On Monday 21 March, Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar will give a seminar on the relation between the 'Jewish Question' and 'Muslim Question'.
Unsettling the Question
Albeit distinctively, the ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Muslim Question’ have articulated public debates on the presence and existence of Jews and Muslims in Europe, constructing these communities and individuals as ‘alien’ to Europe, and in dire need of assimilation or integration. Recent scholarship on Islamophobia has pointed out similarities and differences between this phenomenon and antisemitism, and yet, the ‘Questions’ remain unchallenged. Our talk situates the ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Muslim Question’ in an arrested temporal horizon in order to think them relationally. We pay particular attention to the articulation of these public debates in the format of ‘Questions’ and the manifold political implications of such a configuration, as well as the issues raised by thinking these ‘Questions’ relationally. Ultimately, our aim is to develop an analytic (theoretical and methodological) on how to approach and think the family resemblances of the ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Muslim Question’.
Biographies
Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. She is the PI of the NWO funded Vici project EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’. She is the director of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality and the Executive Editor of the Sage journal Ethnography.
Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar is a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam, working on the project EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’. He holds a PhD in Sociology by the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Among his publications: (2018) Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany, Race, Time, and the German Islam Conference, Leiden & Boston: Brill: (2020) The Interior Frontiers of Germany, On Recursive History and Ritual Male Circumcision. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 10(1), 22–44; (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020) “They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement, British Journal of Sociology, 71(4): 680-701.
You can read the following text in preparation of the seminar:
Sarah Bracke & Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar (2021) On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims, Critical Research on Religion,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20503032211044430
Sara R. Farris (2014) From the Jewish Question to the Muslim Question. Republican Rigorism, Culturalist Differentialism and Antinomies of Enforced Emancipation. Constellations, 21(2):296-307.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12087
We are meeting on Zoom at 15:30 Netherlands time. The Zoom link has been distributed via our email list. If you would like to receive it (again), please email [email protected].
In the evening on the 21st, there is a screening and discussion of the film Moonlight organised by the anti-racism student group from Radboud University. Here is a link if you are interested: https://www.lux-nijmegen.nl/film/luxspecial-moonlight/