Response to Distinguished Lecture

Abstract

Response to Distinguished Lecture Maureen O. Gallagher I am grateful for the opportunity to read and respond to Thomas O. Haakenson's essay and contribute to a broader discussion of decolonization in the field of German studies, which is a topic long overdue to reach the pages of German Studies Review. Haakenson's thought-provoking essay discusses the decolonial potential of Dada and the avant-garde more broadly. Haakenson's essay reflects on Dada as both an art movement with a specific chronology associated with cities such as Zurich, New York, Paris, and Berlin and connected to the racialized legacies of colonialism and appropriation, as well as an artistic praxis, with techniques such as juxtaposition and obfuscation rife with critical possibilities. This is what is at work in Black Dada, as exemplified by Adam Pendleton's Dada Dancers. As Haakenson describes, Pendleton's use of obscured and layered versions of the source photograph of Dada artists Sophie Taeuber and Erika Schlegel dressed in costumes modeled after Hopi Kachina figures challenges the primacy of the appropriative image, drawing attention back to the original Hopi reference. Pendleton's approach resists simple categorization and allows for ambiguities and double meanings, and it is here, Haakenson argues, that we see the critical power of the avant-garde and Dada's decolonial potential. I find Haakenson's description of Pendleton's methods and this type of critical praxis a convincing account of the potential for this kind of avant-garde criticality, perhaps particularly appealing to those of us who advocate for the centrality of the humanities, in particular world languages, for teaching critical thinking and new perspectives, but I wonder how generalizable Pendleton's approach is. Is the kind of "aesthetic appropriation as a form of intersectional solidarity" that Haakenson describes practicable as a pedagogical and methodological approach in the field of German studies more broadly? I think here of Audre Lorde's reminder that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."1 In his essay, Haakenson engages with Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's groundbreaking 2012 essay, "Decolonization is not a Metaphor."2 Haakenson rightly points [End Page 351] out that theirs is a narrower or more specific conceptualization of decolonization than that which dominates Europe and consequently German studies, exemplified by the title of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's influential 1986 book, Decolonising the Mind, and focusing on the more immaterial impact of colonization on structures and conceptions of knowledge.3 As important as this type of decolonization is, Tuck and Yang bring a more specific focus. When they center the concept of repatriation in their definition of decolonization, they are not primarily talking about the repatriation of cultural artifacts but instead the literal return of the land. For those of us who teach and research in the field of German studies in settler states such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Aotearoa (New Zealand), we do so on expropriated Indigenous land, and when Tuck and Yang argue against the metaphorization of decolonization, they are asking us to remember this fact. Haakenson's inclusion of a land acknowledgment in his essay is a reminder of this important point. While Haakenson gave his lecture in Berlin, I tuned in live from Kansas City, home to many Indigenous nations, including the Sioux, Osage, Kaw, and Kickapoo peoples. When I began drafting these remarks, I was in an airplane somewhere over the Pacific, embarking on a long-delayed journey to a new academic position in Australia after eighteen months of remote teaching and research, and I finish them from my new office in Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. My story of migration and displacement is not entirely dissimilar to Haakenson's aunt Hiede to whom he dedicates the essay. Haakenson's invocation of the "wonderful world of words" is for me an expression not just of the personal impact that learning German has had on my life and career but also a reminder that German studies is not solely embedded in European contexts. The settler contexts of German studies in which many of us work, teach, study, and research require grappling with a different set of questions and circumstances than...