Public Lecture: (Un)silencing women in the colonial archive; Speaker: Stephanie Lämmert

Abstract:

This talk concerns women’s protest in colonial Tanzania. Specifically, I look at how the role of Usambara women in the protest against agrarian change after the Second World War has been silenced. Drawing on gender and labour scholar Lyn Ossome, I am thinking of this silencing of women’s activism as a form of structural violence; a violence that characterizes the relationship between the colonial state and women’s reproductive labour. It is a violent relationship in so far as the colonial state does not address women as subjects, but silently assumes their labour. Indeed, women’s labour guarantees the functioning of the colonial political economy. I am thinking of the silencing of women’s labour and agency also as a methodological problem for historians. I suggest that we need to think further about the implications of this violent relationship between women and the colonial state in order to interrogate the sources we have in a more comprehensive fashion.

Stephanie Lämmert is a historian of East and Central Africa and affiliated with the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. She is currently a fellow at MIASA in Legon, Ghana. Stephanie is currently finishing a book manuscript dealing with agrarian change and women’s protest in Tanzania. Her research also explores the history of intimacy, motherhood and care work in twentieth-century central African Copperbelt society, and its broader implications for histories of feminism, labour and global capitalism. She has published in journals such as Gender & History and Past and Present. Stephanie is, together with Serawit Debele and Yusuf Serunkuma, PI of the Volkswagen funded project “German African Studies through the lens of Critical Race Theory” in which they interrogate the politics and emotions of (Africanist) knowledge production and questions around epistemic and geographic location within African Studies.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/68716662957?pwd=NP99jQRnUOPs97VVWSv6ZnCLqJlYZk.1

Meeting-ID: 687 1666 2957
Kenncode: eY78qHL07