LECTURE SERIES | 3 DECEMBER 2024 | 18.30 UHR (BERLIN)

Chiara de Cesari: Heritage Politics, Racism and the Israel/Palestine Question (ENG)

Strains of Holocaust memory are widespread in current representations of Gaza and Israel/Palestine, in both narratives of solidarity with Palestinians and those supporting Israel’s government. In an example of what could be called, following Michael Rothberg, asymmetric multidirectionality, memories of the past are reproduced and transformed while being activated as interpretive lenses to read present historical events and affective media though which those events are experienced and acted upon. This is not new in the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, especially in relation to Israel, whose national identity is grounded in Holocaust memory.  Yet, in the last year, we have seen a dramatic proliferation of so-called Holocaust analogies to read what is happening at the present moment. My talk will center on this multidirectional framing and its ambivalent, racialised politics. 

Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her eclectic research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of post- and decoloniality, globalization and state transformation. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums and cultural institutions. An important strand of her research examines how artists and activists are reclaiming and reinventing public cultural institutions. De Cesari is leading a large collaborative research project on this theme, named “Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation”. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014; European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in many international research projects and networks, connecting universities across worlds with different social partners, museums and cultural institutions.

Location:
Universitätsbibliothek der TU und UDK Berlin
Fasanenstraße 88
Raum Bib 014

Video Conference:
https://tu-berlin.zoom.us/j/66001454281?pwd=gzHbq0tKpCu73RKathtuN6d7jMZfOx.1

Meeting ID: 660 0145 4281
Passcode: 123456