Veranstaltungen

Abstract 1 (Dr. Sonja Hegazy, Berlin):
Achieving a common understanding of one’s own history is frequently the subject of bitter controversy in countries across the world. Recent history, the German historian Hans Günther Hockerts says, attracts particular interest, as contemporary witnesses are still alive, and the resonance of ‘coming to terms with the past’ as a medium of political reassessment continues to grow.
Many authors today are critical of the so-called ‘memory boom’ or ‘memory industry’ that has developed in recent years in response to the violent twentieth century. The lecture looks at Morocco and the processes leading up to a truth commission in 2004 as well as its follow-up projects as a case in point. With the loss of legitimacy of politicians, it seems that historians are supposed to provide an answer as to how, in view of what has happened in the last fifty years, the next twenty years should be shaped.

Abstract 2 (Dr. Rana Barakat, Birzeit):
Modern Palestinian history has come to be defined by one word: Nakba. As Palestine’s ultimate and on-going colonial tragedy, historians have faced the paradox of working to remember the moment that in both individual and collective terms was meant to politically and socially erase Palestine. We will explore how people’s memory of that moment and the work of the historian in constructing historical narratives of the Nakba meet through contradictions. Rana Barakat will discuss the politics of remembering by interrogating historical amnesia and the process of re-calling and re-cording at the intersections of historical narratives and the contradictions that arise when reading the past through the present. Finally, by focusing on oral histories about the Palestinian village of Lifta in the north-west corridor of Jerusalem, this lecture will work to undercover these contradictions and see that history can sometimes only be remembered (if not recorded) through them.

Panelists:
Rana Barakat is an assistant professor at the Department of History at Birzeit University. After finishing her doctorate in history at the University of Chicago, Rana teaches about various historical subjects in contemporary Arab studies. Rana works on various issues including revolutionary social movements, the history of Jerusalem, contemporary Arab history, colonialism and its post-colonial resonance in the Palestinian cultural sphere and is currently working on a project of recording the oral testimonies of first and second generation refugees from the Jerusalem area. She is also currently working on a manuscript that deals with the social and political transitions of her specific definition of Jerusalem in the Mandate period with a primary focus on the city's western corridor and the urban fallah.

Sonja Hegasy studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo, the University of Witten/Herdecke and finished her M.A. at Columbia University (NY). In 1996 her Ph.D. on ‚State, Public Sphere and Civil Society in Morocco’ was published. Subsequently she joined Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin as Research Fellow and became its Vice-Director in 2008. Her research interests are civil society and social movements, politics of memory, world society and cultural globalization. Since 2012 she heads the research group ‘Transforming memories. Cultural Production and Personal/Public Memory in Lebanon and Morocco’ at ZMO. She co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Middle Eastern Women’s Studies on „Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes” (Winter 2012). She is also Head of the Advisory Board ‘Science and Current Events’ of the Goethe-Institute in Munich.