Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Das Programm befindet sich auf der Startseite des Instituts:

https://www.iaaw.hu-berlin.de/de

Africa Colloquium

Sommersemester 2025

Venue & time: Invalidenstraße 118, r. 315; 16-18 h c.t.

The Afrikakolloquium is organised this semester jointly by
Dr. Lamine Doumbia (Department for African Studies, HU) and
Dr. Susann Baller (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)

The colloquium is open to the public. Students, colleagues and guests are welcome!

Prof. Dr. Goutam Karmakar

(Humboldt Fellow, University of Cologne/ University of Hyderabad)

Infrastructural Violence, Dissent and Extractive Practices in Africa

Infrastructure is a crucial element that determines people’s direct interactions with one another and their surroundings within any spatial framework, thereby enhancing its social and material components. The expanding corpus of literature by urban scholars and geographers concentrating on the built environment has unquestionably facilitated multidisciplinary approaches that transcend the perception of infrastructure as solely composed of inanimate material apparatus and constructions. Instead, it emphasizes the concurrent social, cultural, and human dimensions of infrastructural relationships, prompting inquiries into the degree to which infrastructure fosters liveability and its benefits for various populations. This indicates that infrastructure serves as a primary conduit for state machinery, functioning as a locus where politics, policy, planning, and implementation intersect with capitalist and developmental initiatives. Taking these dimensions of infrastructure into critical African geographies, the talk focuses on oil extractive practices in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, the neocolonial and capitalist modes of production and distribution, as well as the resultant environmental toxicity due to the extractive industries in the region. The talk further sheds light on how communities are subjected to infrastructural violence and necropolitical anthropocentric ideologies and how they respond to collective environmental and epistemic injustice, thereby necessitating the importance of dissent and decolonial repair.

Goutam Karmakar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, India. He is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany. In addition to these academic engagements and positions, he is also an honorary research associate at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Previously he was a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Karmakar’s research interests include Global South literary studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, environmental studies and cultural studies.

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