Monday, April 7th • 3:00-4:45 pm Racial Erasures and Memory: A Global Perspective. The first seminar will seek to provide a framework for the series as a whole. It will also ask why forms of racial innocence, and the memory cultures that have sustained them, have not been subjected to substantial historical investigation. It will explore examples from across the world – from North Africa to South America – to help place Eastern Europe into a global context.
Monday, April 7th • 5:00-6:45 pm The Formation of National Memory: White innocence and white desire in Eastern Europe 1880s-1930s. This seminar will address how growing nation-building projects in the region built memory cultures around both their own colonisation (as slaves, coolies) and their distancing from the violence of western European Empire. At the same time, these cultures were deployed with the aim of gaining access to a full recognition as white European nations, in some cases underpinning the desire to join western Europeans as colonising nations, and sought to whiten national traditions and myths.
Tuesday, April 8th • 5:00-6:45 pm Communism and the reproduction of white memory 1940s-1989. Despite commitment to global anti-racism, European Communist states maintained a desire for white superiority whilst claiming historical innocence concerning colonialism or Jewish genocide. This was based on selective reworking of these earlier histories of morally superior anti-coloniality, erasure of the region’s colonial desires, and relationship to genocide, and, by the late 1950s, also included the development of cultures of imperial nostalgia. All of these, and their political effects, will be examined in this seminar.
Wednesday, April 9th • 5:00-6:45 pm Populism and the re-emergence of race 2000s-today. Whereas seminars 2 and 3 focusses more on a regional history of the growth of this memory culture, seminar 4 will widen the lens once again, to consider how Eastern European ‘white memory’ connects to new populist racially supremacist memory cultures worldwide. It will explore how from the 1980s – even before the collapse of Communism – new racially supremacist ways of remembering were gaining traction, not only in Eastern Europe but also in e.g. India or China. This marked the beginnings of the populist memory cultures of racial supremacy we see today. A central question will be: how do we bring new questions of post-Communist memory into conversation with – either through comparison or entanglement - ‘populist postcolonial turns’ in history and memory (e.g. India under Modi).