In my dissertation, I examine the biographies of Black women who appeared, for shorter or longer periods of time, in the Swiss mass-mediated public sphere between 1970 and 2020. I am interested in their “(negative) subjectivation” (Bergold-Caldwell 2023) within the “spectacle of the Other” (Hall 2001), and I analyze the symbolic, identitary, and material social conditions that shape these public scenes. While research in the Swiss context has so far primarily focused on exposing forms of post-/colonial othering and their grounding in epistemic whiteness, my aim is to use a biographical approach to trace forms of non-white agency — or rather, how such agency can be “critically fabulated” (Hartman 2008) within intersectional power constellations.

In this lecture, I will present several scenes I examine in my dissertation and invite you to reflect with me on how we might analytically conceptualize Blackness in Switzerland; why Blackness and race are meaningful categories for understanding Switzerland as a globally entangled temporal-spatial formation; and the ways in which Black Studies in Switzerland encounter historical, institutional, and epistemic limits.