Replik på ledartext i Flamman 9 februari 2024 av Leonidas Atetakis

In the mid 1980s the Swedish mining company Boliden exported 20 000 tonnes of toxic waste to Arica in northern Chile. The wastewas never processed but dumped in the vecinity of a poor community. In the 1990s a social housing project was constructed next to the waste which resulted in an environmental and social catastrophe.This essay traces the longer history of waste back to the extraction of silver of Potosí as a nodal point for global commodity- and waste chains and explores the waste heap as the shadow figure of the archive.

A mediados de los años 1980, la empresa minera sueca Boliden exportó 20.000 toneladas de residuos tóxicos a Arica, en el norte de Chile. Los desechos nunca fueron procesados ​​sino arrojados en las cercanías de una comunidad pobre. En los años 90 se construyó un proyecto de viviendas sociales junto a los residuos, lo que provocó una catástrofe medioambiental y social. Este ensayo rastrea la historia más larga de los residuos hasta la extracción de plata de Potosí como punto nodal de las cadenas globales de productos básicos y residuos y explora el montón de residuos como la figura en la sombra del archivo.

Artikeln ger en detaljerad genomgång av apartheids juridiska och politiska struktur, samt sammanställer litteratur och rapporter om apartheidsystemet i Israel.

The article provides a detailed review of apartheid's legal and political structure, and compiles literature and reports on the apartheid system in Israel.

Essän undersöker arkivets plats i relation till antropocen, kolonialism, minne, historia och framtid.

The essay explores the place of the archive in relation to the anthropocene, colonialism, memory, history, and the future.

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe.

In this essay I examine the thoughts, reflections and attitudes of the White Consciousness movement in South Africa in the early 1970s. At heart of the essay is the potentiality in the response and sensitivity of the White Consciousness movement to the criticism raised against white liberals by the Black Consciousness Movement.

In this introductory chapter, we present the concept of ‘austere histories’ by situating it in the intersection of at least three contemporary issues, cultural contexts and academic discussions: first, discussions on Europe’s cultural memory and the precarious place of the colonial legacy in it; second, controversies on multiculturalism, racism, xenophobia and Europe’s migration crises; third and finally, the debate on austerity as policy and as ideology.

We analyse how austerity turns economic concerns into moral and cultural ones and how it simultaneously remodels historical consciousness and conceptions of Europe’s colonial past. Examining how such processes in turn changes the relationships between classes, ethnic minorities, majorities and migrants, we seek to reveal how this affects the very definition and self-image of contemporary European Societies. Furthermore, we explore to what extent and in which ways present-day historical debate and practises of history writing support and legitimize the idea of ‘austerity’ and its social and political consequences, in the areas of citizenship, migration and social exclusion.

Following the failure of Europe to confront its supressed colonial past on a general level, the colonial wound continues to repeat itself. In the present, this wound is manifested as a colonial divide that separates postcolonial citizens, indigenes, and migrants from majority Europeans. In this concluding chapter, we argue that this inequality is being sanctioned by hegemonic history writing, as well as being maintained, or even aggravated, by the current ideological conditions of austerity. Against a horizon of an austere future, and as an alternative to the austere histories that are critically examined in this volume, we here suggest a historiography that takes its point of departure in this wound: how the colonial past transformed Europe and thus is preserved as an integral part of the present and its future.