Grada Kilomba

Grada Kilomba

Grada Kilomba (* 1968 in Lisbon ) is a Portuguese author, psychologist, theorist and interdisciplinary artist whose work deals critically with memory, trauma, gender , racism and post-colonialism . She works with different formats, from text to staged reading and performance, and combines academic and lyrical narration. In 2012 she was visiting professor for gender studies and postcolonial studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Life

With roots in the West African islands of São Tomé and Príncipe and in Angola , Grada Kilomba was born in Lisbon. There she studied clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA). While working as a psychologist in Portugal, she worked in psychiatry with war-traumatized people from Angola and Mozambique and initiated various artistic and therapeutic projects on the subjects of trauma and memory, as well as on the work of Frantz Fanon . As a scholarship holder of the Heinrich Böll Foundation , Grada Kilomba did her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin , where she worked as a visiting professor .

From 2009 to 2010 she was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry . In the following years she taught postcolonial studies , psychoanalysis and the work of Frantz Fanon at various universities, a. a. at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Bielefeld and the University of Ghana in Accra . Most recently she was Professor of Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. There she researched a. a. on the topic of African diaspora and taught on the subjects of 'Decolonial Feminism', 'Decolonizing Knowledge' and 'Performing Knowledge'. She gives lectures in Europe.

In the talk show Insight Germany , presented by Deutsche Welle in 2013, Kilomba told how early experiences of racism in post-fascist Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s shaped her perception of the world. The Federal Agency for Civic Education wrote about her in 2009: "Your literary work combines post-colonial discourse and lyrical prose on the traces of slavery, colonialism and everyday racism."

plant

Grada Kilomba became known through her book Plantation Memories , a collection of everyday experiences of racism in the form of psychoanalytic short stories, which appeared for the first time in 2008 at the International Literature Festival in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele . She is co-editor of Mythen, Masken und Subjecte (2005), an anthology on critical whiteness research .

In 2013, Plantation Memories was adapted by Kilomba for a stage reading in the Berlin Ballhaus Naunynstrasse theater . The theater wrote about her work: "With her book, Plantation Memories - Episodes of Everyday Racism, Grada Kilomba succeeds through her concise and profound language in exposing the consequences of racist violence and racist trauma." A year later, the staged reading took place in the house shown at the Berlin Festival.

In more recent works, Kilomba is increasingly concerned with the performative staging of theoretical and political texts, including the film Conakry (2013) about the African freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral . The short film is a project by Grada Kilomba, the director Filipa César and the radio editor and activist Diana McCarty. Conakry was implemented in the House of World Cultures in Berlin and shown at Art Tatler International, Theater Arsenal in Berlin and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, among others.

Since 2015, Grada Kilomba has been developing the “Decolonizing Knowledge: Performing Knowledge” project. Kampnagel writes about her accompanying lecture performance “Decolonizing Knowledge” : “In her lecture performance, Grada Kilomba exposes the violence of classical knowledge production and asks: What is recognized as knowledge? Whose knowledge is this? Who is even allowed to produce knowledge? Kilomba touches this colonial wound by opening a hybrid space in which the boundaries between academic and artistic language blur and the structures of knowledge and power are transformed. ”Decolonizing Knowledge was shown at the University of Amsterdam and Linköping University (Sweden). as well as in the Vienna Secession . The project is accompanied by experimental videos such as While I Write (2015), in which Grada Kilomba explores the function of writing for postcolonial subjects. While I Write was premiered in 2015 at the Vienna Secession.

Publications

• Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism. 3rd edition Münster, 2010. ISBN 978-3-89771-485-4 .
• Grada Kilomba-Ferreira: The color of our gender. Thoughts on "race", transgender and marginalization. In: polymorph (Ed.): (Not) one gender or many? : Transgender in political perspective, Quer Verlag, Berlin, 2002. ISBN 978-3-89656-084-1 .
• Grada Kilomba-Ferreira: The colonization of the self - the place of the black. In: Hito Steyerl / Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (ed.): Does the subaltern speak German? Migration and postcolonial criticism, Unrast Verlag, Münster, 2003. ISBN 978-3-89771-425-0 .
• Grada Kilomba-Ferreira: “Don't You Call Me Neger!” - The N-Word, Trauma and Racism. In: ADB & cyberNomads (eds.): TheBlackBook. Germany's moults. IKO Verlag, Frankfurt am Main & London, 2004. ISBN 978-3-88939-745-4 .
• Grada Kilomba-Ferreira: Rewriting the Black Body. in: Gudrun Perko and Leah C. Czollek (eds.) Pleasure in thinking: Queers beyond cultural localizations. Papyrossa Verlag, Cologne, 2004. ISBN 978-3-89438-294-0 .
• Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche and Susan Arndt (eds.), Myths, Masks and Subjects - Critical Whiteness Research in Germany. Unrast Verlag, Münster, 2005. ISBN 978-3-89771-440-3 .
• Grada Kilomba: Who can speak? Decolonizing Knowledge. in: The Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies (Ed.), Utopia of Alliances, Conditions of Impossibilities and the Vocabulary of Decoloniality, Löcker Verlag, Vienna, 2013. ISBN 978-3-85409-589-7 .
• in: Corinne Kumar (ed.), Asking, We Walk: The South As New Political Imaginary, Streelekha Publications, Bangalore, 2013. ISBN 81-904677-4-3 .

Filmography

• 2011 White Charity by Carolin Philipp and Timo Kiesel
• 2013 Conakry with Diana McCarty and Filipa César

Web links

Commons : Grada Kilomba  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• personal website
• Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Ed.): Grada Kilomba, profile

Individual evidence

1. ↑ KULTURAUSTAUSCH - magazine for international perspectives ( Memento of the original from August 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on August 1, 2016) 
2. ↑ http://gradakilomba.com/bio/
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/afrikanische-diaspora/59448/das-n-wort?p=0
5. ↑ http://www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de/veranstaltung/plantation_memories_-_episodes_of_everyday_racism_13.01.2014
6. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated February 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ http://www.kampnagel.de/de/programm/2-vortragsprogramm/
10. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUaOwfmA9w