Monday, April 9 2018, 4pm Miller Learning Center, Rm. 214 Lecture The ethnic, religious, and cultural “otherness” of migrants has been mostly visualized by means of the female body. For example, the “Kopftuchmädchen” (“headscarf-girl”) became a protagonist within the anti-immigration discourse in Germany over the past ten years. Since the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015, however, images of Arab men have been increasingly circulating within the European and German media landscape. While aiming to illustrate specific events that range from the new German “Willkommenskultur” (“culture of welcoming”) to the assaults on women at New Year’s Eve in Cologne, they are often embedded within a long tradition of colonial and racist depiction of Arab masculinity and sexuality. One of the prevailing questions since then has been, how can a project be articulated that is both anti-racist, yet also anti-sexist? Intersectionality offers the instruments to take into account diverging social forces, but can it also do justice to the contradictions at stake here? By analyzing photographs and pictures from different archives, in this talk, I am presenting some of the ideas of a research project that tests the potentials and limits of our critical language of post colonialism in dealing with social conflicts and their representation within contemporary Germany and Europe.
