Remembering Joséphine Soliman is more than an act of historical justice

Yesterday, our publisher, simon INOU, had the honor of delivering a short address as founder of the Josephine Soliman Gesellschaft at the inaugural Josephine Soliman Lecture hosted by the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. The Josephine Soliman Lecture in African Studies is an annual lecture series dedicated to exploring African history, politics, knowledge production, and decolonization.

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends

I would first like to thank the organizers of this unique event here at the Institute. Thank you for taking the time to develop such a vision and, above all, to bring it to life during a time of budgetary constraints at the University of Vienna.

Thank you also for inviting Professor Akosua Adomako for this very first edition. Dear Professor Adomako, a warm welcome to you. From the mother continent you are bringing both the warmth of your homeland and a wealth of intellectual insight we so desperately need in a Europe which—through the emergence and normalization of far-right ideas—has grown cold over the past two decades.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the Research Group on Black Austrian History and Present (Recherchegruppe zu Schwarzer österreichischer Geschichte und Gegenwart). This group was formed within the framework of the project „Verborgene Geschichte/n – remapping Mozart“ during the Mozart year in 2006, when the 250th anniversary of the composer was extensively and culturally celebrated across Salzburg and Vienna.

The goal of this research group within the PAMOJA Movement of the Young African Diaspora in Austria — composed of Claudia Unterweger, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Njideka Stephanie Iroh, Araba Johnston-Arthur, Dominic Mariochokwu Gilbert (also known as ITEM seven) — was to challenge invisibility and forge new paths in Austrian historiography, combining this with the self-determined visibility and voice of Black Austrian experiences and contemporary realities.

This is how I came to know Joséphine Soliman. As an important figure in our shared history, she is considered one of the first, if not the very first, women to openly resist structural racism in the Habsburg Monarchy. Despite this, and although the Research Group on Black Austrian History has petitioned for a street to be named after Joséphine Soliman here in Vienna, to this day there is still no street, statue, or public memorial bearing her name.

This is one of the reasons why my team from the Black Austrian Awards and I decided to help restore the Soliman family’s rightful place in Austria’s collective memory. The Angelo Soliman Black Austrian Awards—established 2018 by our magazine, fresh—celebrate and honor the remarkable contributions of Black individuals, collectives, organizations, and initiatives to our communities within the austrian society.