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Presented By: Judaic Studies

Trauma and Memory: Thinking from Somali Diasporic Contexts

Amal Alhaag, moderated by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag
This workshop focuses on how geographies continue to limit our thinking, even our potentialities in how we might think our Opacity/ies and Relation/s to each other. In particular, following Alhaag’s invitation to think from Somalia, she asks, what is yielded when we think colonially bifurcated geographies together? When in Alhaag’s words we imagine and care for each other 'from different oceans and seas that wrap around the African continent'? A description to Alhaag’s related curatorial project will be available in a temporary Dropbox link (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y2kqddexyrrlxw8/AAAokTzyfj_Lhlu16CO6SI29a?dl=0) .

Following Alhaag’s call, Benedicty-Kokken invites us to consider Igiaba Scego’s writing. Notably, Benedicty-Kokken has chosen excerpts from two texts in which Scego deploys a Jewish-Muslim friendship:
-the first, Scego’s novel Adua originally published in Italian in 2015, and translated from the Italian into English in 2017, recounts the historical and geopolitical connections among Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, and Italy through stories of four generations implicated in the region;
-the second, the children’s book Prestami le ali [Lend Me Your Wings], illustrated by Fabio Visintin, based imaginatively on a true story of a rhinoceros who/that a Dutch merchant brought for show in Venice in the 1750s: it tells the story of a Jewish girl and a Somali enslaved boy, and their collective care for the rhinoceros, and each other. The children’s story emerges from a project titled Remapping the Ghetto led by professor Shaul Bassi at Università Ca’ Foscari (including writers Scego herself, Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Philipps), and was workshopped with students from the school Carlo Pisacane (Tor Pignattara, Rome) with their teacher Vania Borsetti.
For more about Scego’s work see Benedicty-Kokken’s article, Giulia Riccò’s interview with Scego, and an interview with Scego about the children’s book. Excerpts of Scego’s novel are available through a temporary Dropbox link.

Amal Alhaag is an Amsterdam-based independent curator, dj and researcher who develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counter-culture, oral histories and popular culture. Her projects and collaborations with people, initiatives and institutions invite, stage, question and play with ‘uncomfortable’ issues that riddle, rewrite, remix, share and compose narratives in impermanent settings. She is co-founder of several initiatives, including Metro54, a platform for experimental sonic, dialogic and visual culture and the Side Room: a room for eccentric practices and people together with artist Maria Guggenbichler (2013-2016). Alhaag is currently part of the curatorial team of the quadrennial sonsbeek2020-2024 in Arnhem, Netherlands; senior research & public programmer at the Research Center for Material Culture, Netherlands and curatorial and research fellow at Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is Research Coordinator and Senior Researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in the Netherlands. Headed by Wayne Modest, the role of the RCMC is to critically interrogate the historical legacies of ‘the ethnographic museum.’ She has a series of articles that interrogate what Sarah Phillips Casteel names “the rhetorical oppositionality of ‘Black’ and ‘Jew’”. Her books are: Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015); the co-edited “Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet,” a special issue of Yale French Studies (2016), and also co-edited The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (2016). Alessandra currently holds an affiliation with Gender Studies at Utrecht University, and was formerly Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center (City University of New York). She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series, Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, and member of the FACE Foundation’s French Voices selection committee. She has engaged two career tracks in academe and in culture diplomacy, at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. and NYC as well as at the Québec Government House in NYC.

Advance Registration Required: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0od-uppz4rHtyPtvxwV42DQEFoykstScr0
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Amal Alhaag

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