Activist and writer Zoé Samudzi shares insights from her scholarly research, which has been primarily concerned with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, settler colonialism in southern Africa, and coloniality across the continent more broadly. Framed by the concept of cadence – derived from the Latin cadere (‘to fall’) that describes the sense of closure at the end of a musical phrase – Syma Tariq will host a discussion on warring modes of historical repetition through the sacred and the profane, incantation and the performance of language as power, and the never-present tense of genocide.

This event is the fifth in a public programme series curated by researcher, writer and sound practitioner Syma Tariq, and is supported by the La Becque Artist Residency Programme. Full listings for ‘Metal on Metal’ can be found on our website.

Dr. Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at Ohio State University. She is a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE). Her work contends with genocide memory and registers of denialism; political mythologies of the postcolonial African nation-state and the relationship between ethnicity and the national question; visuality and the ethics of photographic and humanitarian seeing and witnessing; human remains and the state and community politics around repatriation and restitution; and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession. She uses curatorial methodologies as a visual-material extension of her research. As well as an art critic and writer, Samudzi is an associate editor with Parapraxis, a popular magazine dedicated to psychoanalytic thinking.