Guest Lecture by Pedzisai Maedza: „Speaking for the Dead: Contemporary Performance Artists in the Archive“

This talk considers the role of performance dramaturgy in remembering, memorializing and sustaining the memory of the 1904 to 1908 genocide in Namibia, sometimes dubbed Germany’s forgotten genocide. It frames performance as a media through which this history is narrated and transmitted. The talk interrogates how contemporary artistic and cultural performances and performance-makers inform the ways in which the history of colonial genocide and the present are presented and remembered. It investigates how memories circulate across time and place- transnationally and across generations in response to the social amnesia surrounding the first genocide of the 20th Century. This cross-border and trans-generational reflection is essential to understanding how the genocide in Namibia has and is articulated, circulated, and remembered through performance.

Pedzisai Maedza is an Assistant Professor in Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. Prior to this he was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He is the author of Performing Asylum: Theatre of Testimony in South Africa and has published several book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in internationally recognised journals on Performance, Genocide and Cultural Memory.