Pushing Columbus, Jefferson, Bismarck & Co. Off the Pedestal? Current Conflicts in Memory Cultures and the Politics of History - Prof Sabine Sielke (Bonn)

Statues of famous figures in world history are currently under severe attack; and this "iconoclasm" is by no means a new phenomenon. Yet while some activists promote the quick disposal of monuments honoring characters whose heroism appears questionable in hindsight and whose display is deemed to reaffirm racism, others fear that along with contested sculptures, our sense of history gets disposed and we become all too forgetful. This talk marks some of the frontlines of these so-called “culture wars” whose concepts and strategies get adapted from US-American debates for incomparable historical contexts on foreign turf.

About the Speaker

SABINE SIELKE is Chair of North American Literature and Culture and Director of the North American Studies Program and the German-Canadian Centre at the University of Bonn. Her publications include Reading Rape (Princeton 2002) and Fashioning the Female Subject (Ann Arbor 1997), the series Transcription, and 20 (co-)edited books, among them Nostalgia: Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures (2017), Knowledge Landscapes North America (2016), New York, New York! Urban Spaces, Dreamscapes, Contested Territories (2015), and American Studies Today: New Research Agendas (2014), as well as more than 140 essays on poetry, (post-)modern literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, gender and African American studies, popular culture, and the interfaces of cultural studies and the sciences.