The Future is a Risk, Masquerading as a Promise

Venue: LUMA, schwarzescafé, first floor, Löwenbräukunst, Limmatstrasse 270

In many non-European languages such as Mandarin, Urdu and Hindi, the term for past and future is the same. In Hindi and Urdu, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are the same word: कल (kal). In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie remarks: ‘People who use the same word for “yesterday” as for “tomorrow”, cannot be said to have a firm grip on time.’ Rushdie is alluding to the difficult relationship between temporality and hope, the desire for a future free of domination and the impossibility of utopian thinking.

Colonialism not only negates the past and the history of the colonised, but also undermines their capacity for the future, which is monopolised by Europe. This problem is reminiscent of two important words in the German language: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and Zukunftsfähigkeit. To be future-ready, one must be willing to come to terms with the past, which means accounting for how we got to our current state.

The talk will explore how our histories of the past should help us to strategically interrogate the present in order to visualise the possibilities of a post-imperialist future. This would involve a ‘decolonisation of the mind’ that shifts from the enlightenment principle of sapere aude (dare to know) to the courage of ‘care to know’, which requires epistemic work that entails continuous careful care and attention.

Nikita Dhawan is Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas at TU Dresden. Her focus is on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonisation. In 2017, she received the Käthe Leichter Prize for outstanding achievements in women's and gender studies and for supporting the women's movement and realising gender equality. In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship in Los Angeles.

This lecture is part of the Futurological Congress, which will take place on 29 and 30 November 2024 at Löwenbräukunst and in cooperation with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartkunst as part of the exhibition ‘Knowledge is A Garden’.

• Language: Englisch
• Free access
• Sign language translation
• No registration required
• Free entry