Zentrum für Ostasienwissenschaften SCREENINGS and DISCUSSION: “We Are Here” (2015) and “The Returning Tide: Thirty Years On” with Film Directors Shitou, Xu Xiaotong, Yang (Iris) Yu

Where is future created? Based on some of the research done in the Thematic Research Network Denk(t)räume–(Re)thinking and Building Futures and at CAPAS (the Center for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic studies), this event series takes the question of building futures from the margins as its starting point for a review of some of the seminal literature in global history. The aim of the event series is to foreground marginalized sources (material peripheries e.g. the “un-disciplined" knowledge produced by the arts) and positions (socio-political pheripheries e.g. that of indigenous protesters), and regions of the world (spatial peripheries, e.g. parts of the world that do not make headline news) as well as specific times (chronological pheripheries: questioning why there may be a privileging of specific periods in time while neglecting others). In taking what is read as “marginal,” its voices and sources seriously, and by including  artistic and activist resources, this  event series offers an intervention to established academic reasoning: at a time when apocalyptic narratives and authoritarian visions of the future dominate public discourse, the events focus on different forms of “critical hope” that can emerge in times of crisis: analytically grounded, socially engaged, and convinced that a diverse, collectively shaped future arises from the productive tension between different worldviews, the event series sets out to test out transcultural perspectives on and alternative approaches to the writing of histories (of and for the future).