Gesprek Voor de Dam: Susan Neiman x Gloria Wekker #DeBalie

On the eve of National Remembrance Day Susan Neiman, American moral philosopher, and anthropologist Gloria Wekker will discuss how to deal with the dark sides of history. How do you take responsibility for the horrors of the past? How should we deal with victimization, reparations and the belief/unbelief in progress? In her book Learning from the Germans (2019), Susan Neiman, who grew up in a Jewish family in the South of the US and has lived in Berlin since 1982, compares how German and American society deal with their traumatic past. In her new book Left Is Not Woke (2023) she plees for universalism instead of tribalism and criticizes the focus on victimization and the unreparative past within the left movement. What is the best way to collectively face a traumatic past? Gloria Wekker analyzed in her influential book White Innocence (2016) how the Netherlands has suppressed its history with slavery for years to maintain a positive self-imagery and how that influences contemporary racism. How do we commemorate a traumatic past within a polarized society? Are we able to process our history into a positive ideal of ‘never again’? http://DeBalie.nl