Jacqueline Rose and Chiara de Cesari speaking

Jacqueline Rose: “The Legacy”

Chiara de Cesari: “Impossible Memories: On the Predicament of Creating Palestinian National Museums”

We are delighted to host Jacqueline Rose, Professor of Humanities at Birkbeck University, and Chiara de Cesari, Assistant Professor of European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. They will be speaking as part of the Sadler Seminar Series “Confronting Traumatic Pasts: Between the Local and the Global.” This is an interdisciplinary research initiative that investigates the memory cultures connecting us to traumatic historical events.

Jacqueline Rose will be speaking about the legacy of apartheid in contemporary South Africa:

What is the legacy of a brutal political past?  How does it pass down through the generations?  At a time of persistent, or even growing, race, gender and class discrimination and inequality, what does it mean to tell the young that they have been born free into a new world? In this lecture Jacqueline Rose turns to South Africa to argue that, far from lifting the weight of history, such expectations lay an impossible burden on the children of the nation. Drawing on the living archive of the recent University protests, on radical South African thinkers, alongside other voices from across the world who have struggled with a cruel history, she suggests that only a continuous reckoning with the past, however agonised, can forge a path towards a better, more just, future.

Chiara de Cesari will be speaking about “Impossible Memories: On the Predicament of Creating Palestinian National Museums”:

In this talk, I explore the peculiar history of museums in post-Oslo Palestine and especially the story of the Palestinian Museum. I explore the ways in which the Palestinian quasi-state, the Palestinian Authority, has tried but failed thus far to create a national museum as a key institution of national representation. Instead, Palestinian artists and cultural producers have experimented with different museum formats, creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile, thus producing national institutions in transnational spaces.