Everyday Police Violence and the Affective State in German Southwest Africa

  • Date: Jun 1, 2021
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Marie Muschalek, Universität Konstanz
  • Location: online
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions

Everyday Police Violence and the Affective State in German Southwest Africa​​

In the German settler colony of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), at the beginning of the 20th century, the task of police work fell to a fairly small, racially mixed (two-thirds white, one-third black), militarized force of about six to seven hundred men called the berittene Landespolizei. The post-genocidal order that the police force established in the wake of the war against the Herero and Nama (1904-1907), was one suffused with quotidian acts of unspectacular, normalized violence. The goal of my paper is to assess what the historical study of emotions can tell us about colonial state violence and how both thinking and feeling were relevant to the way policemen did their work. In fact, even the insistence on rationality was grounded in and always accompanied by a preoccupation with affect. I claim that some emotions, mostly the “right” ones, but also disavowed ones, were in fact very much part of the colonial police’s style of ruling, and not merely inconsequential, private impressions. The broader implication is that colonial statecraft was not simply rationally performed, but rationally and sensorially felt. In that sense, German Southwest Africa was an affective state.

Since the summer semester 2021, Marie Muschalek is a research associate and lecturer at the Chair of the History of Knowledge at the University of Konstanz. Previously, she taught at the University of Freiburg and at University College Freiburg. She studied in Hamburg and at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris (SciencesPo), and earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University. The historical study of violence (especially historical-anthropological but also sociological approaches to forms of everyday violence) has been one of her main focuses.

Her book Violence as Usual (Cornell U. Press 2019; UNAM Press 2020) is a historical anthropology of police practice and the normalization of imperial power in German Southwest Africa. It re-examines fundamental questions about the relationship between power and violence. Marie Muschalek tweets as @MMuschalek. ​​

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