Doctoral Student Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of German
“Before Negative Dialectics: Anticolonial Critique in Southwest Africa, the Caribbean, and Germany
Julia Landmann is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of German at New York University. Her interests range across black study, Critical Theory, histories of anticolonialism, and transnational German studies.
Her dissertation examines modes of anticolonial critique that engage dialectic as a movement without presupposition or principle, thus challenging the dialectical paradigm of anticolonial struggle as counterviolence. The project analyzes the transnational dialogues that are staged in resistance to German colonialism in Southwest Africa, C.L.R. James’s and Sylvia Wynter’s connections to the Frankfurt School, and the anticolonial aspirations of student protests in Germany and Black German feminist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s. Julia has conducted extensive archival research in Windhoek, Berlin, and New York.
Previously, she studied comparative literature, philosophy, and German at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Julia has authored “Immanent Critique as a Practice of Transplantation—Sylvia Wynter and Theodor W. Adorno,” published in CR: The New Centennial Review (2023) and is currently co-editing a special issue, “Conceptual Histories of Identity,” for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.