The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: "After Diaspora, Beyond Citizenship—Articulating “Blackness” as a Universal Claim"

What does it mean to think of life “after diaspora” and “beyond citizenship”? What does a perspective from post-War and post-Wall Berlin reveal about these positions? The point of this research is not to argue that citizenship is no longer important as an analytical category or a social ideal, or that diasporas no longer exist. Instead, this project simultaneously thinks diaspora and citizenship beyond their limits. It examines citizenship beyond the nation-state and diaspora beyond ethnic purity or a politics of return. While citizenship as a philosophical concept holds up laudable social ends, in its actual practice it cannot get beyond the reality of exclusionary outcomes. The politics and analytics of diaspora, while seemingly limited to a particularly restricted transnational ethnic or ethno-religious network, also produces its own unexpected trans-ethno-religious affiliations and unanticipated outcomes.

The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: “Articulating ‘Blackness’ as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, European Enlightenment, and Noncitizen Futures” by Damani Partridge

This series thinks through the relationships between European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and contemporary democratic participation. It will examine, in particular, the ways in which "Blackness" intervenes in philosophical and everyday discussions about enlightenment and genocide, examining the relevance of the Haitian revolution to French democracy, and post- World War II African-American military occupation to a democratizing and denazifying Germany. From Berlin post-migrant theater’s use of “Black Power,” to the contemporary articulations of refugee rights, the series will investigate the extent to which articulations of “Blackness’’ enable democratic participation in a context in which that participation demands accountability for Nazi perpetration and the associated proof that one is not anti-Semitic or a terrorist.
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The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures are a series of lectures on a work in progress, designed both as free public lectures and as a special course for advanced students to work closely with a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology on a topic in which the instructor has an intensive current interest. As the description written by Professor Roy “Skip” Rappaport in 1976 states, “…it offers the opportunity for other students and faculty to hear a colleague in an extended discussion of their own work.”