Speakers

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until the last few decades. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my lab and many others around the world has helped reopen this question. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

The work of translation (i.e. the act or process of translating words and phrases from one language into another, as well as its product, e.g. a published text which presents the translation of a foreign language original into another language) can be conceived as a paradigm of understanding, linguistic creativity, and transcultural communication. Following a hermeneutic approach to the philosophy of translation (as sketched out, in particular, by Paul Ricoeur), I shall endeavour to develop the concept of translation (in German: Übersetzung) as confrontation (Auseinandersetzung), i.e. the thesis that the work of translation essentially involves an engagement with as well as a confrontation between different world views, or “world visions” (Weltansichten) in the sense of Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the first part of my talk, I shall analyse the notion of paradigm, in the triple sense of an example, a (scientific) model of description, and an ideal, i.e. a standard of quality or an ethical norm. In the second part, I shall argue that the work of translation can be conceived as a paradigm, in this triple sense, of understanding, linguistic creativity, and transcultural communication. In this context, I shall discuss Ricoeur’s account of the work of translation, according to which it consists in a “construction of comparables”, drawing on the potential for “semantic innovation” inherent in human language which founds the possibility of a metaphorical transfer of meaning as well. This will lead me to examine, on the one hand, the kinship between “inter-linguistic” and “intra-linguistic translation”, as Roman Jakobson has termed the act of saying something in other words (paraphrase), and on the other hand, the notion of a kind of “pre-linguistic translation,” i.e. the originary articulation or transposition of experience into linguistic expression. Finally, conceiving the work of translating between languages as a descriptive model of transcultural communication as well as a normative ideal, I shall take up Ricoeur’s ethical and political notion of “linguistic hospitality” and connect it with the thesis that “culture is translational”, put forward by Homi K. Bhabha in the context of his critical theory of postcolonial struggles and cultural hybridity. In the third part of my talk, I shall develop (with reference to the notion of “untranslatables”, as elaborated by Barbara Cassin) some further perspectives for a philosophy of translation. In order to concretise the concept of translation as confrontation, I aim to demonstrate what it can mean to reflect philosophical key concepts, so to speak, in the ‘mirror’ of translation, by methodically examining and comparing the ways in which they are or have been translated between different languages, discourses, and idioms.

How can individuals and communities heal from long-standing legacies of structural violence and inequality that have shaped the project of diversity and inclusion? My illustrated talk will describe and analyze The Zip Code Memory Project, a pandemic–era experiment in transformative inclusivity, based in New York City.i In the Fall of 2021, I was part of a small group of academics, artists and activists (Diana Taylor, Susan Meiselas, Lorie Novak, and Laura Wexler) who created the Zip Code Memory Project as a way of finding reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods.  Once Lenape lands, the area we focused on attests to a history of repeated dispossession and inequality as well as resistance and renewal. In the United States, Zip Codes are postal codes, but they also mark the uneven distribution of prosperity, precarity and hope in neighborhoods across a country that, to date, has lost over a million people to the pandemic and has seen life expectancy drop significantly, if differentially, over the last two years. Zip Codes that house larger Black, Latinx and undocumented populations have suffered far greater losses of subsistence, health, education and life, and their populations had greater infection and mortality rates. Crowded apartments, and the inability to work from home compounded these effects. Women, especially, were called on to offer disproportionate amounts of care during this moment, losing jobs and livelihood, and the disabled lost essential support. The deep legacies of systemic failure, inequality and neglect that the pandemic revealed so starkly demanded accountability and transformation. We believed that economic recovery would fall short without the communal work of mourning, acknowledgment and memory that are part of personal and social recovery, but that, at the same time, memory work must be accompanied by a continued struggle for social and economic justice.  And we recognized that the effects of lockdown and isolation needed to be repaired through connection, community and touch. Attentive to the logics of separation they enact, we set out to form partnerships with community and arts organizations to activate the Zip Codes differently, opening up spaces for communicative and reparative acts. As academics, we were able to apply for and to secure a grant that would support the project and were able then to invite community members from Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx to gather for a series of art-based workshops that provided a space for collective mourning, community-building, care and repair. Through what we believed to be the restorative power of artistic collaboration and community, we aimed to create a kind of inclusivity that could allow us to work together while also acknowledging the inequalities among us – inequalities and injustices we could attempt to combat and redress as allies joining together. Thus we aimed to create a pause, a safe space, where loss could be acknowledged and felt; where we coud share our stories; experience how and where, in our bodies, we carry the uncertainties, anxieties and fears the pandemic provoked. Accompanying each other in the work of remembering and grieving, in momentous and intimate instances of pain and of joy, we hoped to find ways to heal and grow together. Most importantly, we wagered that the trust-building workshops in which we participated could enable us to acknowledge our shared vulnerability and interconnection as humans living in bodies and in time, and thus together to imagine some small ways toward transformative justice and renewed hope in our neighborhoods. Our small group workshops were supplemented by public Zoom roundtables on “Reparative Memory,” “Why Zip Codes?” and “Long Harm”; by public gatherings and performances that brought a larger community together to mourn and to organize; and by an art exhibition “Imagine Repair” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The workshops, roundtables, performances and exhibitions provided a stage on which participants could communicate their responsibility to bear witness to an extraordinary historical moment and to contribute to a growing demand for transformative justice.  Building on some of our small group of organizers’ recent scholarly and artistic work on memory, this project participates in a turn in memory studies from the past to the future, and from trauma to vulnerability, care and repair. The project builds on the writings and teachings of Augosto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair, Judith Butler’s writings on vulnerability, Diana Taylor’s work on the politics of presence, and on the work of memorial artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Doris Salcedo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hank Willis-Thomas, Susan Meiselas, Maria José Contreras, and others. In my talk, I will analyze the project’s assumptions, successes and failures, using it as a case study to think about vulnerability, repair and the work of justice. I will offer some thoughts on the implications of the transformative inclusivity we envisioned for the work of responsibility, diversity and inclusion more broadly, asking what memory studies has to offer this long-range project on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2018, an important public announcement was made in national media: ‘Qatar aims to make FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 the most accessible in tournament’s history’. In the years that followed, slow but progressive steps were taken to ensure that a Middle Eastern country would be ready to welcome fans from all parts of the world, including those with a disability. With the approaching of the mega tournament, efforts to turn an aim into a reality intensified, and on the day the first ball is kicked, the country will had done all it could to live up to the expectations it had created for both international visitors and local residents. In this presentation I will provide an overview of how a communicative approach to inclusivity and accessibility contributed to social change in the Arab world. Achievements and challenges will be showcased, and a critical reflection will consider the possible impact of the ongoing efforts on individuals, a country, a region, and possibly the world at large. These will be given from the perspective of an action researcher who is actively engaged in finding solutions for real problems in collaboration with all the stakeholders involved in the planning, development, delivery and consumption of accessibility solutions that, rather than following the principles of universal design, are user-sensitive and thoughtful of human diversity.

The advent of web 2.0, the affirmation of social media, the possible spread of the metaverse have made public discourse move to a horizontal, digital, commercial open platform. The horizontal character of the platform has undermined the intermediation processes that imposed, for better or for worse, their own order on public discourse. The digital nature of the new communication channels has moved our daily interactions into an unprecedented socio-communicative universe which, to be used usefully, would require skills that go far beyond those that most of the users have. The management of the platforms by colossal advertising agencies has subjected the public discourse to profit logics that require the user to be kept online for as long as possible through exposure to content consistent with his profile and inclinations and how much as captivating as possible. The pursuit of this logic has, on the one hand, segregated users into eco chambers in which they only receive messages that confirm them in their respective and often divergent representations of reality; and on the other hand, it has led to the proliferation of content characterized by discursive excess: sensationalism, fake news, hate speech, extreme and polarizing messages. All observers agree on the need for a vast educational intervention aimed at creating a widespread ability to communicate online. However, at present, education in digital public discourse is limited to the transmission of a set of technical-procedural knowledge that is useful but insufficient to address the complexity and rapid mutability of the technological and cultural changes underway. In this talk I will illustrate the contribution linguistics can make, on one hand, to the deep understanding of the impact of digital revolution on public discourse dynamics and on the other hand to the reinforcement of the technical, epistemological, communicative, argumentative and linguistic competences necessary to develop discourse awareness. In line with the linguistic analyses conducted within the framework of the “Dive-in. Diversity and Inclusion” research project, I will focus in particular on the indirect, albeit disruptive, impact that the economic and communicative model underpinning social media platforms has had in the last ten years on the social construction of the category of migrant by showing how the far-right has been able to understand and ride these dynamics and impose, thereby, its own categorization of social reality.

In 2011, Yasemin Yildiz and I published the essay “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany” in a special issue of the journal parallax on “Transcultural Memory.” In that essay, we drew on citizenship scholar Engin Isin’s concept of “acts of citizenship” to demonstrate how performances of memory by immigrants can transform understandings of collective belonging. The category of “memory citizenship,” however, remained undefined. In this lecture, I will expand on this category in three steps. First, I will add conceptual precision to the notion of memory citizenship by drawing on additional work by Isin and other scholars of citizenship. Next, I will map out the current field of memory citizenship with particular reference to Germany, but with gestures to its broader transnational implications. The years since our essay was published have seen significant developments in the politics of memory in Germany—developments in which the Holocaust, colonialism, the plight of refugees, antisemitism, far-right populism, and the politics of the Middle East have intersected in frequently explosive ways. At stake in what has been called the Historikerstreit 2.0 (Historians’ Debate 2.0) is the question of the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism, racism, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. In the final part of the lecture, I will investigate this explosiveness by turning briefly to three very different examples of migrant memory citizenship. All of these examples testify to what I call—with reference to comments by the anthropologist Sultan Doughan—“lived multidirectionality”: the lived experience of diverse, intersecting memory cultures among migrants and minorities in a context defined by a dominant, relatively univocal Holocaust memory culture. As the debates of recent years have demonstrated, the productive ‘self-doubt’ that characterized German memory culture in its earlier stages has given way to a creeping dogmatism and to feelings of what the German journalist Mohamed Amjahid calls ‘Erinnerungsüberlegenheit’ (‘memory superiority’). Yet, at the same time—as I will argue using examples of migrant engagement with the Holocaust—German society already possesses more relational practices of memory that have the potential to transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways. Migrant memories of the Holocaust can serve as an inspiration for challenging the orthodoxies of the dominant memory regime, not in order to relativize the Holocaust or the demands it continues to make on Germans and on all of us but rather to experiment with new ways of remembering and taking responsibility for multiple forms of political violence. The three examples I will discuss take very different forms: a video essay, an Instagram “performance,” and a short autobiographical text. I will begin with writer Priya Basil’s video Locked In and Locked Out (2020), which premiered at the virtual opening of Berlin’s controversial Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Berlin Palace. Basil’s video explicitly links memory and citizenship in a multidirectional constellation involving the Holocaust and colonialism. Basil narrates her journey from outsider to insider through the story of her consecration as a citizen and her decision to enter the Berlin Palace in order to deconstruct it from within. The video thus provides an opportunity for reflecting on the affordances and limits of citizenship as a model for thinking about the politics of memory. The question of who gets to speak also arises in another recent example of migrant memory citizenship. In an Instagram conversation that took place in February 2021—just two months after Basil’s video premiered and amidst ongoing discussion of the Humboldt Forum—the artist Moshtari Hilal and the political geographer Sinthujan Varatharajah approach the question of memory citizenship from a different angle. Identifying themselves as “children of refugees” and thus outside the contours of the dominant Germany identity, they take aim at the center: they propose the category of “Menschen mit Nazihintergrund” (people with a Nazi background) as a way of marking continuities between Germany’s National Socialist past and the inequalities of the present. (“People with a Nazi background” is a deliberate play on the phrase commonly used to describe migrants, postmigrants, and minorities: “people with a migrant background” [Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund].) If Basil criticizes the field of German memory citizenship for its failure to universalize its working through of the Holocaust to encompass colonial history as well, Hilal and Varatharajah draw attention to the limits internal to Germany’s confrontation with the Nazi past. My third example considers a short text by Wafa Mustafa, who is not the child of a refugee, but is herself a refugee from Syria and the child of a political prisoner. Taking the form of an essay as well as a video project, Mustafa’s piece “Travels” (2017)—known in German as “Werde ich je wissen, ob ich überlebt habe?” (Will I Ever Know If I Survived?)—recounts her childhood in Syria and her encounter with Germany’s Holocaust memory culture after she fled her war-torn homeland where her father had been arrested and was being held indefinitely by the regime. Mustafa’s engagement with multiple traumas weaves together public history and personal experience, as do Basil’s and to some extent Hilal and Varatharajah’s. Yet, while Mustafa’s contribution deals with deeply political concerns, it is ultimately less invested in direct political intervention than the other pieces: it instead works with the idiom of the uncanny to unsettle regimes of memory and belonging. Although Mustafa’s experience as a refugee and daughter of a political prisoner is highly specific, her conjoining of migration, political violence, and Holocaust memory is not unique—as Basil and Hilal and Varatharajah also demonstrate—but rather one example among many of how migrants and minorities have developed creative modes of engaging with German memory culture. As Yasemin Yildiz and I detail in a forthcoming book, creative and ethical engagement with the Holocaust from migrant perspectives can be found in works of literature like Menekşe Toprak’s ‘The Letter in the Suitcase’ (Toprak, 2017), in post-migrant theatre by Hakan Savaş Mican, in musical performances by Bejarano and Microphone Mafia, and in visual art by Ani and Sibel Öztürk, among other examples (Rothberg and Yildiz, forthcoming). These modes of engagement with Holocaust memory are heterogeneous and they come with no guarantees. But at their best they offer a relational, multidirectional remembrance that neither denies the specificity of the Holocaust and its lessons for Germany’s present nor elevates that specificity into a sacred and untouchable event.