The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.
In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.
The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.
The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.
Joachim Zeller
The collaborative anthology focuses on the profound inequalities and injustices as a result of “1492”. The authors and artists look closely and stumble upon the violence resulting from the colonial past, which is inherent in global inequality. Lights are being topped the coloniality of our everyday life today. At the same time, reference is made to the decolonializing potential of the everyday struggles of activists. The detailed introduction explains the postcolonial approach of the book. The collaboration on the artistic level, through dialogue and solidarity, has given hope, it says. Last but not least, the non-profit project sees itself as a contribution to the commitment to development education. A literature list in the appendix rounds off the volume. The moving “Episodes from a Colonial Present” must not be missing in any postcolonial library! Joachim Zeller https://www.iz3w.org/artikel/rezension-zeller-episodes-colonial-present-bendix
CLIP-Editorial
In nine stories, (post)colonial conditions are linked to the personal experiences of the authors and the historical conditions of colonial life are made transparent. This is what the story is about the story of tracking trauma. The German Genocides at Home and Abroad, the complexity demanded by the FES and illustrated, as the Nama groups changed alliances in connection with the German colonial aggression: “The Witbooi (/Khowesin) initially fought against the Ovaherero, then closed peace and fought side by side with the Ovaherero under German command against other peoples. 43). An explanatory text states: “Today, 70 percent of the private land belong to a few thousand whites, most of which are German-speaking farmers” (p. 45). They wanted a German version in all waiting rooms of our perpetrator country. https://www.cilip.de/2024/12/05/literatur-78/