Geographies, Spaces of Experience and Objects of Migration in Jewish Visual and Material Culture

The workshop will analyze and discuss multifaceted entanglements and encounters of visual and material culture in Jewish geographies and spaces of experience in the 19th and 20th Century. It will focus on geographical areas which have received less attention on the map of scholarship of Jewish history yet, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and the Pacific region, the Carribean and Suriname.

A series of case studies presented at the workshop will investigate cultural, ritual and everyday objects, artistic, aesthetic and cultural expressions, practices, spatial and territorial imaginations and utopias, as well as visual and material testimonies of migration and exile experiences of European – especially German – Jews in these geographies. In a critical knowledge oriented   approach, they are analyzed with regard to the visual and material reception and representation of these encounters. Thereby, the objects are interrogated as epistemologically charged, intercultural negotiation spaces and contact zones, studied in order to understand and analyze processes and questions about Jewish socio-cultural, political and spatial identities and their visual and material representations in the 19th and 20th century – a period, that is marked by Jewish emancipation and assimilation processes in Europe, National Socialism, the Shoah and its consequences such as exile, as well as expansionist or colonialist ambitions of Empires, collective and individual loss, and moments of resistance.

Program:

September 15, 2023

09.30 Hannah Baader Welcome 
Anna Sophia Messner and Eva-Maria Troelenberg Introduction

09.45 Julia Schneidawind, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich
German-Jewish material cultural heritage in Oceania and the South Seas

10.30 Laura Almagor, Utrecht University
“Sick of the Civilized World”: Jewish Territorialism and postcolonial reinvention in Suriname, 1946-1948

11.15 Coffee break

11.45 Jessica Williams Stark, Princeton University
Anne Fischer: South African Photographies of Exile and Resistance

12.30 Lunch break

13.30 Anna Sophia Messner, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
German-Jewish Encounters with sub-Saharan Africa. A Visual Cultural History

14.15 Anna-Carolin Augustin, German Historical Institute Washington
‘Rescued Remnants’ on a ‘Dreamy Island’ – The Jewish Curaçao Experience

15.00 Final discussion

15.30 Visit to the Synagogue (speakers only)