First two seminars of the Senior seminar 'White Memory: colonialism and race in Eastern European memory cultures', held by Prof. James Mark (University of Exeter).
Date: 07 APRIL 2025 from 15:00 to 18:45
Event location: Aula Specola, Department of History and Cultures, Piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2
Type: Cluster 4 - Memories and Political Genealogies
The first seminar will seek to provide a framework for the series as a whole. It will also ask why forms of racial innocence, and the memory cultures that have sustained them, have not been subjected to substantial historicization. It will explore examples from across the world – from North Africa to South America – to help place Eastern Europe into a global context.
The second seminar will address how nation-building projects in the region built memory cultures around both their own colonisation (as slaves, coolies) and their distance from the violence of western European Empire. At the same time, these memory cultures were deployed with the aim of gaining access to a full recognition as white European nations, and in some cases underpinned advocacy to join western Europeans as colonising nations. National traditions and myths were whitened, and national histories used to underline their capacity to be morally superior humane European colonisers.