Over the past roughly two decades, the interconnected concepts of reparation, restitution, and commemorative culture have gained renewed momentum - in academic discourse as much as in activist, artistic, and political contexts. This development insists on a critique of the material and systemic conditions of societies and global relations. In their 2018 report on the restitution of looted cultural artifacts, for example, Benedicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr discuss restitutions in the light of a new ethics of relations. Individual acts of restitution, but also the processes of material and immaterial reparation that go with them, are viewed as mediators in the by definition irreparable legacy of colonialism and its present repercussions. A new ethics of relations might even go beyond anthropocentrism: The destruction of nature in the Anthropocene and the destruction of humanity that is colonialism both require a fundamental questioning of the premises of western modernity and a radically different relationship to the world. The present volume aims to examine different discourses and practices of reparation, bringing together perspectives from cultural studies, memory studies, post- or decolonial studies as well as literary studies. Chapters from these disciplines are complemented by contributions from the fields of philosophy, art, and literature in order to explore the multiple facets of reparation. With contributions by Kader Attia, Lucia della Fontana, Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Alexandre Gefen, Hannah Grimmer, hn. lyonga, Helena Janeczek, Markus Messling, Clement Nde Fongang, Aurelia Kalisky, Fabiola Obame, Angelica Pesarini, Aurore Reck, Olivier Remaud, Patricia Oster-Stierle, Sahra Rausch, Igiaba Scego, Ibrahima Sene, Christiane Solte-Gresser, Jonas Tinius.

This book provides a genealogical perspective on various forms of mind reading in different settings. We understand mind reading in a broad sense as the twentieth-century attempt to generate knowledge of what people held in their minds - with a focus on scientifically-based governmental practices. This volume considers the techniques of mind reading within a wider perspective of discussions about technological innovation within neuroscience, the juridical system, "occult" practices and discourses within the wider field of parapsychology and magical beliefs. The authors address the practice of, and discourses on, mind reading as they form part of the consolidation of modern governmental techniques. The collected contributions explore the question of how these techniques have been epistemically formed, institutionalized, practiced, discussed, and how they have been used to shape forms of subjectivities - collectively through human consciousness or individually through the criminal, deviant, or spiritual subject. The first part of this book focuses on the technologies and media of mind reading, while the second part addresses practices of mind reading as they have been used within the juridical sphere. The volume is of interest to a broad scholarly readership dealing with topics in interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, history of knowledge, cultural studies, and techniques of subjectivization.