Race and Antiracism in Europe: Comparative Histories
Apr 06, 2022 | 12:30 - 2:00pm ET
Virtual Panel Discussion | Speakers: Rita Chin (University of Michigan), Michael Rothberg (UCLA), Jürgen Zimmerer (Univerity of Hamburg)
The Black Lives Matter movement has prompted many Europeans to stand in solidarity with antiracist protesters in the USA and confront Europe’s own histories of racist violence, from colonial conquest and genocide to the structural discrimination of immigrants and minorities. How does this reckoning rhyme with Europe’s postwar self-image of a continent committed to peace and social justice? And how do historians approach the fraught question of comparing distinct histories of racialization, stratification, and persecution as they manifested in colonialism, the Holocaust, and postwar migration regimes? What is to be gained by such comparisons?
For this panel, we are inviting three historians to explore old and new forms of racism, as well as highlight antiracist forces, movements, and policies.
This event is co-sponsored by the BMW Center for German and European Studies, the German Historical Institute and the Goethe Institut.
Panelists
Rita Chin is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is a historian of post-1945 Europe and focuses on issues of immigration, race, and cultural diversity. She is the author of The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (2017) and The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (2007) and co-author of After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Beyond (2009). She is at work on a new project, Original Sin, Race, and Reparations in the U.S. and Germany.
Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation.
Jürgen Zimmerer is professor of Global History at the University of Hamburg/Germany and director of the research cluster "Hamburg's (post-)colonial legacy/Hamburg and (early) globalisation. From 2005 to 2017 he served as founding president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), and between 2005 and 2011 as editor/senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. His research interests include German colonialism, comparative genocide, colonialism and the Holocaust, and environmental violence.