Germany received a great deal of global credit for accepting so many refugees in the late summer and fall of 2015. In 2016, continuing into 2017, as the world seemed to be turning towards nationalist populism as a solution to fears of globalization and global migration, and at a time when many fewer migrants actually made it to Germany, its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was being celebrated across the world as the one who stood up against the otherwise exclusionary sentiment. The results of that extended moment of welcome should not be forgotten. Real people benefited from the possibility to live and stay in Germany. Still, though, one needs to ask, ‘under what conditions?’ When one looks more closely at the forms of incorporation that took place during this time marked by ‘refugees welcome’ initiatives, one should consider both the extent to which these forms of incorporation were also exclusionary (see Partridge 2012), who got left out of the so-called Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome), and finally, what kind of politics could be articulated by noncitizens (amidst pity).

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.”