21/02/23
 
About
The boasblog “Undoing Race and Racism” presents anthropological perspectives on racism and racist formations in Germany, where a new conjuncture has increased critical engagement with the ongoing effects of institutional, everyday and violent racism. You will find an introductory text by the editorial team here. Editorial Team: Manuela Bojadžijev (Humboldt-University Berlin), Katharina Schramm (University of […]

The Borders of Normality
A Queer Perspective on Far-Right Racism
How can we describe the shifting ways in which racism intersects with other systems of oppression in the present? As an anthropologist who has researched the contemporary German far right from the perspective of gender and queer theory, I have frequently wondered about this question. A gender and queer theory informed ethnography can make important […]

Far-right anthropologies
One of the things that surprised me most after I began doing research on European far-right youth activists was my research participants’ statements on how much they love anthropology. Not Mussolini, not Christianity, not philosophy, but precisely anthropology. “How dare you?”, I would comment on such statements in my head, assuming that they completely misunderstood […]

Scented Entanglements
On olfactory racism and the ‘forgetting’ of odours and scents in the anthropological study of ‘race’
Shortly before the first Corona lockdown in spring 2020, I was busy preparing for fieldwork in Turkey on a much neglected topic in the scholarly literature on beauty, namely the role of odours and fragrances. Reading up on the history of smell cultures and perfumes (ultimately unable to leave for fieldwork), I began talking to […]

Calling Worlds into Being
The Sound of Black Lives Matter
BLM Banner Black Lives Matter!…Black Lives Matter!…..Say it loud…. I’m Black and I’m proud! ……I’m Black and I’m so fucking proud!” (BLMB demo 2021) It’s been years now since I heard this chant at the Black Lives Matter demo in Berlin in 2021. Since then, the whole world has once again turned on its head. […]

Doing Public Anthropology in the Classroom
(Un) Learning ‘Race,’ White Fragility, and Mobilizing Antiracist Pedagogy in Germany
The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. – bell hooks (1994, 12) Introduction  On 6 June 2020, thousands of people gathered at Berlin Alexanderplatz in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. #BlackLivesMatter Protest in Berlin Alexanderplatz on 6 June 2020 © Nasima Selim While a singular event does […]

Institutional Transformation in South Africa and Germany
An Interview with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Katharina Schramm (KS): In your book “Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization”, you make reference to W.E.B. Du Bois, who famously stated in “The Souls of Black Folk” that the problem of the twentieth century is the color line. Du Bois explicitly addresses racism and its specific articulation in the United States as a […]

A Pedagogy for Anti-Racism
Reflections from a Classroom and Beyond
In this blog piece, I build on classroom discussions triggered by an ‘image exercise’—when I invited students to choose an ideal image for the home page of any anthropology department—as a gateway to think through some pertinent issues that have emerged while teaching topics such as extreme speech, nationalism, racism and decoloniality at different institutional […]

Undoing Race and Racism
Anthropological Interventions
In Germany today, critiques of racism, practices and forms of racialisation, and their multiple entanglements in anthropology have gained renewed prominence.  On the one hand, in academic discussions an expansive debate around museum practices and colonial collections (in ethnographic as well as natural history museums) has highlighted colonial histories and their  connections to the genealogies […]

About
Undoing Race and Racism: Anthropological Interventions
In Germany today, critiques of racism, practices and forms of racialisation, and their multiple entanglements in anthropology have gained renewed prominence.  On the one hand, in academic discussions an expansive debate around museum practices and colonial collections (in ethnographic as well as natural history museums) has highlighted colonial histories and their  connections to the genealogies […]