Plantation Memories is a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. From the question “Where do you come from?” to Hair Politics to the N-word, the book is a strong, eloquent, and elaborate piece that deconstructs the normality of everyday racism and exposes the violence of being placed as the Other.

Released at the Berlin International Literature Festival in 2008, soon the book became internationally acclaimed and part of numerous academic curricula. Known for her subversive practice of giving body, voice, and image to her own texts, Grada Kilomba has adapted her book into a staged reading and video installation. Plantation Memories is an important contribution to the global cultural discourse.

Grada Kilomba is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and theorist born in Lisbon, where she studied clinical psychology and psychoanalysis. Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Kilomba started writing and publishing on memory, trauma, race, gender, and postcolonialism, and later on extended her concerns to form, language, performance, and video installation. She holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin and has been lecturing at several international universities, and was last a Professor at the Humboldt Universität Berlin. In her work, Kilomba intentionally creates a hybrid space between the academic and artistic languages, using storytelling as a central element for her decolonial practices. Her highly thought provoking works, have been presented at the Bienal de São Paulo (2016), Berlin Biennale (2018) and Documenta (2017), and exhibited at venues such as The Power Plant, Toronto; MUAC - Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City and Amant Art Foundation, New York; among others. She is the author of Plantation Memories and co-editor of Mythen, Masken und Subjekte (2005), an anthology on Critical Whiteness Studies.

Grada Kilomba's profile page