LIAS-Lecture "Thinking Across Hemispheres"
Undoing Apartheid: Race and the Tasks of Thinking Across Hemispheres
06. Jun
On the occasion of the opening of the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society, Premesh Lalu, Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, will give the central opening lecture on the LIAS motto "Thinking Across Hemispheres" in Lecture Hall 4.
Premesh Lalu, research professor and founding director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, reflected in his well-attended lecture on the need for humanities scholars to develop a practice of thinking beyond hemispheres, using parts of his recently published monograph Undoing Apartheid. The lecture referred to three plays - Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld and Ubu and the Truth Commission - by William Kentridge, Lesego Rampolokeng, Jane Taylor and the Handspring Puppet Company, which were performed to mark the end of apartheid in South Africa and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany. Theatre, says Lalu, offers a way of reflecting on the fundamental 'fictions of race' that have found expression in the idea of apartheid, revealing the workings of a sensual order and its simultaneous abolition through an aesthetic education based on, say, Friedrich Schiller. Above all, however, "Undoing Apartheid" calls for thinking across hemispheres, both geopolitically and across the subdivisions of the sensual.Premesh Lalu discussed with Paula Banerjee, Susanne Leeb moderated the numerous questions from the audience.