German-Jewish Writer Esther Dischereit to visit the University

"Racist Killings and Mourning Songs"
Reading and Discussion with German-Jewish Writer Esther Dischereit
Tuesday, October 8
11:30 a.m.
125 Nolte Centre

Recently, the discovery of 10 years of racist killings by the "National Socialist Underground" (NSU), a neo-Nazi underground guerrilla organization, has shocked the German public. Dischereit has since become the most important independent voice for the public, extensively covering the legal and political investigations of this unprecedented crime in post-war Germany involving police, secret service, politicians and state officials. Unlike standard media coverage Dischereit wants to let the voices of the victims and their families be heard. The Mourning Songs tell each story of a murder from the families' unique and painful perspective and memory, and challenge racism and xenophobia wherever it is to be found; out on the streets or inside official state institutions. Dischereit, who conducted countless interviews with the victims' families, voices her perspective of telling and mourning for the victims of various ethnic backgrounds. The Mourning Songs is one part of Dischereits' unique libretto project "Mourning Songs - Flowers for Otello: On the Crime of Jena" which has just been produced for the German radio by Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Esther Dischereit is one of the most exciting writers and thought-provoking public intellectuals in Germany today. Her poems, novels, essays, films, plays, and radio plays, and her opera libretti and sound installations offer unique insights into Jewish life in contemporary Europe. Dischereit, who was born into a survivor's family, is an artist of the Second Generation, who analyzes power relationships surrounding the body, femininity, expressions of minorities, and the different functions and forms of remembrance, ritual, and memory. Dischereit often initiates cross art projects for which she collaborates with composers, musicians, dancers and graphic art designers.

Please join us for the reading (in German, English, and Turkish) and discussion (English) of this unique, critical, and contemporary work, and meet Esther Dischereit and the translator Iain Galbraith.
Sponsored by: German, Scandinavian & Dutch, Center for Jewish Studies, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Center for Austrian Studies, Center for German and European Studies.
For more information: Amanda Haugen, E-mail: gsd@umn.edu, Phone: 612-625-2080

Courtney Gildersleeve PhD candidate to present at the next CHGS workshop

"Poetry, Damaged Life, and One Poem by Agha Shahid Ali"
Courtney Gildersleeve
Holocaust Genocide & Mass Violence Studies Workshop (HGMV)
Thursday, October 3
Room 710 Social Sciences

Courtney Gildersleeve is a PhD Student and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Working broadly in the field of Post-Colonial Studies, and with a commitment to the tradition of historical materialism, she examines the ways that literature and especially poetry has played a role in anti-colonial struggle and continually seeks to reckon with the long history of colonialism and violence that has shaped the modern world. Although her work is decidedly comparative, her dissertation research foregrounds the history, literature, and anti-colonial thought of the Caribbean.

While focusing primarily on writers from Cuba, Martinique, and Haiti, she studies texts that emerged from or in response to the Transatlantic slave trade, those that address the labor of African peoples in the Americas, and those that grapple with the continuing cost of 'intervention' by many other nations in the Caribbean. In addition to the presentation she will give at the HGMV workshop, which parts ways with this historical context, this semester she is also working on a project that offers a critical perspective on recent efforts--particularly in the former slave-trading city of Bordeaux--to memorialize the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, and the struggles of that revolution.