“We are looking for Ourselves,” When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness

Practical Information

Date: 28 October
Time: 17:30-20:00 
Venue: Stockholm University of the Art, 
114 28 Stockholm, Brinellvägen 58 (Studio 8)
Meeting Point: 17:20-17:30 at the entrance door
The event will be chaired by Prof. Martin Sonderkamp
 

Registration

To asisst with our arrangements, attendees are kindly asked to RSVP by emailing karin.hauptmann@uniarts.se (by October 26 at 14:30).

“We are looking for Ourselves,” When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness

This seminar, which draws from Black Consciousness, Black Existentialism and psychoanalysis, takes participants on a tour-de-White Consciousness, as the absence of the words to say it . . . the absence of the words to address the salient features of the racialized White subject who cannot pin-point, cannot fully address the absence of the knowledge of White racialisation. 
The White Consciousness that is examined here is in no way an elaboration or meandering of the in-vogue work on Whiteness that took over academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s but rather an examination of the relationship between consciousness and politics, consciousness and speech, consciousness and the hidden, forbidden and repressed aspects of the White subject who struggles with the presence of subjects conscientised by Black Consciousness.

The seminar is not for the light-hearted, not for those willing to talk about racism but unwilling to talk about the unnamed, unclaimed aspects of White Consciousness, masked as shunning, performed as delicate decolonial care, tender and tedious patronizing of the Black subject, performed as casual interest toward the colonized travelling subject who has crossed the European borders in search of White recognition . . . as the White subject would like to believe. 

The seminar is an unpacking of the ways in which White subjects’ function in the absence of an ethical responsibility of the plunder of African subjects, of Black Consciousness and the politics of the flesh . . . of what it means to live in a decolonial world with colonial callouses cluttering the curriculum with casual racism, dripping with White liberalism, salivating enslavism.

Biography

Rozena Maart was born in District Six, the former slave quarter of the Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa. Her family along with thousands were forcibly removed in 1973 due to the Apartheid government’s Group Areas Act and the Forced Removal Act. It is from this forced removal date of 1973, that her annual hives arrived on her body, an annual staging that lasted for sixteen years to mark the anniversary of her family’s forced removal. The Dutch named the people they cargoed from Bengal, Indonesia and Malaysia, together with people from the Eastern Cape, according to the month of their enslavement. Rozena’s family carry the names of Maart, April and September.
In 1987, at the age of 24, Rozena was nominated to the “Woman of the Year” award in South Africa for her work in the area of gender-based violence, and for starting with four women the first Black feminist organisation in South Africa: Women Against Repression [W.A.R.]. She published her first book at the age of 27 in 1989. In October 1992, three weeks after the birth of her daughter at the age of 30, she won, “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada,” for a story, ‘No Rosa, No District Six,’  and four months later she started her doctoral degree, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and completed it exactly three years later. Professor Maart has published several books, journal articles and book chapters and has collaborated on various documentary and Art projects. "Rosa’s District Six" her short story collection made the best seller list in Canada and was on the HOMEBRU list in South Africa in 2006. In 2009, The Writing Circle was shortlisted by the African Studies Association for the Aidoo-Snyder award, named in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo, the celebrated Ghanaian novelist and short-story writer, and Margaret Snyder, the founding Director of UNIFEM. Professor Maart writes fiction and non-fiction. She recently edited, Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World [2020], which includes the contributions of 27 contributors from South Africa and across the world. More recently, as one of three editors, including Lewis Gordon, she published Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: The work of Lewis Gordon [Bloomsbury (2023], which sat at #1 on Amazon after 1 month of publication. Prof Maart has been recognised with two lifetime achievement awards in philosophy and literature, respectively from Philosophy Born of Struggle (2016) and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to literature and Philosophy by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2021). Prof Maart is also a Research Ambassador to the University of Bremen in Germany, and a Mercator Fellow to the first Contradiction Studies programme, also hosted at the same University. Prof Maart is an award-winning writer, and a national and international critical race theorist and a scholar of decolonial thought. Her PhD is from the University of Birmingham in the UK, in political philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her edited book, Palates of Pleasure, with Routledge, was published at end of August 2025. She sits on the Editorial board of both Routledge and Bloomsbury and currently holds the South African Research Chair [SARChI Chair] on the Study of the National Question. Her book Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh, is forthcoming.