Whiteness and Collective Trauma in the Rearview Mirror
Mar 04, 2022 | 4pm PT
Virtual Lecture | Speakers: Alice Hasters, Mohamed Amjahid, Akasemi Newsome
Series: Conversations on Memory Culture in Contemporary Germany
Organized by the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, and the Goethe-Institut of San Francisco
If you would like to attend the event in person at UC Berkeley, please email: pro@ghi-dc.org
From the statue of slave trader Edward Colston toppled into the sea in Bristol, UK, to the defacing of a bust of former Belgian King Leopold II in Ghent, Black Lives Matter activists in Europe stoked public debate about racism and Europe’s colonial past, making headline news in recent months. Germany, too, has been the setting of heated discussions and demonstrations on that nation’s role in slavery and colonialism and its legacy today. However, these developments have been particularly fraught in the German context given the shadow of the Nazi past and the practice of Holocaust education and commemoration that has permeated German society since the 1980s. Thus, the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco, and the DAAD are launching a series of conversations to examine the relationship of these more recent reckonings with racism and colonial violence to Germany's long-standing reckonings with its Nazi past. We introduce perspectives from art, photography, architecture, and material culture, rooted in memorial sites and museums, as well as in film, literature, and podcasts. Our goal with this series is to address the role of race and racism in determining who can legitimately remember the nation’s past in Germany, what constitutes the bounds of the national past, and the ways in which it has been and continues to be remembered.
For the first episode of the conversation series on March 4, 2022, we have invited journalists Alice Hasters and Mohamed Amjahid. Both authors have written on whiteness as a socially stratifying concept in contemporary multicultural Germany. Hasters and Amjahid will discuss the importance of critically questioning and picking apart German memory culture, Whiteness, and the idea of a Dominanzgesellschaft (dominant society) in Germany. They will also examine the link between discourses in Germany and the United States in the transatlantic media landscape.
The series continues on March 30 with Dr. Duane Jethro (Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town) and Dr. Miriam Brusius (German Historical Institute London) in conversation with Dr. Isabel Richter (DAAD / UC Berkeley), and on May 4 with author and illustrator Nora Krug in conversation with Dr. Bettina Wodianka (Goethe-Institut San Francisco).
The series is organized by Heike Friedman (Pacific Regional of the German Historical Institute Washington in Berkeley), Akasemi Newsome (Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley), Noémie Njangiru (Goethe-Institut San Francisco), Isabel Richter (DAAD Professor in the History and German Departments of UC Berkeley), and Bettina Wodianka (Goethe-Institut San Francisco).
Speakers
Alice Hasters was born in Cologne in 1989 and works in Berlin as a writer for several German media outlets, including Rundfunk Brandenburg Berlin, Tagesschau, and Deutschlandfunk, among others. Together with Maxi Häcke, she hosts "Feuer&Brot," a monthly podcast on feminism and pop culture. Her bestselling book Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen aber wissen sollten (What white people don't want to hear about racism but should know) was published in 2019 by hanseblau.
Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main in 1988. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo. After completing his master's degree, Amjahid worked for several prominent German newspapers. He is now a freelance investigative journalist and is currently working on several new book projects. His latest book was published in 2021 by Piper Publishing and is titled Der weiße Fleck: eine Anleitung zu antirassistischem Denken (Whitewash: A Guide to Anti-racist Thinking).
Akasemi Newsome is the associate director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the associate director of research at the Global, International and Area Studies Hub, both at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research on the politics of labor, immigration, and comparative racialization addresses topics at the forefront of international and comparative political economy, including rights and global governance, institutions, capitalist development, and social movements. Her book manuscript “The Color of Solidarity” examines the conditions for labor union support of immigrant claims-making in Europe. She is also a co-editor (with Marianne Riddervold and Jarle Trondal) of The Palgrave Handbook of EU Crises (2021).