The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Thursday, 21 April 2022, 19:00
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften
Lecture | Research focus »Democratic Vistas«

Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape)
»Democratic Vistas: Shifting the Ground of the Image«

About the lecture
A democratic way of life raises the question of who is visible and whose views matter. White privilege, Souleymane Bachir Diagne notes, is »the privilege of seeing without being seen.« According to the Senegalese philosopher, it is about »considering oneself to be the norm while the others are different or particular, and that one represents a certain form of norm and universality.« There is a suggestion that whiteness is about not being looked at.
In her lecture, Patrica Hayes examines these dynamics of power using the example of the black press photographer Fanie Jason, who documented the democratic transition in South Africa. He caused a scandal when, on behalf of a British journalist, he took a private photo of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, who had settled in a gated community in Cape Town. Hayes demonstrates that the photographic image in Southern Africa is grounded in a history of whites looking through the viewfinder. Fanie Jason sought to shift this ground when, as Jean-Luc Nancy expresses it: »By taking the photograph, I fix an other in a suspended hesitation by which the image and its subject are both determined.«

The speaker
Patricia Hayes
Patricia Hayes is the National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her research background is in African history, and she engages extensively with photographic archives and their methodological challenges to bring together history and aesthetics. She is co-editor of the volume Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019); also of the special issue on »Other Lives of the Image« of the journal Kronos, Vol 46 (2020), and the recent edited volume Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021).

Chair: Till van Rahden
Till van Rahden is a professor of German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. Recent publications include Demokratie: Eine gefährdete Lebensform (Campus, 2019) and Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Edition, 2022).

Research focus »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World«
The lecture is part of the research focus »Democratic Vistas. Reflections on the Atlantic World«, hosted by the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. The interdisciplinary group of Goethe University scholars and international and regional affiliates addresses the potentials and limits of Atlantic cooperation with regard to the future of democracy from various perspectives and disciplines. Heads of program: Johannes Voelz, Professor of American Studies, Goethe University, and Gunther Hellmann, Professor of Political Science, Goethe University. .

Please find more information (in English) about the research focus »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World« here.

Please find more information (in German) about the research focus »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World« here.

Participation and registration
Please register at
anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de