Content and aim of the research project

This project examines multimodal relationalities of German colonial history and its aftermath in Germany and West Africa. The research will be performed in close dialogue and cooperation between University of Yaoundé I, University of Bayreuth and Braunschweig University of Art (HBK).

German industrialization, colonization, media of mass culture and West African plantation economy, enslavement and infrastructures of transport are deeply intertwined. Their historical entanglements are discussed by focusing on two exemplary cases of ‘colonial commodities’, each of which is associated with different practices of power and knowledge: Cocoa/Chocolate and Cinchona/Quinine.

Using a Science and Technology Studies (STS) inspired approach, we follow the materials, the colonial practices and the knowledges related to them, their conditions of production, their routes of transportation as well as administration, their material and medial transformations, discursive and visual attributions.

The focus on these two exemplary colonial materials allows an analysis of their situatedness(es) and an empirical study on relationalities of colonialism, industrialization and mass media. With the focus on cacao/chocolate and cinchona/quinine the project aims at a critique of often overlooked epistemic legacies of these knowledges up to the present day (see collector’s items, popular culture, digital games etc.).

This project will put in dialogue research into colonial history in Germany and Cameroon and enables a discussion on the relationally of media history and colonial history for a range of disciplines within African Studies (literature studies, film studies, cultural history, Science and Technology Studies) and beyond. The project will as well contribute to recent historical and political debates about German colonialism as to approaches of decolonization knowledges of the Global North.