"Learning from the Germans?"
Information
As part of their 2023 Thomas Mann Fellowships, scholars Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela will visit the east coast for several lectures and discussions with partners in the U.S. Join the Literary Arts & Studies (LAS) department, the Global Arts & Cultures (GAC) department and the Division of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) for a conversation on the politics of remembrance. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.
In her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that Germany is exemplary in how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Tracing the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust, Neiman outlines how progress is evident in laws, in language and in the education system. However, a number of controversies in the past years over Germany’s colonial past indicate the pitfalls of German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past). These controversies confront us with the challenge of how to think together different forms of discrimination and memorialization. The event addresses the conundrums of memory politics and engages with the “unfinished conversations” between Holocaust and Postcolonial Studies.
Participants
María do Mar Castro Varela studied psychology and pedagogy at the University of Cologne and earned her doctorate in political science at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. She is a professor of general education and social work with a focus on gender and queer at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Science in Berlin. Her research focus on social justice, digital hate and conspiracy theories, and issues of emancipation.
Nikita Dhawan studied German Studies, Philosophy und Gender Studies at Mumbai University and Ruhr-University Bochum. She holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization.
Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is also Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.
Helen Yitah is a Professor in English, University of Ghana. She teaches Introductory Courses in Composition and Literary Studies. Her higher level teaching is in the areas of the New Literatures in English, Eighteenth Century British Literature, The Short Story, Practice in Criticism, Literary Theory, American literature and Research Methods. Her scholarly articles have appeared in many local and international peer reviewed journals.
Emily Apter is an American academic, translator, editor and professor. Her areas of research are translation theory, language philosophy, political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, history and theory of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, and political fiction. She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University.
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