International Conference, June 3-5, 2025, organised by Sami Khatib & Jens-Peter Hanßen
The event was originally planned for 20-22 May 2024 under the title “Crisis, Memory & Critique,” conceptualized and organized by Jens Hanssen and Sami Khatib, and subsequently postponed and reconceptualized due to the genocide in Gaza. For this international conference, Jens Hanssen and I successfully applied to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for third-party funding and were granted the sum of 17,600 EUR.
Thematically, “Catastrophe, Memory & Critique” takes stock of how the field of memory studies has metamorphosed and expanded internationally since the landmark event Crisis and Memory, held at OIB in 1998. In 2025, in times of genocide, war and terror, our conference aims to interrogate the place of critique in relation to three contested fields of research: (1) European memory politics and Germany’s once celebrated “Erinnerungskultur” (memory culture) in particular; (2) the figures of catastrophe, crisis and critique in the Arab intellectual tradition; (3) the painful afterlives of war, resistance and revolution in Lebanon, Syria, and Algeria.
Regardless of the final verdict of the International Court of Justice, Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign against the population of Gaza has not only undermined international law, but also challenges the historicity of memory and the discursive implications of memory studies. How will this unprecedented act of destruction, annihilation and expulsion be remembered? In terms of scale, impact and duration, talk of a “second catastrophe (Nakba)” is hauntingly apposite. How could the memory of two different but related catastrophes, the Holocaust and Nakba, put the unfolding genocide into perspective? What continuities and ruptures will come to the fore? And ultimately, is memory still a meaningful category at all when thinking with, through and against the negativity of the present? What kind of memory is yet to come, written in the grammatical tense of ‘future past’?
Authors: Sami Khatib & Jens-Peter Hanßen