House of World Cultures Berlin hosts for the next few days the project Import Export (Cultural Transfer between India and Germany, Austria) which ‘aims to explore the dynamics of mutual perception in the age of globalisation’.
Today’s morning of the accompanying symposium was covered by explorations of authenticity which ended with a presentation of filmaker and journalist Navina Sundaram. And her position and experience within german broadcasting system evolving from merging her migrant background with work experience of being an ‘anderer Deutscher’ (other German) highlighted some very interesting facts about the still difficult and limited situation for migrants/immigrants in this culture. Despite the developments in media braodcasting in other western cultures which at least changed their transmitted surface through the visible involvement of journalists from various cultural backgrounds, the german attitude still critisizes on one side missing assimilation (the all-time argument to avoid multitude) and on the other reproaches a biased sympathy for the original country of the migrant. From this hyper-ambivalent setting that in her words creates a steady paranoid situation around the always present question if the attack or critic was just personel or a general distinction against the migrant evolves a more than demanding situation of the inbetween with attacks from all sides – which hardly allows to express a hybrid self.
Navina Sundaram summarizes:
(link)
(… the entire text of her lecture has been published in last weekend’s taz magazine .. sorry, just in german)
