Deutsches Haus at NYU presents “Anachrony and Migrant Memory,” a public lecture and conversation with Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, postdoctoral scholar in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Feng-Mei Heberer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU.

In this talk, Michaelsen is thinking of a certain form of temporality that is relevant to the discourse on racism and which she understands as anachrony. By this she means that from a certain perspective, racism is considered to have already been overcome, which is why it is always out of date, so to speak, to talk about it. Racist violence is thus placed in a temporal vacuum. If we apply Didi-Huberman's concept of anachrony, it refers not so much to something that is no longer relevant, but to a historical legibility that has not yet been achieved. After the so-called NSU’s series of racist murders came to light in 2011, many people were shocked to realize that they had gone almost unnoticed by a wider public. Michaelsen will refer to the collectively unfolding reflections on mourning and remembering racist violence in order to approach the mode of anachrony in this context.

Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen is a postdoctoral scholar in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from Ruhr-University Bochum. Prior to her current position, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, with a project on postmigrant film and video (2018-2020) and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (2021-2022), with the project “Postcolonial Ghosts in the Adoption Archive.” Her research focuses on representations of (post-)colonial trauma, minority historiography, and reparative practices.

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies. She is also a faculty affiliate of the department’s Asian Film and Media Initiative. Her research interests lie at the junctures of labor, transnational migration, and Asian diaspora, and her work draws heavily on the insights of ethnic studies, queer studies, feminist studies, and critical area studies. Heberer is the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). The book explores a multilingual archive of contemporary queer and feminist videos by Asian diasporans in North America, Europe, and East Asia. It grapples with the pressing question how media representation can critique and advance social justice for racialized minorities in the wake of today’s unprecedented rise of onscreen diversity.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 12^th, 2024 from 6:00 PM-7:30 PM

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

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