In the organizer's words:

ASIAN PRESENCES IN THE COLONIAL METROPOLIS OF BERLIN

BOOK PRESENTATION 09.07.2024 18:30
WITH Yumin Li, Linh Müller, Irit Neidhart and Kien Nghi Ha

LANGUAGE The event will be held in German
Free admission Donations welcome
VISIT SAVVY is accessible by wheelchair

We are looking forward to presenting the new book by Kien Nghi Ha at SAVVY and discussing it with the publisher and the authors Yumin Li, Linh Müller and Irit Neidhart.

The volume uses colonial-critical film analyses to examine the almost unknown history of Asian representations in Germany. The focus is on orientalizing German cinema films of the Weimar interwar period. After the end of Imperial Germany, Germany's colonial-racist fantasies and ambitions were increasingly transformed into an imaginary coloniality. Their cinematic productions inspired a mass audience. The film set, but also its production and consumption, itself became a cultural colonial space. Their popularity is proof of their social and historical significance.

In contrast to the dominant perception, in which Berlin is celebrated as a world-class European city of culture and film due to the "Golden Twenties", the book focuses on decolonizing perspectives. Eurocentric discourses systematically suppress the fact that beneath the surface of modern urbanity lies a "wild cultural life" characterized by colonial entanglements and exoticization. In contrast, the cinematic works of Hito Steyerl and Philip Scheffner, for example, reveal forgotten layers and dimensions of the colonial metropolis of Berlin.

The book expands the decolonial debate and focuses on anti-Asian racism and Orientalism. It does pioneering work by exploring the "world metropolis Berlin" as a colonial cultural space with (anti-)Asian references.

KIEN NGHI HA holds a doctorate in cultural and political science and is head of the Postcolonial Asian German Studies department at the University of Tübingen. He has conducted research at New York University and at the universities of Bremen, Heidelberg and Bayreuth and was awarded the Augsburg Science Prize for Intercultural Studies. As a curator, he has realized various projects on Asian diaspora at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the Hebbel am Ufer-Theater and the Sinema Transtopia, among others. He has written and edited more than ten books on postcolonial criticism, racism, migration and Asian diaspora. Most recently, the anthology Asiatische Deutsche Extended. Vietnamese Diaspora and Beyond (Association A 2021) was published as an expanded new edition. In 2025, he will publish the volume Anti-Asian Racism in Transatlantic Perspectives: History, Theory, Cultural Representations and Social Movements (transcript).

The book will be available during the event!

Kien Nghi Ha [ed:] Asian presences in the colonial metropolis of Berlin
Localizing Decolonialization - Localizing Decolonialization
Berlin: Association A, 2024, 200 pages.
16 EUR

A publication of the project DARE (Decolonize Anti-Asian Racist Entanglements).
The book and the film series are produced in cooperation with bi'bak e.V (Sinema Transtopia), korientation. Netzwerk für Asiatisch-Deutsche Perspektiven e.V. and the Korean Studies Department of the Asia-Orient Institute at the University of Tübingen. It was supported by the program "Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte" of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.