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IPP KNL | Dr. habil. Rene Dietrich (Katholische Uni Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): "Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and 21st Century Indigenous Literatures"

IPP 20th Anniversary Keynote Lecture Series

When

Jun 08, 2022 from 02:00 to 04:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

GCSC (MFR) & Online

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In many discourses of race and ethnicity, questions of the human, humanization as well as dehumanization are paramount. The status of the "human" being ascribed or denied to marginalized and racialized communities and bodies, for instance, contributes to determining to which degree they are exposed to violence by the state and other actors with impunity. In this sense, literature and other forms of representation are often approached as avenues of humanization that run counter to dominant discourses of the non-human, racialized other. For Indigenous peoples under the rule of settler-colonial states such as the U.S., though, this question of humanization runs a risk. First, it prioritizes the category of the "human" in distinction from other life forms in a way that collides with Indigenous epistemologies of relationality and kinship of all living beings as the determining factor for constituting sociality and political formations. Second, it appears to subsume Indigenous rights struggles under the rubric of human rights discourse, tending to eclipse the political struggle of peoples for sovereignty and self-determination in confrontation with imposing settler-colonial nation-states. In this sense, relationality and decolonization, rather than humanization, are at the horizon of Indigenous-centered discourses. As I want to show in this lecture, they also help to outline the path of a Native literary resurgence in the twentieth-first century, as well as mark the parameters of a literary analytic attendant to its forms, strategies, and innovations.

 

// Dr. habil. René Dietrich is the academic coordinator of the KU Center for Advanced Studies "Dialogical Cultures. Critical Reflections Spaces for Cultural Studies and Social Sciences" at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. He holds a PhD from Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2010, completed his "Habilitation" at the Obama Institute of JGU Mainz in 2020 and was a visiting scholar at the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA.

 

 

 

 

Please, register here for Dr. René Dietrich's Keynote Lecture (in person or online)

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