Seminars

Eng’s new book investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.

The events of October 7 and their aftermath have revealed major shifts in the often celebrated German memory culture regarding the Holocaust. This lecture will address these shifts in the context of recent debates surrounding memory of the Holocaust and colonialism in Germany. In light of blind spots in German responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the talk casts doubt on the efficacy of German “negative exceptionalism” regarding memory of the Nazi past.