The Minor Detail of Palestine in Holocaust Archives: On Refusal in Times of Genocide Denial and Palestinian Refusal of Displacement
Citizenship is often thought to be the precondition for political action. But what if citizenship was rather a technology of secular conversion? And what if this secular conversion rested on the particular use of history? In taking these questions to the context of Germany, this talk engages with the phenomenon of responsibilizing citizenship for the genocide of European Jewry among the Turkish and Palestinian diasporas in Berlin. Tracing how the word Palestine appears in the Holocaust archive, this talk demonstrates how Palestine is a disruptive temporality sitting squarely within secular time and the project of secular conversion. This talk introduces the notion of refusal in interplay with denial to argue how refusal as a form of political action can disrupt secular time and allow for the present to take hold of incomplete pasts.
About the Speaker
Dr. Sultan Doughan is Lecturer/Assistant Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London in the department of Anthropology. She is also the convenor of the MA programme Anthropology & Museum Practice. Her first book Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory after Gaza project is based on her dissertation research in Berlin, Germany and deals with the minority question in Europe after the Holocaust.
This work engages citizenship as a technology of secular conversion rehearsed, inculcated in museal, memorial and educational settings. Her scholarship takes stock of what citizenship inheres and engages notions of race and religious difference, space, archives and museums, injury and repair, liberalism, and secularism in Europe. She is currently working on a co-edited volume Europe’s Question of Palestine: The Politics of Injury and Refusal in Germany and Beyond for UC Press.
Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced European and German Studies, the Richard Diebold Fund for Linguistic Anthropology as well as by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Fellowship through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to coming to the department of anthropology at Goldsmiths, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University (2019-2021) and a visiting assistant professor the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University (2021-2022). Doughan holds a Phd from UC Berkeley (2018) and an MA from FU Berlin (2009). Her writings have been published in Cultural Anthropology, Transit Journal for the Study of Migration, and The Annual Review of Sociology of Religion, as well as in Errant Journal and Arts of the Working Class.