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The full program of the conference can be downloaded here.
On each day, there will be a keynote speaker: Antoon de Baets and Josias Tembo.
Antoon de Baets is Emeritus Professor of History, Ethics and Human Rights at the University of Groningen. He is the author of 185 publications, including Responsible History, and the coordinator of the Network of Concerned Historians. He will talk to us about censorship of the study of history under various dictatorship, as well as its unintended effect: resistance to this censoring.
Antoon de Baets’ talk is called Historians’ Resistance to Tyrants.
Abstract Since time immemorial, dictators have censored the writing of history and persecuted its practitioners. This policy of history censorship has had many effects, some of which were unintended, such as the development of strategies to counter the distortion of history. The key-note therefore opens with a summary overview of the intended and unintended effects of the censorship of the science of history. Against this backdrop, the talk then focuses on one unintended effect of this censorship: resistance to the distortion of history. A tableau is given of the repertoires of available types of resistance under dictatorships and, for comparative purposes, in democracies. The talk uses these repertoires to analyze the resistance of the historians under dictatorships from four perspectives: actors (historians and others); conduct (acts and omissions), motives (ethical, moral, professional, and political), and impact (short-term and long-term). The talk is intended as a tribute, both to historians who once resisted tyrannical power and to historians who retell their stories as an inspiration for present and future battles.
Josias Tembo is a social and political philosopher specialising in Critical Philosophy of Race, African philosophy, postcolonial and decolonial theories, and gender studies. He currently works on how the connections between race and religion create and support racism (past and present) and how race and religion have been historically configured across the Atlantic between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In this research, he works with themes such as humanisation and dehumanisation, racism and racialisation, sexism, modernity, the trans-Atlantic, decolonisation, freedom, and sociopolitical and epistemic justice.
Josias Tembo’s talk is called Resistance: Practices of human integrity and dignity.
Abstract Conditions of systemic unfreedom, oppression, degradation, and violence form the main living conditions of many human populations across modernity. Racialised and violently gendered people are the majority among the degraded and violated people of modernity, whose humanness has been systemically constrained by racism by means of white heteronormative forms of existence. In this talk, I reflect on resistance against racism and sexism as a crucial way by which people practice and reenact their humanness in the face of persistent systemic racism and sexism that functions to limit and deny the humanness of its victims. I mainly reflect on how Audre Lorde and Aimé Césaire have practised and theorised resistance as acts of reconstituting and reenacting the denied humanness of racialised and gendered people. By engaging Lorde and Césaire, I aim to show how reenacting the integrity of the (dynamic) human body, the dignity of human consciousness, and the relationship between them is fundamental to understanding and mobilising resistance against racism and sexism. As such, resistance against racism and sexism is a practice of integrity and dignity. They are practices of humanisation in systemic sociopolitical conditions that limit and deny people’s humanness. Of course, there are multiple forms of resistance, and they depend on the sociopolitical and historical context.