Chiara De Cesari
Chiara De Cesari is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her wide-ranging research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of contemporary globalization and state transformation. One strand of work explores how artists and activists are reclaiming and reinventing cultural institutions. Chiara is currently leading a major NWO-funded project on this theme, named “Imagining Institutions Otherwise.” Another concerns the transnational politics of memory and cultural heritage, above all in the West Bank. Her monograph, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), argues that Palestinian civil society has enrolled museums and urban regeneration initiatives to assert its distinct cultural heritage amid the enduring Israeli occupation. Still another focuses on colonial legacies and cultural racism in contemporary Europe. Chiara is currently co-writing another monograph, provisionally titled Curating the Colonial, which explores how museums are reframing colonial histories in response to postcolonial critiques. Across these interests, Chiara has published many articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and Memory Studies, and co-edited two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019, and Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to international and interdisciplinary collaboration, she has been involved in several major international research projects. Currently, she is working in the HERA’s “en/counter/points” project and the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation’s “Worlding Public Cultures” network.
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Papers by Chiara De Cesari
Bringing together a group of political scientists, anthropologists, and cultural and memory studies scholars, the book illuminates the relationship between memory and populism from different angles and in different contexts. The contributors to the volume discuss dominant notions of European heritage that circulate in the public sphere and in political discourse, and consider how the politics of fear relates to such notions of European heritage and identity across and beyond Europe and the European Union. Ultimately, this volume will shed light on how notions of a shared European heritage and memory can be used not only to include and connect Europeans, but also to exclude some of them.
Investigating the ways in which nationalist populist forces mobilize the idea of a shared, homogeneous European civilization, European Memory in Populism will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of European studies, heritage and memory studies, migration studies, anthropology, political science and sociology.
Chapters 1, 4, 6, and 10 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivatives 4.0 license.
With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.
Het recente geweld in Israël/Palestina heeft achtergronden in de sociale, juridische en politieke context van de laatste zeventig jaar. In de reconstructie van deze context hebben de laatste jaren grote verschuivingen plaatsgevonden. In recente rapporten van mensenrechtenorganisaties zoals Human Rights Watch en B’Tselem wordt de sociale en politieke ongelijkheid tussen Joodse Israëli’s, Palestijnen in Oost-Jeruzalem, de Westbank en Gaza geanalyseerd in termen van apartheid, en is er aandacht voor de rol van Israël in het bestuur van het hele gebied tussen de Middellandse zee en de Jordaan. Hoe verhoudt dit zich tot het publieke engagement en de publieke perceptie in Nederland?
Moderator: Yolande Jansen
Sprekers: Erella Grassiani, Dina Zbeidy en Itaï van de Wal
Dit programma vond plaats op woensdag 2 juni 2021 bij SPUI25.
Het programma is onderdeel van een tweeluik over Israël/Palestina, zie ook het eerste deel 'Voices on Israel/Palestine: Contributions from the Humanities' via https://spui25.nl/programma/voices-on-israel-palestine.
Moderator: Chiara De Cesari
Sprekers: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Haidar Eid & Mezna Qato