Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, New Haven, US. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of colour critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies. She is the author of three books and numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation. Her current research projects explore the intersecting legacies of colonialism, fascism, and socialism in Europe and the potential of (queer) people of colour alliances in decolonizing the continent.

El-Tayeb’s talk outlines the foundational critique of intersectional Black European studies, a discipline at the centre of the decolonization debate, taking HKW’s 2004 Black Atlantic project as a point of departure for considering the relationship critical race studies has to the German context. Focusing on the continued seeming impossibility of Black Europeans, El-Tayeb talks about epistemic alignments, objectivity, and the necessity of archiving marginalized knowledge.