140 years after the end of the Berlin/Congo Conference (1884–85) that resulted in the division of the African continent among the industrial and military powers of the time, a three-day programme at HKW reflected on the urgency and potentials of a deberlinization process—an endeavour to disentangle this complex of colonial appropriation, identify its after-effects, and question its epistemological legacy.

This volume documents the contributions to the Deberlinization conference and presents the academic research, essays, polemics, and literary approaches that emerged from it. Through a transformative poetics of relation between creative action and forms of resistance, history, and memory it considers alternative narratives on the prevailing world order and possible future trajectories.