Actually, it can hardly be in the interest of those sciences that deal with global cultural theoretical, historical and philosophical questions to quickly give a statement on a current "dispute" that has been initiated apart from academic debates, has meanwhile found a lively press response and thus developed a fatal momentum of its own. In fact, there are many arguments against taking this step. The interests are too different, too diverse are the instruments and forms with which topics are taken up and negotiated in politics, culture and science, too divergent the objectives as well as the level of knowledge, and the skills.

However, the bottomless accusations against Achille Mbembe, which have now become a "causa", are currently causing great damage – to the detriment of the global scientific community and the world-wide operating expert committees, the bilateral research associations and projects, not to mention the consequences for cultural and cultural policy actors and institutions in Germany.

As is widely known, the pseudo-conflict over the invitation to the Ruhrtriennale to the renowned historian and philosopher, cultural theorist and representative of contemporary postcolonial theory was triggered by the obviously politically motivated accusation of the FDP party politician, Lorenz Deutsch (member of the state parliament, Northrhine-Westfalia). However, enriched in the meantime by the clumsy critique of postcolonial theory in general, it continues at the lowest level in the German press and digital media.

If the vulgar-loud tenor, with whom first Deutsch and now his self-proclaimed comrades-in-arms are currently expressing their views on the matter, also has all the characteristics of a provincial pose, it is now also expanding into largely conservative feuilletons to include a general attack of Germany as a location for humanities. The fact that the German-language Wikipedia post on Achille Mbembe under the heading "Criticism" – in addition to numerous online contributions of questionable sources – already reduces the current, completely unsubstantiated accusations from politics and the media landscape unfilteredly and also links to the articles of some accusers of Mbembe, already makes clear the spectrum of effects up to the social media.

This article is not intended to "explain" or interpret Achille Mbembe's publications to a broader audience, which requires the efforts of qualified scientific editors and art pages. Nor is it intended to defend or even rehabilitate Mbembe in the current, highly embarrassing "cause" – which would be completely absurd, if only because of the alarming level of public discussion. In view of the current conflict in the political assessment of the scholar Achille Mbembe, however, it seems appropriate to start at the point from which the accusations against him take their official character and tone, as it were: Namely, the approach and critical point of Felix Klein, the Federal Commissioner for Anti-Semitism, who has been in office since 2018 and who seems to lack both an awareness of cultural historical and cultural studies contexts as an interest in the approaches by critical, postcolonial theory in particular.

The absurdity of the criticism against the scholar, which is far removed from the subject, becomes particularly clear when viewed from the perspective of globally oriented cultural studies (including in Germany) and in the light of the predominant research perspectives in the disciplines addressed, which – together with Mbembe – are now equally affected. This also reveals the obvious political interest that seems to have guided the disavowal of Mbembe's position and, with it, of global intellectual thought as such.

"Appointed" to criticize

The public éclat – because this is not an academic debate at eye level or a dispute among colleagues – was notoriously renewed by Felix Klein's public critique of Achille Mbembe's alleged "anti-Semitism" in April. Apart from the obvious lack of prior expert advice (which is promised on the official website for his position), Klein's accusation any basis in the first instance. But also, and this is far more crucial, the necessary expertise and scholarly skills.

In an interview (DeutschlandFunkKultur, 21.4.2020), this became particularly clear where Klein, struggling in part with scholarly diction, relied on a single, obviously randomly selected passage from one of the writings of what he called "Africa's very important philosopher": Mbembe's supposedly questionable attitude towards Judaism and the State of Israel is obviously to be exemplified here by a single text excerpt – unfortunately completely incoherent, without any knowledge of the subject, Mbembe's writings in total nor of the larger cultural-theoretical-philosophical context, and therefore inevitably quibbling and arbitrary. And, as if the anti-Semitism commissioner does not have any more burning tasks in view of the increasing radical right-wing influence on (cultural) politics and the cultural landscape in Germany and the current rise in everyday anti-Semitism.

Holocaust vs. Apartheid ?

Interestingly enough, Klein was quick to set his own, richly muddled idea of the non-comparability of historical events (here Holocaust vs. Apartheid) against Mbembe's misinterpreted position – a political demarcation line that he sees crossed in a single "essay" by Mbembe, from which Klein had again selectively taken only a few signal terms. Actually the reference point was the detailed book essay, Politik der Feindschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2017; engl. trans. Necropolitics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), in which Achille Mbembe bundles his previous theoretical considerations – on the philosophy and history of (post-)colonialism, the structures and visible manifestations of racism and its institutionalization forms – and focuses on current, authoritarian forms of governance. It is simply an essay that usually gives room for the free unfolding of thoughts, for experimental thinking as well as for great drafts of ideas.

In fact, as previously in scholarly publications, the political and phenomenological-psychiatric approaches of the African-diasporic theorist Frantz Fanon, which trace the genesis of the racial subject in the identity thinking of Western philosophy, play a central role in this writing by Mbembe. Here, they are exemplarily related to the paradigm of enmity, war and its constant reconfiguration: conquest, occupation, terror and revolt. In its focus on the space of the Black Atlantic, this investigation is therefore necessarily cross-historical and cross-cultural. And it refers to practices, forms and perceptions of the separation, division and segregation of "races" in modern societies, whose structures Mbeme traces until the present.

Klein's criticism of Mbembe's statements would hardly be worthy of attention if it had not led to such fatal consequences for the current public perception of the scholar Achille Mbembe in Germany immediately after its articulation. For it starts with the indiscriminately selected alleged "equation" of two racist repressive regimes, which Klein believes he can take from the above mentioned book's second chapter ("Die Gesellschaft der Feindschaft", engl. trans: "The Society of Enmity") with a representative claim. In fact, Mbembe himself states: "The apartheid regime in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter in an extreme fashion and within a distinct context – constitute two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation" (qtd. from engl. trans, p. 50; german trans., p. 89). According to Klein's personal reading this results in an explosive constellation: "For me these sentences are also to be interpreted as a relativization of the Holocaust, and in my capacity as anti-Semitism commissioner I feel appointed to intervene in such a debate and then also to express my concern that this may be misunderstood here. (…)." (www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, 21.4.2020, trans. by the authors).

Obviously, the self-appointed official prosecutor's certainty of citation and interpretation has already reached its natural limits. For the image of "emblematic manifestations" used by Mbembe does not only refer to the global segregation and camp structures and the practices derived from them. The author also claims to treat their visibility and irrational violence comparatively and to examine their transcultural interconnections, effectiveness and modes of operation in a broadly based dispositif. Similarly, the globally oriented historical, cultural and social sciences pursue modern global phenomena of violence, which include colonialism as well as political strategies of exclusion, segregation and internment, mass destruction and the Holocaust. Beyond the scholarly sphere, such considerations and approaches are neither per se generally intelligible nor easily comprehensible without extended contexts of knowledge and further explanation.

Felix Klein, in contrast, judges that "it is something completely different, these fantasies of separation" – admittedly, without telling us at the same time where differences to what might lie. Klein feels that the equation of the "national ideology of the Nazis" with the "system of apartheid", which he diagnoses, is inappropriate "because this all-encompassing destruction and racial mania of the Nazis led to the systematic and industrial destruction of human beings." And he also considers this, "if I include Mr. Mbembe's South African or Cameroonian perspective, really problematic, especially since, even if he also refers to Israel, he puts the situation in which Israel finds itself too much on a par with what was in South Africa" (ibid.; trans. by the authors).

Despite the busy exhibition business, the past weekend at the Munich Haus der Kunst was very quiet. Footsteps in the large, empty central hall seemed almost like inappropriate noise. As the current editorial message on the website conveys, the team of the exhibition house mourns for his on last Friday deceased head Okwui Enwezor – and combines this with the expression of great gratitude for the "extension to our perspective" made possible by him, his new "guiding principle" of the exhibition house, but above all for "the conviction that the developmental lines of contemporary art are global and multi-layered and cannot be limited by geographic, conceptual and cultural boundaries." For the audience of the last weekend, the visit of Enwezors last great show to the work El-Anatsui as well seems to have been more in the sign of condolence.

Since Friday, the daily and specialist press has been full of tributes and obituaries to the exceptional curator Okwui Enwezor, who has so decisively shaped the international exhibition events and art debates of the past decades and enriched the entire exhibition and museum system with his globally expanded approach. For the discipline of art history, however, the enormous value of his work lies not only in the large, elementary exhibitions – in the format of a documenta 11 of 2002 or the Venice Biennale of 2015, through whose platform model and decentralized approach Enwezor set a rethinking in the perception of the actually global intertwined modern and contemporary art in motion.

Earlier exhibitions such as "Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994" from 2001, which grounded on the cooperation of the Munich Villa Stuck with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and subsequently was shown internationally, focused specifically those political, Art and cultural histories, here of the African continent, which hitherto was devalued as historyless, and therefore excluded from the great (Western) historical narratives. Enwezor's merit was to counteract precisely this alleged lack of history and timelessness and to counter the status of a supposedly oral-based reference to the past in Africa with a tremendous array of art, images and source material, and thus at the same time to trace and relocate the cultural and artistic production and history since Modernity, in the Post-war period and phase of de-colonization up to the present time in its intellectual context.

In the later exhibition, "Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and Bureaucracy of Daily Life", which was also realized at Haus der Kunst in 2013, Enwezor re-established this strategy. Once again he confronted the exhibition visitors with a wealth of press and artistic photography, images and written sources; again, through the globally contextualized presentation – here of the historical circumstances of violence and resistance in South Africa and of domestic and foreign policy negotiation and international solidarity – he highlighted the blind spots in the perception of historical, cultural and artistic forms of negotiation and proceedings. Like Jacques Derrida, to whom he devoted an interdisciplinary anthology to African-diasporic modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity in 2009, seemingly also his concern is to situate art in a new understanding of a pictorially perceptible writtenness – as a form of fragile marking, a non-pathetic trace and fundamental (not textual) cultural expression.

Okwui Enwezor, who saw himself as a curator, author, and scholar, is brought together much more with his groundbreaking curatorial achievements than with his academic approaches and numerous publications in and beyond the exhibition scene. In fact, not only did he draw attention to countless highly relevant artistic positions in their global contexts and connections, which he opened up to postcolonial debates, but above all he also groundbreakingly questioned the objects and the
repertoire of methods in traditional art history. In addition to the demonstrative side of his exhibition projects showing these shifting processes away from the old centers of Western art, it is Enwezor merit to have enlarged the art historical focus into large transoceanic spatial contexts, in which the artistic connections and

Members of our network got to know her under different circumstances and at different points in time as an energetic exhibition maker, scholar and author. Bisi Silva pioneered cultural policy in particular in Nigeria by creating conditions for artists, curators and art historians in which they could work. Energetically, empathically and always visionary she was able to initiate dialogues between different local positions, to incorporate international guests and to collaborate with colleagues from the Global South. Bisi took charge of the processing of African contemporary art and was so firmly committed to the realization of exhibition projects that also promoted young positions in Nigeria and elsewhere, who first made important artistic positions from Africa familiar to the art world. She researched artists from the history of Nigeria until the present and explorated the subject of diversity.

After completing her language studies in Dijon, Bisi Silva graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a Masters degree in Curating Contemporary Art and then returned to Lagos, where she became one of the central figures in the art and exhibition scene. In 2007, she founded the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA), which has become more than just an exhibition space for contemporary art, especially for young, even lesser-known or new positions, a crucial place of first exhibition and public perception.

It corresponded to Bisi Silva's self-image as a scholar and author of renowned art magazines and journals (such as Agufon, Artforum, Art Monthly, Metropolis M, or Third Text) and her tremendous vision of building up a comprehensive art and cultural science library in the CCA, one of a kind in Nigeria which made the CCA a highly important meeting place, a place of research and negotiation for the local art scene, as well as international researchers and guests. Especially in recent years, he became for Bisi Silva, who wanted to focus