On one of those grey afternoons that are so common in Berlin, we meet up for tea at the Spore Initiative in Neukölln. Because many publicly funded institutions are no longer making their spaces available for the kinds of conversations that matter to us, we’ve been having exchanges here more frequently. The Spore Initiative, financed by a private foundation, collaborates with Indigenous partners to present their knowledge of biocultural diversity and forms of coexistence. And it is creating a space for diasporic communities impacted in various ways by the growing marginalization and suppression of perspectives and practices. Spore offers these communities in Berlin the opportunity to gather and to converse. We have chosen this place as a point of departure to discuss what Heimat and beheimaten mean for us.
Neither of us grew up in Germany, but instead in a variety of different places. Heimat as a concept, therefore, is not part of our active vocabulary and not relevant to our own experiences. However, we have both lived in Berlin for a long time, making families here and establishing our careers. Does Heimat only become a topic for us once it becomes precarious, even though as children and in our youth we got along fine without it? What do we associate with Heimat, and what conditions contributed to us not having a need to worry about Heimat before? Together, we work through these questions.
Iris Rajanayagam: My first association with the concept of Heimat is rather negative in nature. For me, the word initially evokes boundaries, exclusion, and separation, as well as an essentializing conception of belonging. In the German context, words like Leitkultur [the ‘dominant culture’] and Heimatschutz [‘homeland security’], come to mind. To me, the concept seems very inwardly oriented and contains a great deal of violence, or can be used in violent ways.
I find it interesting, in this context, that there is no literal translation of the concept into English. Certain stand-ins like ‘belonging’, ‘heritage’, or ‘home’ are used, but the meanings hidden in these terms are not accurate in my opinion, and at the same time they have more positive connotations. For me personally, there never was a Heimat in the actual sense. On the other hand, I have felt feelings of belonging, of community, of well-being, of warmth, and of security many times and in different constellations. Naturally, this results from my own family history and biography; the fact that I moved quite frequently as a child, also internationally; and that my family is dispersed widely in geographic terms (including in Malaysia, Canada, Australia, England, and Tamil Eelam).
If I would have to use the word Heimat, I’d prefer to do so within something of a frame, as in the phrase beheimatet sein [to be at home]. I feel a little more comfortable answering the question of where I feel beheimatet. This word transmits more of a feeling of belonging. For a long time now, this beheimatet feeling has been embodied by my communities and by my family, as well as by my family of choice (although of course there are overlaps between communities and families). Above all, it is not tied to a specific territory, to say nothing of a specific nation.
However, I’m noticing increasingly that this is not entirely sufficient in today’s times, or rather that a feeling of alienation, insecurity, and fear is growing for me and for many of us (despite our communities and families). I do not have, and I have never had, an identification with Germany in the sense of a Heimat. Perhaps with Neukölln, where I’ve lived for over twenty years, but also only to a limited degree.
Yet even if this concept of Heimat can contain something dangerous, depending on the geographic and political associations, it is also an important point of reference for people that I wouldn’t want to simply dismiss, especially in the context of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, and actual land. I don’t mean Heimat here in the sense of separation, exclusions, and essentializations, but with reference to our own sovereignty as people and groups, the right to integrity, and the possibility of unfolding oneself. The concept ought to be thought of here in the context of anti-colonial resistance, the recovery of what was taken by violence, and the countering of negation, extermination, erasure, and displacement at various scales.
So in a certain sense, I see my stance and my connection to the concept of Heimat within this framing as a privilege. Because with my German passport, I can feel secure (at least for the moment) that I’m not threatened by statelessness, and that my family and I, if we were forced to leave this country, would have many opportunities to live elsewhere.
Iman Attia: In our family context there was also no concept of Heimat, nor was there, as far as I remember, one in our social or societal context. At least not in the sense that the concept is used in Germany. In Arabic, the closest word I can think of is watan, which describes one’s belonging to people that one doesn’t know and to a place that extends beyond one’s personal spatial radius, and mobilizes corresponding feelings. In Morocco, for instance, you see the triad of Allah-Watan-Malek everywhere: God, nation, king. Yet translating watan as ‘nation’ suggests German peculiarities and other imperial meanings that can’t be transferred over so easily. The nation as a reference point and resistance strategy to push back against colonial dominance and violence, against repression and exploitation, takes on a different, slightly shifted meaning here. This makes me think of Michel Foucault’s studies of productive power, his remarks on the formation of a positive identity through shared experiences of violence and resistance. All the struggles in social movements that form to resist patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist relations of violence can be subsumed into such a process—to recover from them and withdraw from them, to reflect on the shared situation and to address it, to oppose and to fight it. Social movements respond by uniting around shared experiences. Stuart Hall has detailed this in a very sophisticated way in his texts on racism and cultural identity. He describes how people come together to form communities to address shared experiences of racism and colonialism, to find positive identification and to be empowered to act. He also analyzes the pitfalls and dangers when, in the course of this process, people are essentialized or naturalized, or when the construction of resistance is made permanent. Of course I also think of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial text The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon exhorts Algerians to form themselves into a nation to counteract French colonial power, not to let themselves be co-opted and divided, but rather to fight together for liberation. Fanon too, like Hall, understands the nation in this context as a political alliance, not as a natural and permanent entity. Watan, therefore, shouldn’t be translated into the German sense of ‘nation’, and shouldn’t be understood as an acceptance of European nationalism. Colonial violence is closely intertwined with the European process of nation-forming, and depends quite centrally on racism to endow subjects with identity and to justify exploitation. It organizes and disambiguates sexual relations and pursues capitalist interests. And for the nations formed by anti-colonial resistance, there is similarly a danger—and this has happened in history—that national resistance is transferred over to a state structure that generates new contradictions and relations of violence.
Another concept that’s complementary to Heimat, which I also encountered for the first time in Germany, is the concept of ‘migration’. My family moved around quite frequently, but we moved, we didn’t ‘migrate’, and we never described ourselves as migrants or refugees even though experiences of restriction, persecution, and war played a role in our reasons for moving. That is to say, we moved when circumstances necessitated it, or when our lives were endangered, or when the plans of my family were impeded—for a variety of different reasons. ‘Migration’ makes our multifarious normality one-dimensional, it makes it somehow anomalous and banal at the same time, which was not actually the case for us, nor for those around us. Everyone came and went, so we came into contact with one another quite quickly and were also able to say goodbye or maintain relationships in other ways than spatial proximity or a shared ‘Heimat’.
The sense that I’ve now learned here is that migrants are heimatlos [‘homeless], that it’s sad to move so often, that migrants suffer from it (and in fact: that we/migration make the settled community suffer), that they/we are victims of their/our lands of origin or also of the receiving society, and that we also might leave again, or—without ever being welcome—stay. It took me many years to understand that I am categorized as a migrant here. And still, this categorization bears little meaning for me personally, except as a context of experience that I share with other migrantized people. I feel connected to migrant communities, I share migration experiences and struggles in a local, migrantized context. This concept meant nothing to me in the context of my biography until I came to Germany, yet in the context of my life here migration has become significant. However, debates and studies on migration mean very little to me so long as they treat the movement and mobility of people as an exceptional circumstance and as something problematic, or as something to problematize. I only find the concept interesting when it’s about our lives here, because here we are turned into migrants, and many of our experiences and struggles are associated with this, that our lives are framed as migrantized. Unlike other nations with immigration, Germany does not talk about ‘immigrants’, people who will one day belong, albeit in a changed version of themselves. Here, migrants remain floating, they cannot arrive, they cannot belong, because they/we are not a part of this ‘Heimat’, or cannot/should not/do not want to be. In the German context, the concept of becoming migrantized is closely bound up with the concept of ‘Heimat’. Referring to ‘Heimat’ means turning people into migrants who are eternally condemned not to arrive.
Iris, you say that other people are what’s important to you when it comes to something like beheimaten. This is something I can agree with: people, as individuals and in groups and in communities, are also important to me, for making me feel that I belong, for caring for others and for being looked after, for exchanging experiences and planning a future, perhaps even jointly. This is also contained in the hegemonic concept of Heimat, albeit in a more static sense, and less defined through contemporary challenges and ideas that might also be connected to historical experiences but, in the hegemonic context, are defined by historical cohesion—the glue that holds together what would otherwise fall apart, in other words that repels and blocks differences and keeps people from growing, from remaining flexible. This is what differentiates a backwards-looking and conservative relationship to other people, conceived in essentializing and naturalizing terms, from one that also makes a connection to history and experience, yet that wants to change it. These fluid, constantly updating and changing associations mean that relationships and also senses of belonging can change. Belonging, perhaps, can then only be thought of in the plural as Heimaten, or perhaps not using such concepts at all. We don’t need to make use of these hegemonic concepts and terminology, even in a shifted way, do we?
I’d like to pick up on an aspect that you mentioned and dig deeper into it with you, and that’s the reference to the land, which is in fact deeply entrenched in the German concept of ‘Heimat’. For me, the land is central in a very different sense, namely as earth that ensures our survival. Can you elaborate your thoughts on this? It seems important to me.
Iris: You raise a very important point here, I think. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang come to mind, who argue persuasively in their important text ‘Decolonization is not metaphor’ how important it is always to maintain that aspect of land, and to pay attention to the centrality of returning land when discussing decolonization processes and decolonialism. And indeed, I understand its centrality too, and above all else, with reference to ‘the earth that ensures our survival’. The important question here is, what does ‘Heimat’ mean for people and communities that don’t ‘possess’ any land, or that don’t have access to the resources associated with land? And here I also mean both land concretely in the context of food sovereignty, as well as the connection of people to this land in a collective and, in some cases, a spiritual sense.
Tiara Roxanne and Rashwet Shrinkhal have demonstrated the various levels of disenfranchisement and violence that go hand in hand with the dispossession and displacement of settler colonialism. Roxanne writes in this context (with a focus, however, on ‘Indigenous data sovereignty’) that structures of Indigenous sovereignty also comprise ontological, cosmological, and political systems outside the specific territorial level. Referring to the northern regions of the US, Roxanne shows how disenfranchisement and invisibilization are not limited exclusively to a purely territorial level. For example, in the US, it was only in 1978, with the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, that Indigenous communities received a comprehensive right, anchored in law, to practice their religions freely. Roxanne describes further how the erasure and non-recognition that goes alongside settler colonialism in this context continues to this day in the digital sphere, where people, for example, are categorized in COVID-19 databanks or in electoral frameworks as ‘other’ or even ‘none of the above’.
Rashwet Shrinkhal likewise describes the epistemic, ontological, and cosmological dimensions of violence in connection with settler colonialism and shows how a concept of land as a mere resource lies at the bottom of this and cements it.
Iman, how would you describe your connection to land in the sense of ‘earth that ensures our survival’ in the context of ‘being beheimatet’?
Iman: I understand our connectedness to the earth in a complementary fashion to the more cosmopolitan life I outlined earlier—something I’m calling ‘cosmopolitan’ only to differentiate it from the national. Actually, the history of humanity is not a history of sedentary individuals—though we wouldn’t describe the distant past as cosmopolitan. What matters to me are not just relationships to other people, maintaining them and cultivating them, but also experiencing myself as a part of nature and as someone who finds a place within it and can live inside it. To be able to satisfy my fundamental needs on my own, to grow food, to make clothes, to build a shelter, to adapt to sand and rainstorms, to extreme cold and heat, to volcanoes, and everything else that makes up life on earth—to understand it, recognize it, live with it, and learn to deal with it without subjugating it. This is what fascinates me. In the interplay between dependency (on natural forces) and self-efficacy (as opposed to alienation and domination), I feel alive and part of something more all-encompassing than ‘Heimat’ could ever be.
This meaning of ‘the earth’, which is important for me, is different from other connotations, although they also offer points of connection. For displaced people, reclaiming land is extremely important. Their lives have been disrupted, not just the material foundations have been taken from them but also cultural and spiritual foundations, as you just explained. Even those who remain behind or who are able to return to their land are often incapable of leading their lives as they were accustomed to, or as they would prefer to. Genetically modified seeds or subsidized staple foods imported from industrial countries suppress inherited methods of production that are closer to nature. Topics of this sort are addressed by the Spore Initiative, which demonstrates through exhibitions, workshops, and lectures how things could be different. The significance of land for displaced people is also made a theme here. In this context, the Arabic word for land, ard, is also interesting, because it has a central importance for example in the Palestinian context, as Kawthar El-Qasem demonstrates in her empirical study on the importance of passing on memories and narratives. Looking back points toward the future: the narratives contain a message, a task passed onward to the next generation. The elders press a yellowed photograph into the hands of the youth, describing their land, the place in which their home was built and an olive tree was planted. They urge them to notice where the life of the family happened, a life that has been at a standstill for generations, been interrupted, cannot be rooted in the earth.
There are many metaphors in German for this understanding too, and yet its experience is denied to people who are not read as German. The German concept of ‘Heimat’ combines ‘blood’ and ‘soil’ in a specific way. Soil here, like blood in ius sanguinis or in the German concept of the Volk, is static, sticky, rooted, confined. Understanding people as a part of nature and experiencing self-efficacy is interpreted in the ‘Heimat’ concept as a connection to a specific landscape and a specific soil. Yet scouts, hikers, the reform movement, nudist culture, as well as urban gardening groups, school and community gardens, weekend houses, construction trailers, or converted barns in the countryside all testify to how much people yearn, here too, to live in connection with the earth and come into contact with nature.
The spiritual reference is explained very vividly by Lyla June for the Indigenous tradition and by Asmaa El-Maaroufi for Islamic ethics. Both describe what tasks are ascribed to humans as part of nature or creation in order to maintain it or care for it, not primarily for the sake of human survival but rather for the sake of nature itself, or for the sake of preserving creation. The relationship between people and nature is also discussed in various ways in ‘western’ philosophy, and here too there are voices that emphasize (from physiocentric or holistic perspectives) how nature possesses a right of its own. However, to me, the predominant position seems to be that one claims nature (as something extrinsic and subordinate to humans) must be protected to ensure human survival. Nature, that is to say, is instrumentalized, yet receives an aesthetic or recreational value for humans. This anthropocentric perspective thus puts humans above other natural phenomena and forms of life. And then, of course, there are voices that put their own quality of life above all else, for example when electric cars are advertised with reference to their fuel independence or our limited global resources, or with reference to noise and pollution in our immediate environment, yet no attention is paid to the ruthless exploitation of nature or the working conditions and health hazards associated with securing the necessary materials in neocolonized countries. Here, again, the limited meaning of ‘Heimat’ shines through. It doesn’t have the whole earth in view, but rather extends only to one’s own national or European borders. So there are many different references to land, soil, and earth wrapped up in these concepts, all of which seem essential to realizing ourselves as humans and which evince quite different relations to ‘Heimat’—or even no relation to it, but rather to human beings as such.
We have both touched repeatedly on the aspect of memory, something that’s important for the concept of ‘Heimat’ alongside ‘blood and soil’. The writing of history, memory politics, and historical narrations are currently a field in Germany that is central in the context of ‘Heimat’ and belonging.
Iris: Indeed, in my immediate environment, I see more and more people yearning for this connection with land in the sense of earth and nature that you’re describing. No doubt this is closely related to increasing feelings of alienation and broader limitations on self-efficacy. Nature, and the ability to put oneself in a relation to it, functions here partially as a vanishing point. At the same time, I must confess that, for me, an immediate relation to the earth/nature (beyond the growing yearning for peace and calm) plays a rather minor role, at least at this point in my life, in the context of the question of where and how I feel beheimatet. This is likely related to the fact that I’ve spent my entire life in very urban, metropolitan settings, and for me they represent an aspect of being beheimatet. At the same time, this/my relationship to the earth is assuredly also something of a privilege. In this context, we must of course speak about the earth and nature in the context of colonial and capitalist structures, and about extractivism, which was and remains essential for the maintenance of these structures. Part and parcel of this is the dehumanization of people in order to enslave them as labourers on land which was either taken from them violently or from which other people were previously expelled. On the one hand, this dehumanization was accompanied by, or legitimized by, the equating of these people with nature; on the other hand, a clear separation and hierarchization of nature and the ecosystem and supposedly ‘civilized people’ took place. I find the idea that humanity is part of nature, which possesses its own rights, very important for these considerations, especially because it enables a critical interrogation of our understanding of ‘progress’, ‘civilization’, and power.
But I’d like to return once more to the subject of memory. You were talking about an understanding of ‘Heimat’ that draws connections to other people with history and experiences, yet that, in contrast to hegemonic conceptions, also seeks to change them. This thought resonated very strongly with me, and I’d like to talk more about it. For me, a central aspect of feeling beheimatet is shared and plural remembrance. This encompasses shared experiences, both trans-generational and in the present, as well as collective knowledge repositories and access to epistemologies. And here I’m referring also to collective knowledge repositories without any territorial limit. I’m interested especially in connections between shared yet specific memories—a relational remembrance that focuses on establishing relationships with one another. Angela Davis writes in this context on the question of belonging and the collective:
Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.
A conception of ‘Heimat’, however, that is shaped by collective and above all transgenerational, interwoven, multivalent, globally interacting (to use Jie Hyun Lim’s words) knowledge repositories, experiences, and memories would open up, as far as I see it, the opportunity to understand this concept of ‘Heimat’ across states and territories, as well as across time periods. In diasporic networks, the feeling of connectedness and belonging can also be understood in terms of transcending geographic and temporal spaces. But also beyond diasporic contexts, global entanglements and connections — especially in the framework of alliances forged in solidarity—can convey a feeling of being beheimatet, even if only in the sense of a political ‘Heimat’.
When thinking about ‘Heimat’ or being beheimatet, I find a ‘borderland’ methodology very helpful, tying into the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, above all her work Borderlands/La Frontera, and the remarks by Linda Tuhiwai Smith about borders and the decolonization of knowledge and knowledge repositories. Smith describes how the colonization of knowledge is based on borders, and how these borders and boundaries serve as enclosures through which disciplines, individuals, and spaces are separated and divided up. What do borders, or particularly border spaces, mean for you in the context of thinking about ‘Heimat’?
Iman: Borders in the context of ‘Heimat’ reflect a concept with two faces: while for some they mean exclusions and barriers, others feel protected by them and, at the same time, are able to cross them easily whenever they want. Ultimately, borders restrict humanity. By this, I mean both normality, the vitality of movements that are halted by borders and turned back, as well as the normality and generosity of humanity’s togetherness as a whole and our sharing of this earth, our being-together on this earth. The restriction of humanity to those who are felt and defined to be part of the nation, part of the ‘people’, part of the national state, restricts the humanity of those who seek to isolate and keep everything for themselves—especially because everything that has been declared as ‘theirs’ was appropriated and could only emerge at the cost of those held outside or let in only in limited fashion, and with conditions imposed that benefit the ‘Einheimischen’ [the ‘native population’]. The exploitation of the excluded and marginalized takes place, that is to say, both inside and outside the borders. And yet beyond the borders (of the empire, the motherland, the nation) people are not only exploited and reduced/attempted to be reduced (through the integration imperative), but their material, social, cultural, spiritual, and natural foundations of life have been exploited and destroyed for centuries.
This is why memory work is so important: so that we remember how things and relationships have arisen, and how people and the rest of nature have become what they are today. Because much of what we find in Europe and Germany today involves people, many of them unwilling participants, who are now unwelcome in Europe and Germany. Yet this is precisely the basis for many to feel beheimatet in Europe and Germany. The museums, the culture, the cities, the agrarian economies are full of knowledge and experiences, creations, and products that do not originate from Europe and Germany. Often, these are more welcome here than the very people who created them.
In order to feel beheimatet, transgenerational memory work is also important in our communities because otherwise our histories might get lost, or be told in corrupted form. In our project Verwobene Geschichte*n, which we developed jointly with people from a variety of communities, we provocatively did not tell our stories as German stories. The point of departure for our stories is actual lives in Germany. This, too, is a proactive act of making ourselves beheimatet—to tell our stories not as exotic tales or migration histories, but in their global and historical interconnectedness.
The Spore Initiative has chosen a different approach which I find significant, namely to learn from everyday, collective, resistant practices, the experiences and epistemologies of the south, and from this perspective to address subjects that belong here but are excluded. This, too, is a form of memory work that can have a stimulating and corrective effect, because it expands horizons and makes clear that all people are beheimatet in the same world. There’s only this one world, and we all live in it. Seen this way, ‘Heimat’ knows no borders. We’re very far away from such an understanding of ‘Heimat’.
Irrespective of this, I do ask myself the fundamental question of why we’d want to translate this, something so important to us, into a concept that means nothing to us. Though we’ve found points of connection, as our conversation demonstrates, we’ve had to omit many further aspects from our conversation because they don’t have much to do with ‘Heimat’, even in a shifted sense of the term. We remain, that is to say, in the mode of answering. Perhaps we should also, or we should instead, address ourselves to things that are important to us and not allow ourselves to be diverted. Toni Morrison describes very forcefully how racism functions in a way to divert us, insofar as we repeatedly need to explain, correct, and justify ourselves, and how ineffective this winds up being because the misrepresentations and false interpretations never stop.
Iris: I couldn’t agree more. We’ve all encountered these mechanisms often enough, and yet it requires constant effort not to be diverted. That is why I have long been involved—and we are involved together as well through our joint projects—with questions of perspectives and transformations, with movement histories and solidarities. My goal is to be guided less by discourses that, as you just said, contain or enforce restrictions on humanity. However, in today’s times, this is often a difficult feat, as discrimination and racism and the violence and dehumanization associated with them—especially directed at vulnerable groups, both in Germany and abroad—is increasingly normalized and often enjoys impunity. Despite this, or precisely because of it, I believe it’s all the more important that we continue talking, in a concerted fashion, about possibilities for community-spanning, transnational solidarity, about possibilities for opposing these developments. The Spore Initiative is a place that makes this possible. There are and have been many others, for example the Migrationsrat Berlin or Plataforma, an important example for me personally, which is an initiative of migrants and refugees who, among other projects, have addressed issues of solidarity at various levels and implemented this in practice. And of course there are many more. These, too, have been places of being beheimatet for me.
More important than the question of where I feel beheimatet, therefore, are questions that interrogate this complex of themes. For me, the documentation and transmission of marginalized knowledge is also very central. This is because, as Tiara Roxanne and Rashwet Shrinkhal describe, the segregation, removal, and eradication of certain communities from social groups defined through exclusion and separation occurs at both a political, ontological level and an epistemological one. Whether this happens through negation, silencing, delegitimizing, or even through the targeted destruction of knowledge—for example the arson attack on Jaffna Public Library, at the time one of South Asia’s largest and most comprehensive libraries, which was burned down by a group of Sinhalese security forces and individuals during the night between 31 May and 1 June 1981.
So we return, in other words, to remembering and sharing knowledge. Remembering histories of violence and injustice, but remembering above all moments of solidarity that have always existed across borders and across individual marginalized groups and that now must be (re)activated in an enhanced way.
What are your perspectives, hopes, and desires for the future at this moment when it comes to being beheimatet?
Iman: This is a justified question after we’ve spoken so long about what ‘Heimat’ does not mean for us. On the one hand, I wonder whether it’s possible under conditions that deny us anything like ‘Heimat’—despite the fact that it’s central to the dominant society—to hold onto the idea that ‘Heimat’ means nothing to us. The answer can only end up being as contradictory as the question itself implies. I’d like to reformulate it as a counter-question: can we leave it up to this society to decide whether this is our ‘Heimat’? Or put differently: can we afford to continue renouncing ‘Heimat’ despite the fact that our survival is made dependent on it, not just in Germany, but in so many places around the world? The shift to the right at this moment, unfortunately, is global and forceful. So do we need to insist and fight for the fact that we have long made ourselves at home here and become beheimatet, even though the concept of ‘Heimat’ doesn’t intend to include us and, even more important, is actually irrelevant to us? And if this ‘actually’ is true, can we continue preferring a mobile, open, dynamic life when the world around us insists on borders, citizenships, and binding agents of every sort? To create a place—to the extent such a thing is possible—where all of this would be superfluous, where we could feel at home, would only fall into the very patterns we criticize and multiply the mistakes.
What’s left, then? I don’t know. Have our efforts of the past few decades borne fruit, through criticism and education, through self-organization and the march through the institutions, to change structures and discourses, to change minds and feelings? Thirty years ago, everyone who worked publicly on racism knew one another, whether in academia or in civil society. Today, literature and practice on the subject have become considerable. This means, on the one hand, that many more people engage with practices critical of racism, with research and theories on racism. On the other hand, many positions have shifted after receiving financial support. A great deal of the money and jobs are awarded to people who, in the best cases, are quite early in their practice, or in the worst cases trivialize the subject—or are diverted from the actual work, the work of socially critical practice and theory development, by filling applications, by drafting reports, and by other administrative tasks as well as social and administrative guidelines. The logic of subsidization suppresses those who, due to racist effects, continuities, and barriers, lack the formal conditions (recommendations, recognized degrees, citizenships, and so forth) or who, due to their deep insight into racist structures and modes of operation, are considered too radical for state-financed institutions or academies. Understanding racism as a social structure and institutionalized normality is much more fundamental than assuming it is the misguided attitude of individuals. Many of those who struggled against racism, therefore, did not do so for money or for renown but for social justice, out of necessity, with passion and perseverance and before the backdrop of well-founded and collective bodies of knowledge. Institutionalization therefore threatens the politics, the practice, the research, and the development of theory with backsliding. And at the same time, this work can no longer be done on a voluntary basis, after (paid) work, and without access to levers of power. Does becoming beheimatet, then, mean entering the discourses and institutions, conducting the Gramscian battle for hearts and minds, raising awareness and empowering people—not in a way that’s neatly separated, conceived without fundamental restructuring according to the logic of subsidization? By that point, we will have long since made ourselves at home, moved into the field assigned to us, if perhaps in a different way than intended, making our mark, that is to say, through criticism. But that cannot be achieved alone. To produce the relevant insights and legitimize speech about them, we need collective knowledge production, both within communities and across communities. We need networks of solidarity to mutually support one another and to lend our voices more weight. Communities are also important for a different reason: avoiding having to deal with racism often is only possible in communities of colour and with people who experience racism often and reflect on racism, and can therefore put racism aside (temporarily) in conversations and activities. I alternate, that is to say, between struggles ‘with the master’s tools’—even when ‘mistaken’—and struggles in community rooms in which decolonial perspectives and complex issues and, above all, multifarious forms of social communication and interactions are cultivated. Bringing Gayatri Spivak and Audre Lorde together in this manner will certainly prompt some of our ‘white’ academic colleagues to accuse me reflexively of being theoretically inconsistent. But what does theory do for us if it isn’t up to the task of approaching problems and transforming society?
Translated from the German by Rob Madole
Sources
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012).
Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 135.
Asmaa El-Maaroufi, ‘Umweltethik aus islamischer Sicht’ [video], YouTube, 16 November 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=NBMljrmBEtA.
Kawthar El-Qasem, Palästina erzählen: Inversion als Strategie zur Bewahrung des Eigenen in Dekulturalisierungsprozessen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, tr. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, eds. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Paul Gilroy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
Lyla June, ‘3000-Year-Old Solutions to Modern Problems’ [video], YouTube, 29 September 2022, youtube.com/watch?v=eH5zJxQETl4.
Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–113.
Toni Morrison, ‘A Humanist View’, keynote for Black Studies Center Public Dialogue, Part 2 at Portland State University, 1975, mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf.
Eve Rosenhaft and Jie-Hyun Lim, eds., Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Tiara Roxanne, ‘Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the Land Grab Universities Project: Acknowledging the Historical and Ongoing Violence of Settler Colonialism Online and Offline’, Gunda Werner Institute (January 2021), gwi-boell.de/en/2021/02/11/indigenous-data-sovereignty-and-the-land-grab-universities-project.
Rashwet Shrinkhal, ‘“Indigenous sovereignty” and Right to Self-Determination in International Law: A Critical Appraisal’, in AlterNative 17/1 (2021): 71–82.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization 1/1 (2012): 1–40.