A growing body of scholarship explores the complex relationships between Jews, whiteness, antisemitism, and racism, as well as Jewish perspectives on race and racism, among many other related themes. At the same time, scholars of cultural studies have produced fruitful work on how the Jew has been imagined and constructed in different Jewish and non-Jewish spaces. The “spatial turn” in the Humanities has challenged Jewish Studies to study the dialectic relationship between settlement and migration, place and displacement.
“Jews in Racialized Spaces” brings together these two areas of research and theory at an international conference to be held at the University of Cape Town in March 2017. The organizers invite papers that investigate the place of Jews and “the Jew” in a variety of racialized spaces both real and imagined, engaging with conceptual and physical spaces, urban and rural environments, colonial and postcolonial, cosmopolitan and homogenous, Israel and the Diaspora, Jewish spaces such as ghettoes and those understood to be controlled by others.
The organizers seek papers reflecting many different geographies, chronologies, and approaches. They welcome proposals from all periods from antiquity through to the contemporary, and from all disciplines including history, literary and film studies, art and cultural studies, architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, Holocaust studies, and political studies.
The conference will be held at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town from March 28-30, 2017. Please send proposals, maximum of 250 words, and a brief bio to Janine Blumberg (Janine.blumberg@uct.ac.za) by September 30, 2016. Decisions on proposals will be made by November 15, 2016.
The conference will be hosted in partnership with the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney, and Jewish Studies at Tulane University.