"From dualistic to dividual concepts of culture. A history of the entwining of European-African-Antillan cultural understandings".

Michaela Ott

8. September, 2021, 7pm

Prof. Dr. Michaela Ott, "From dualistic to dividual concepts of culture. A history of the entwining of European-African-Antillan cultural understandings".

Abstract: In order to highlight the interdependencies of supposedly individual cultures, the article aims at a reconstruction of the coinage, transfer and translation of the term ‘culture’ in the European-African-Antillan context from the 1940s up to today. Since it has become obvious that all cultural processes are intertwined with elements of different background, the cultural constitution can no longer be adequately described by discursive opposites such as Black vs. White, European vs. African and so forth. The argument therefore goes that the cultural composition needs adequate new terms and that the old term of the ‘individual’ should be replaced by the new term ‘dividuation’ which underlines the processuality, intermixing and mutual participation of all cultural entities. It moves from cultural theories of Leo Frobenius, Jean-Paul Sartre and Leopold Sédar Senghor to arguments of Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Gilles Deleuze and ‘African’ filmmakers such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno and others.

Keywords: culture, interdependency, anti-dichotomy, compositcultural articulations, participation, dividuation, ‘African’ films.

Bio: Professor of aesthetic theories at HFBK Hamburg/Germany; research topics: poststructualist philosophy, aesthetics of film and art, theories of space, affection and dividuation, of artistic knowledge and (post)colonial concerns, African and Arab films. Member of the research cluster “African Multiple”, University Bayreuth/Germany. English publications: Timing of Affect. Epistemologies of Affection, ed. with M.-L. Angerer and Bernd Bösel (Zurich: diaphanes, 2014); Dividuations. Theories of participation (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2018);