Fatima El-Tayeb will give a lecture as part of the DuBois Lecture series with the title “German” and “Ungerman”: Racial Crisis as the New Normal in the United Germany.

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of African-American Literature and Culture at the University of California San Diego, is the author of the ground-breaking study European Others (2011), translated into German as Anders europäisch. Her research shows that the predominant form racism takes in Europe is an ideology of ‘racelessness’ that externalizes racialized groups and questions of ‘race’ more generally. In order to contest such exclusion, she argues, People of Color mobilize queer strategies of resistance in cultural productions such as hip hop, video and performance art.
One of the foremost experts and most innovative scholars in Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies with regard to Germany, Prof. El-Tayeb offers analyses and insights significantly advancing a critical engagement with racism and other social hierarchies both in Germany and the United States.

W. E. B. DU BOIS LECTURE SERIES

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series in American Culture Studies offers new contributions to the urgently needed intercultural dialogue by inviting scholars and intellectuals to give lectures open to a wider audience that address some of the crucial aspects and problems of public culture and the modes of cultural critique today.

The lectures are named in honor of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 to 1963) an important and influential intellectual, scholar, public figure, and writer of 20th century America. After doing graduate work at Harvard University, he was a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität) from 1892 to 1894. In Berlin he studied with Gustav von Schmöller, Adolf Wagner, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Max Weber. The first African American ever to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, he was subsequently professor of economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and became widely known for his numerous historical and analytical studies of the social, economic, political, and cultural status of black people in the United States. In his famous book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which combined political essays, cultural critique, autobiographical sketches, and fiction, Du Bois elaborated his notion of the inescapable “double-consciousness” that characterizes the lives of black Americans.

The lecture will take place at the KINOSAAL
in the main building of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6