Postcolonial Justice in Postcolonial Europe
Dr Jamila Mascat has received IOS seed money to work on the interdisciplinary research project “Postcolonial Justice in Postcolonial Europe: Recognition, Reparation, Restitution”.
Postcolonial Justice in Postcolonial Europe
The project engages with the following questions: can history be retroactively repaired? Might our postcolonial present do justice to the colonial crimes of the past? The project echoes the current societal debates across Europe that discuss the legitimacy of the demands for slavery/colonial reparations, restitution of colonial artefacts displayed in European ethnographic museums, the removal of symbols of colonial legacy from the public spaces and for the diversification of the Humanities curricula in higher education.
By engaging with postcolonial studies, legal studies, cultural heritage and urban studies, this project aims to establish a new interdisciplinary framework, which would create normative grounds for legitimising postcolonial demands for racial justice, epistemic justice and spatial justice, as well as to establish a cooperative setting for assessing and implementing strategies for postcolonial justice. The idea of “repairing history” lies at the core of this research projectand it aims to identify grounds for the concrete implementation of large-scale political measures that may help “righting in the present the wrongs of the past”.
Involved researchers