Last week Professor Michael Rothberg served as one of the keynote speakers at a conference in South Africa. The conference, entitled “Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation,” brought together scholars and practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds to reflect on complex questions of historical wounding and its haunting legacies. To learn more about the conference, visit its website, here.
Michael Rothberg is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is also the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies.
At the recent conference, Dr. Rothberg’s lecture, “The Implicated Subject: Rethinking Political Responsibility,” drew attention to uncomfortable realities about responsibility and redress as they relate to histories of violence. Rothberg proposed that in cases of collective historical injustice, restitution must transgress the limits of simplified categories such as victim and perpetrator. He introduced the position of the “implicated subject,” which he terms in his forthcoming book, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Rothberg posits that implicated subjects, although indirect or belated, “help to propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mark the present.”
To learn more about Dr. Rothberg’s lecture, click here.