Deutsches Haus, Columbia University
Respondents: Sonali Thakkar and Jack Halberstam
Please join the University Seminar on Cultural Memory for a discussion with David L. Eng (University of Pennsylvania) about Reparations and the Human (2025). Eng’s new book investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Please register for the event here.
