venue:
Rehearsal room, Room 304, HMT Leipzig
Grassistraße 8
04107 Leipzig

The lecture marks the start of the joint internationalisation programme organised by HGB and HMT Leipzig in collaboration with the Association of Binational Families and Partnerships (iaf e.V.). The programme focuses on so-called ‘contact zones’: spaces in which different positions, experiences and forms of knowledge converge, and in which conflicts and frictions become the starting point for negotiation and reflection.

How can a practice of mediation be conceived in a post-Nazi migration society that neither ignores differences nor attributes and reproduces them? How can spaces of reference and discourse be expanded without, in doing so, levelling out power relations? In the 1990s, the postcolonial theorists James Clifford and Mary Louise Pratt developed the concept of the ‘contact zone’. By this they describe social spaces in which different social and cultural positions converge and must coexist and be negotiated on a daily basis – with varying degrees of conflict. Against this backdrop, the concept (even though it was originally intended to address colonial and postcolonial situations) lends itself to describing shared spaces in a society of migration. But contact zones are zones of conflict. And so my paper focuses on contact zones in which it is possible to ‘face up to conflicts’ – in which disputes are neither avoided nor played out as resentment. If we take the concept of the contact zone seriously, this opens up a space in which no one has to leave their sense of belonging behind, but nor can anyone be reduced to it alone.