“To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist. An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment.” - Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place.

Small places may be easily forgotten, but doesn’t each of us remember one?

This seminar harnesses different means available to us, including works of literature, architecture, and urban studies, to take participants from the interior of an institution in Berlin, through the streets of our city, via memories held by local minorities, ever approaching the realities of global majorities.

This seminar has two main aims: on the one hand, to help participants develop a better understanding of and personal response to Berlin as a postcolonial city, situated in the here and now, yet governed by racialized and other associated hierarchies endemic to global capitalist systems that span various time- and geographic zones. On the other hand, to develop tools together to describe places from the various pasts, presents and futures that participants carry with them. The course therefore combines reading, watching, listening and discussion (seminar-based learning) with walks in the city and practical exercises to develop personal methods to grasp and translate places we remember, live in or imagine.

The postcolonial city is rich with repertoires of refusal, resistance, remembering and re-making within and around urban infrastructures and buildings. An engagement with different strategies for space-making and memory-making allows for time spent participating in the imagining of alternative futures. Outputs from the seminar may therefore be either critical, speculative, or both.