Palestine and the Challenge to German Studies (Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA))
Newport, Rhode Island
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Event: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Palestine and the Challenge to German Studies
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Newport, Rhode Island
March 6–9, 2027
Submission Deadline: 30 September 2026 through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22528
Recent work in and around German Studies (Younes and Al-Taher; El Bulbeisi; Özyürek; Moses; Salehi) argues that the erasure of Palestinian identity in Germany is tied to deeper national tensions: How the country remembers its past, how it talks or avoids talking about race, what kinds of political speech are treated as acceptable, and how it confronts histories of imperialism and genocide. Moreover, scholars (Thompson and Tuzcu; Ragab; Daher) have documented how major institutions in Germany have been engaged in a wave of repression of ethnic minority communities, targeting Palestinians, other people of color, and Jewish anti-Zionists. This scholarship demonstrates how such pressures influence which voices, histories, and political positions are treated as legitimate within the field of German Studies, and which ones are marginalized.
This panel invites contributions that explore how German Studies has begun or has struggled to engage with the significance of Palestine and Palestinian life, not only in contemporary German culture, politics, and literature, but within the discipline’s own structures. While scholarship on Holocaust memory culture, as well as on multidirectional memory and migrant memory archives, has broadened the field’s understanding of how Holocaust memory circulates and how migrant communities navigate its demands, recent work, such as articles by Catlin, Kundnani, and Rosenbrück in the New German Critique special issue “German Memory Politics at a Crossroads” (2026) provides evidence of the limits of these frameworks and the political pressures that shape them.
Rather than challenge the centrality of Holocaust memory itself, this panel aims to examine how it is mobilized to foreclose other histories of violence, displacement, and coloniality, and how this foreclosing makes it difficult to integrate anti-imperialist, antiracist, and decolonial approaches that would situate Germany within broader histories of imperialism, colonial violence, and genocide. Palestine makes these dynamics visible by revealing how debates about memory shape disciplinary boundaries, how racialization and political speech determine scholarly legitimacy, and how exclusions are reproduced even within critical frameworks.
This panel welcomes contributions that examine where Palestine appears, where it is actively excluded, and how these patterns expose German Studies’ unresolved tensions around race, German colonial histories, and the politics of knowledge production. The goal of this panel is to open a conversation about how German Studies might expand beyond memory-centered approaches toward more globally attuned, anti?imperialist, and decolonial analytical frameworks.
Topics include but are not limited to:
· Intersectional decolonial feminist frameworks and praxes
· Critiques of white Western imperial feminism
· "Pinkwashing" and "homonationalism" to justify colonial violence and dehumanize Indigenous communities
· The role of anti-Palestinian racism in mainstream anti-immigrant backlash and far-right political actors
· Scapegoating of Muslims as the new Nazis in the theory of “imported anti-Semitism” (Özyürek)
· Germany’s colonial and neocolonial relationships to the broader region of West Asia
· Integrating Palestinian perspectives into pedagogy, curriculum, and study abroad advising
· Courses and lesson plans that include the Nakba and its continuity
· German Studies and BDS/academic boycott
· The “Historikerstreit 2.0” and attacks on “postcolonialism”
· The history of East German solidarity with Palestinians
· Student and faculty support in campus organizing for Palestine solidarity, and institutional and departmental barriers
Abstracts:
Please submit 300-word abstracts by 30 September 2026 though the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22528
For questions, please contact the panel organizer Maria Grewe (mgrewe@jjay.cuny.edu).
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22528
Maria Grewe