Following the publication of his recent co-edited book The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press), Bashir’s talk will examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, Bashir’s talk will explore the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. He will argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Critically investigating these intersections, he will claim, paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables decolonization and egalitarian bi-nationalism in Israel/Palestine.
Thu 27 Jun 2019 | 17:00–18:30
The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
Bashir Bashir (The Open University of Israel / Van Leer Jerusalem Institute / EUME Fellow 2009/10), Chair: Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
Bashir Bashir is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His primary research interests are nationalism and citizenship studies, democratic theory, liberalism, decolonization and the politics of reconciliation. He is co-editor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018).