Colonial Memories and Post-Colonial Silences

Restitution, reparation, renaming – the colonial past is omnipresent in today’s cultural, political and academic debates. Christina Haritos sheds light on the post-colonial power dynamics that shape these discussions by analyzing German and Namibian journalistic coverage of the Herero and Nama genocide, with a focus on the German-Namibian genocide negotiations between 2015 and 2021. She thus offers a much-needed entangled perspective on how journalism evokes colonial memories to maintain or challenge colonial power relations. The study shows how journalism navigates colonial gaps in the archive to render certain perspectives (in-)visible and to determine whose past can be used to make claims for a common future.

Author Biography

Christina Haritos, born in 1995, completed her doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation project as well as her research trip for material collection in Namibia was funded by a scholarship from the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung. Her research focuses on memory, media and belonging in post-/colonial contexts. —-