The first Workshop of the International Research Network, 30 May 2013 15:45-19:00, Grote Gracht 80-82, Spiegelzaal, first floor. Please register in advance.
Taking our lead from new theoretical perspectives on ‘sexual nationalism’, neo-Orientalism and contemporary body politics, this workshop will start with a discussion of current debates about the comparability of anti-Semitism and ‘Islamophobia’. Secondly, it will concentrate on historical constructions of Jewish identity from the perspective of colonialism and Orientalism. How did the stereotypes of the external and the internal Other intertwine? What role did/do gender and processes of sexualization and ‘aesthetic formations’ play therein? The first workshop aims at a state-of-the-art overview of gender and postcolonial studies approaches to intersections of new and old Orientalism, pre-Shoa anti-Semitism, and the ambivalent trope of an ‘inner Orient,’ as can be seen, for example, in the figure of the ‘beautiful Jewess’.
Keynote Speakers:
16:00-16:30 Dr Juliane Wetzel (Berlin): Towards a comparability of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia;
16:40-17:10 Dr Achim Rohde (Marburg): Inner Orient: Anti-Semitism and the (Self-) Orientalization of the (German) Jews;
17:30-18:00 Dr Axel Stähler (Canterbury, UK): Constructions of Jewish Identity and the Spectre of Colonialism
More information here
