NAB XVIII 2019

Current Affairs
artwork itself. Th e project is inspired by
new formalist approaches and their renewed
attention to form as organisations
or arrangements that afford representation
and portability across materials and
contexts (Levine 2015).
Multiple Artworks –
Multiple Indian Ocean
Research Team: Ute Fendler,
Rémi Tchokothe, Clarissa Vierke
Th e project focuses on the multi-layered
co-presence and circulation of verbal arts
in relation to narratives, imagery, and
sound travelling in the Indian Ocean.
Taking into account networks of literary
multilingualism, and going beyond the
monolingual straitjacket of modern literary
histories and disciplinary boundaries
that partition Luso- and Francophone literature
from Swahili and Arabic, the project
adopts a multi-sited and multilingual
approach focusing on the multilingual
(foremost French, Portuguese, Swahili, and
Arabic) and multi-medial practices of authors,
the dynamic configuration of imagery,
narratives and sounds in specific works,
and their relationship to other media and
art forms (primarily fi lm, music, and installation).
Secondly, beyond any dichotomy
of centre and periphery, the circulation
of sounds, imagery, and narratives across
various sites of research (chiefly Comoros,
Mozambique, Mauritius, La Réunion, Zanzibar,
and Oman) show the entanglements
and co-constitution of French, Portuguese,
and Swahili literary productions.
Research Section:
Knowledges
Karakul Circulations: Colonial
Economies and the Un-Making of
Disciplinary Knowledges in Germany
and Namibia
Research Team: Katharina Schramm,
Memory Biwa, Eleanor Schaumann
Human-animal relations play an important
role in colonial histories. Domestic
animals such as sheep have had a profound
impact on colonial and postcolonial
landscapes, politics, and epistemic practices.
Th is research project examines the
circulations of people, sheep, and knowledges
in and through post-colonial spaces
and timescales. Th ese Karakul sheep circulations
mark and transgress boundaries
of race and species in multiple ways. Bred
on an experimental farm in Germany in
the early 1900s, the sheep were exported
to the colony of South West Africa, where
they played a major role in colonial settlement
and economies. Th ey were also crucial
agents in scientifi c controversies on
agriculture, Mendelian genetics, and race.
Th e project’s transdisciplinary approach
analyses the relations between bodies
(human and sheep), representations
(documents, scientifi c publications, and
memories), and knowledges (local, tacit,
taxonomic, scientifi c, and silenced). Th e
ways in which Karakul circulations were
instrumental in producing a racialized or
nonhuman other, while simultaneously
challenging conventional species boundaries,
are examined.
Colonial Letters and
the Contact of Knowledges
Research Team: Eric A. Anchimbe,
Glory Essien Otung
14
Letters were one of the major means of
communication during the 19th-20th
century British colonialism of Africa.
Th rough them, the instructions, intentions,
decisions, complaints, justifications,
and agenda of resident British
colonial officers, local colonial administrators
and collaborators, colonial offi
cials in Britain, and colonised subjects
(individuals, villages) were transmitted
across time and space. Th is research
project studies, from a predominantly
linguistic perspective, the instantiations
of colonial contact and postcolonial
heritages that are embodied in,
and transmitted through, letters written
during British colonisation of Southern
Cameroons (1916-1961). Markers of the
construction of multiple identities, the
discursive enactment of (social, political,
hereditary) power, and the coalescence
of colonial and precolonial social
norms of interaction (hierarchy, respect
forms, kinship affiliation) found in
these correspondences will be studied
from sociolinguistic, critical discourse
analysis, discourse-historical, historical
linguistic, and postcolonial linguistic
perspectives.
Colonial Body Archives –
A Media Studies Approach
Researcher: Christine Hanke
Zoumana Sidibé, CFP Bamako
Th is project explores contemporary knowledge
practices related to colonial collections
of human remains in European museums
and scientifi c archives. With respect
to requested restitution, these “sensitive
objects” have been subjected (once again)
to various identifi cation procedures. Although
“modernized”, some of the applied
methods appear disturbingly close to colonial
identifi cation procedures of “race”
and “sex” that rendered human bodies into
scientifi c objects of colonial collections
in the fi rst place. Th e project analyses the
persistence of anthropometric and mor-