Through figures such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, this chapter asks to what extent Turkish- and Arab-European youth, for example, are able to enter discussions about the future of Europe? How do contemporary state-financed youth projects, designed to counter anti-Semitism as a critical component of promoting democratization, work in relation to these unanticipated links? Key sights for this investigation include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and Berlin youth clubs and youth theaters. In this lecture, I am not only interested in how “‘Black’ lives (as such) matter,” but also in the ways in which Turkish, Arab, African, and Jewish subjects come to take on and articulate “Black” positions as part of a universalizing process in which they demand change.

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.”