Repair, Reparation, Refusal

The uneven distribution of the devastating losses of the last years due to the Covid-19 pandemic starkly revealed the legacies of structural racism, inequality, war, poverty, and climate change. Acts of mourning and memorialization also need to acknowledge these compounding inequalities, often dating back centuries.

Cultural studies experts Hortense Spillers and Marianne Hirsch discuss the connections between these traumatic histories and the responses of affected communities on both sides of the Atlantic. They ask whether and how art, literature, architecture and public action can inspire struggles for repair and reparation, raising also the implications of the politics of refusal and abolition that some have recently adopted as a more appropriate reaction to continued dispossession and neglect.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

1014, 1014 5th Avenue, New York, United States