Redress-Revenge-Reparations Venue: History Lounge, College Hall 209, Department of History Time: 4.30-6.30 PM Fall Schedule of Workshops September 25, 2008 Prof. Miranda Spieler, Dept. of History, University of Arizona “The Crimes of History, the Rights of Man, and the "Taubira Law"  Revisited: Rethinking the Revolutionary Colonial Era, and the Origins of Haiti,  from a Reparationist Perspective” October 23, 2008 Prof. Uday Mehta, Dept. of Political Science, Amherst College “ The Language of Peace and the Practice of Non-Violence” November 20, 2008 Prof. Rocío Silva Santisteban, Dept. of Humanities, Pontifica Universidad Católica de Perú and Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Perú “Woman, Memory and War: Four Testimonios of the Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation” December 11, 2008 Prof. Anne Norton, Dept. of Political Science, UPenn “The Lesser Evil: Fear and the Flight to Abjection” Spring Schedule of Workshops January 29, 2009 Prof. Sergei Alex Oushakine, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, Princeton University CANCELLED February 26, 2009 Prof. David Eng, Dept. of English, UPenn CANCELLED March 19, 2009 Prof. Deborah Thomas, Dept. of Anthropology, UPenn “ Memorialization, Reparations and Engagement: Rastafari After Coral Gardens” April 16, 2009 Alison Saar, Artist Co-Sponsored by the Penn Humanities Forum. Redress-Revenge-Reparation Demands for reparation for historical wrongdoing hail scholars in multiple disciplines. Whether our analyses look backward, with Benjamin's imagined angel of history or look forward, to demand the crafting of a different future, the questions will be wide-ranging. Who can ask for reparative justice? Does reparation require a trans-historical and trans-cultural notion of abstract justice? Are some wrongs irreparable? The demand to correct a wrong done in the past can become a license for wrongs done in the present or future, as in common-sense understandings of revenge. The problem of revenge, in turn, connects to debates over how to understand human agency—how one determines who perpetrated an injustice and who was the victim may have implications for our understandings of who makes history, for example. Grounding the discussion in specific histories will raise other inter-disciplinary questions—both particular and theoretical. Not least of these is that of "pastness" itself. Do claims for redress require a conception of time that is linear or might they sketch the possibility of non-linear understandings of history? In convening the Ethnohistory Seminar in 2008-2009 we aim for a broadly multi-disciplinary conversation that is alert to the urgency of ethical, political, cultural and historical discussions within and across our various disciplines. Dr. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear Dr. Anne Norton Ethnohistory Faculty Coordinators 2008-2009 Ethnohistory Workshop The Ethnohistory Program at the University of Pennsylvania
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