Prof. Venkat Mani

Europe and its Blackness: From the Scramble for Africa to Black Lives Matter

Drawing on his current book project on refugees and the global novel, in this talk Mani resists the history of African-German entanglements in the light of arrival of what are now termed as “economic refugees.” Beginning with the Africa Conference (1884), which divided up Africa among European colonial powers, this lecture investigates history in the service of the future. It discusses the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020).