The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: "Democratization as Exclusion?: Refugee Futures and Holocaust Heritage"

Who has the right to make claims on the post-Holocaust and post-Berlin Wall state’s resources and under what conditions? If art is a key arena of participation that also requires state funding, then what does this combination mean for political participation? And finally, if teaching others how not to be anti-Semitic is a key element of post-Holocaust democratization, when and how will refugees and other noncitizens be incorporated into the democratic polity?

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.”