ABSTRACT
What can one do with a monumental Kaiser in a prefab home? Starting with an installation on the banks of the Rhine in 2005, this chapter will address questions about mediation of cultural memory. Taking an intertextual approach to traveling words and images, it aims to bring into conversation the archive of (post)colonial history with artistic and activist interventions in debates on migration and citizenship in contemporary Germany and Europe. In response to such debates and dominant media practices, the transethnic activist network Kanak Attak produced provocative video spots such as Recolonize Cologne (2005, on DVD) and Philharmonie Köln-40 Jahre Einwanderung (2001, available online), which employ reverse ethnography in public places to expose people’s commonplace assumptions and unsettle binaries between the indigenous and the foreign. Such spirited reversals of the ethnographic gaze call for an investigation of the group’s name. The etymology of “Kanak” shows resignifi cations in the meaning of the word since its fi rst occurrences in New Caledonia and other islands of the South Pacifi c. The submerged colonial baggage inherent in the word “Kanak” points to a taboo in memorial culture in and beyond Germany. “Taboo” itself is a foreign word that can be traced back to the colonial South Pacifi c, as Freud’s study on the subject points out. Highlighting similarities between civilized metropolitans and primitive savages, Freud emphasized the double meaning (sacred as well as dangerous and forbidden) and emotional ambivalence (veneration and hostility) regarding taboos. We can thus trace the hidden roots of psychoanalysis back to ethnography and social psychology (Völkerpsychologie). Finally, F.W. Murnau’s last fi lm Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), shot on location in French Polynesia, also takes us back to the South Pacifi c where the love story of Matahi and Reri served as a vehicle to stage postcolonial melancholia and forgotten histories of displacement. I propose that Murnau’s fi lm (rereleased on DVD) offers
a complex critique of the complicit forces of economy, governmentality, and ritual in the “contact zone” that begs to be brought to resonance in counter-media practices. In conclusion, I would like to propose a critique of presentist culturalism and promote creative uses of the visual archive at the intersections of activist intervention and academic research that illuminate representational regimes concerning migrant as well as native populations and that inspire us to rethink categories of colonial memory, postcolonial critique, and global circulation.
