with Dr. Ole Birk Laursen
In 1920s Berlin, the German capital was a hub for anti-colonial revolutionaries in exile, including many Indian veteran revolutionaries as well as newcomers. They established new anti-colonial organisations, sometimes in collaboration with other exiled revolutionaries, sometimes with their own national agenda; they organised social events and fierce protests against racism and imperialism; they negotiated transnational networks, global politics, repression, and deportation; and they plotted revolution from a distance.
The 10th of February 1927 marked an important moment of international solidarity — not just for the Indian activists. With the founding of the League Against Imperialism at the Brussels Congress, Berlin’s anti-colonial communities formed transnational networks on a previously unmatched scale. As one of the many researchers who contributed to the exhibition “Stand in Solidarity”, Ole Birk Laursen joins us on this occasion to provide an introduction to the history of Indian anti-colonialism in Weimar Berlin.
Dr. Ole Birk Laursen is an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on South Asian history, anticolonialism, and anarchism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (London: Hurst, 2023).
Free of charge. Please register by telephone 030-90 29 24 106 or via e-mail museum[at]charlottenburg-wilmersdorf.de. If free spots are available, you can also join spontaneously.
*This event is organized by Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.
**The exhibition »Stand in Solidarity!« is the result of a cooperation between the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and the afro-diasporic and decolonial organizations of the project Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City. It was designed by Studio visual intelligence.
