14232

SoSe 21: Memory politics and minority management in contemporary Europe (Ü)

Schirin Amir-Moazami Hannah (Christiane) Tzuberi

Additional information / Pre-requisites

The seminar comprises 4 SWS and is divided into two separate sections – one reading class and one lecture series. In the seminar we will discuss readings in the field of memory work and politics, postcolonial theory as well as “minority” questions mostly, but not exclusively related to Germany. To prepare for the lectures of invited guests we will ask the speakers to suggest at least one key text that relates to their talk. Students are required to actively participate in both events and should be ready to read and discuss in English. Prior to each session, students are asked to deliver short comments and/or questions to the readings via email to both conveners christiane.tzuberi@fu-berlin.de and schirin.amir-moazami@fu-berlin.de. The seminar is limited to a number of max. 25 students and open for students of the MA programs of Islamic Studies Gender and Intersectionality and Politics, Global History & BUA (Berlin University Alliance). BUA students: Please register with schirin.amir-moazami@fu-berlin.de close

Comments

Over the past decades, the representation of memory work in Germany as an exemplar model of ‘coming to terms’ with its genocidal past has become diffracted. Questions related to the subterranean, disavowed continuities and recursions of racial violence have pressed themselves onto the foreground. Moreover, the relationship of Holocaust memoralization to other memories of violence in past and present, such as colonialism and imperialism has gained salience recently: What is remembered, and what is forgotten, silenced, strategically pushed away or occluded, so that the present appears as radically different from the past? This MA-seminar cum lecture series takes up these questions in order to situate contemporary “minority managements” of Muslims and Jews within a broader web of oftentimes disavowed dependencies and entanglements: How and why do certain forms of subjugation live on in a liberal democracy like Germany, either with Jewish communities, or with other minoritized communities, especially Muslims in Europe? How do previous forms of racialization of Jewish minorities gain reconfigured currency today with regard to Muslim and Jewish communities? What can we make of the simultaneousness of a “boom” of things Jewish in post-1989 Germany and the raising antagonism/violence against both Muslims and Jews? How is desire and disgust, directed unevenly at contemporary Jews and Muslims, entangled with memory/forgetting of past desire and disgust? How, when and why do genocidal atrocities and relations of injustice become inscribed into the present, allowing for some forms of contemporary violence to pass either unnoticed, or to circumvent linkage with the memory of past violence? close