1. Home
  2. /
  3. Cooperations
  4. /
  5. Asian Presences in the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin
11. April 2023 – 20. June 2023

Asian Presences in the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin

Localizing Decolonialization
Curated by Dr. Kien Nghi Ha

A film program of the project DARE (Decolonize Anti-Asian Racist Entanglements)

After the end of Imperial Germany, colonial-racist fantasies and ambitions were increasingly transformed into an imaginary coloniality. Their cinematic stagings not only delighted a mass audience, but also led to an ambiguous overlapping of fiction and reality. Not only film sets but film production and consumption also became cultural colonial spaces.This film, lecture and discussion program is a pioneering exploration of the "wild cosmopolitan metropolis Berlin in the Golden Twenties" as a colonial cultural space with (anti-)Asian references. At the same time, the decolonial debate will be expanded to include anti-Asian racism and orientalism, and thus becoming more multi-perspectival. A book is planned for the end of 2023 (Assoziation A).

Dr. Kien Nghi Ha, cultural and political scientist, is a Postdoc researcher of Asian German Studies at the University of Tübingen. Numerous publications on postcolonial criticism, racism and migration. Editor of „Asiatische Deutsche Extended. Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond“ (Assoziation A, 2012/2021). His monograph „Unrein und vermischt. Postkoloniale Grenzgänge durch die Kulturgeschichte der Hybridität und der kolonialen ‚Rassenbastarde‘“ (transcript, 2010) was awarded with the Augsburg Science Prize for Intercultural Studies. https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/208381

In cooperation with bi'bak e.V., korientation. Netzwerk für Asiatisch-Deutsche Perspektiven e.V. and the Department of Korean Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Tübingen.

With films from the holdings of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden.

Funded by the program "Promotion of Contemporary History and Remembrance Cultural" of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Halfmoon Files

Halfmoon Files

Philip Scheffner, Germany 2006, 87 Min., OV with English subs
Sumurun

Sumurun

Ernst Lubitsch, Germany 1920, 103 Min., OV with English subs