Postcolonial Neighborhoods

Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

In close cooperation with researching activists and artists, the project studies decolonial struggles emerging from the postmigrant, postcolonial texture of Berlin’s urban society. A particular focus is on how migration movements and presences from the global and Mediterranean South as well as the post-socialist East are relevant backgrounds for these struggles. The project investigates a) to what extent migrant histories and after-effects of global colonial and crypto-colonial entanglements are reflexively actualised, mobilised and negotiated today in the urban space; it asks b) whether and how contested meanings and ‘ownership’ of public space is being made the predominant site of these struggles, and c) whether they can be understood as decolonial acts of citizenship and place-making. The project develops and probes into a concept of “postcolonial neighborhoods” to grasp and investigate its main question, namely whether and how these struggles in and over public spaces of the postcolonial European city leadto possible intersectional articulations and minor alliances of differently positioned actors of anti-racist, decolonial movements.