Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde

The 2021 GSA Distinguished Lecture

In the Thick of German Studies: The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series

As part of the German Studies Association's cooperation with the Free University of Berlin's Program for Advanced German and European Studies, it was both an honor and a pleasure to launch our winter semester 2020/21 with the GSA Distinguished Lecture by Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor in Critical and Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts on October 20, 2021. In his timely contribution, Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avantgarde, Professor Haakenson offered critical reflections on the European avant-garde's role in conceptualizing Western knowledge since the mid-nineteenth century. Haakenson's presentation was the ninth in our annual Distinguished Lecture Series. Initiated by GSA long-time Executive Director David Barclay, the series is designed to feature outstanding research by GSA members at Free University of Berlin and to strengthen ties between scholars working in these fields.

We have had the privilege of hosting distinguished speakers on a broad array of subjects and it was David Barclay who delivered the first lecture on "Old Glory und Berliner Bär. Die USA und West-Berlin 1948–1994" in 2013. Suzanne Marchand followed in 2014 exploring "Orientalism and the Classical Tradition in Germany." For 2015, Joy Calico spoke on "Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe: Musical Remigration and Holocaust Commemoration." Irene Kacandes took up another timely subject in 2016 and examined possibilities for "Memory Work for/ in the 21st Century." In her 2017 intervention "The Proletarian Prometheus," Sabine Hake applied the notion of cultural appropriation to examine the working class's use of bourgeois cultural tropes for political empowerment. Exploring the statue of a Hawaiian female deity in Berlin's ethnological collection, H. Glenn Penny engaged with the public controversies around ethnological museums in Europe in his 2018 contribution "Kihawahine: German Ethnology and its Histories of the World." Another compelling matter was taken up by Johannes von Moltke in 2019 who explored "The Meme is the Message: Alt-Right/Neue Rechte and the Political Affordances of Social Media." A strong case for considering Europe as a progressive alternative to Trump's America was made by historian Konrad H. Jarausch in his 2020 lecture "Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative."

The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series has given us much food for thought in the last decade and has served the program's central mission, to deepen the understanding of Germany and Europe in an exemplary way.

Karin Goihl, Berlin Program Academic Coordinator, Free University of Berlin

The Wonderful World of Words

My aunt Hiede Miyazaki was born in Kumamoto, Japan, on March 10, 1931. She was an excellent student, preparing at the end of World War II for college when her father passed away from cancer (Figure 1). At seventeen years old, she became the family's primary provider, often working several jobs and going hungry to support her mother, four siblings, and herself. Eventually, Hiede's English-language skills led to a position with the US Armed Forces at Camp Kumamoto and later on at both Itazuke Air Base in Fukuoka and Johnson Air Base in Tokyo. She continued her creative practice at the same time and became a skilled, much-sought-after Japanese Sumi-E artist, exhibiting widely and teaching classes in mainland Japan, the United States, Canada, and Germany. In the early 1960s, my Aunt Hiede met, and shortly thereafter married, my Uncle Gene. They were together for almost fifty-eight years.

My first encounter with Germany, with German culture and the German language, was made possible thanks to my Aunt Hiede. In 1987, when I was fifteen years old, I flew to Germany to visit her and my Uncle Gene, who at the time lived in a small town in southern Germany near a US military base. I traveled alone transatlantically, with no German language skills and, quite frankly, a rather limited grasp of the English language as well. It was only my second time aboard an...