Register 140 Seats Remaining

HPL Lecture Series

From Eternity to End-times: The Rise of the New German Right

Dr. Petra Rethmann discusses the recent resurgence of far-right politics and ideology in Germany, and what it means for the rest of the world.

*This program is exempt from the check-in protocol. A library card is not required to attend.

For the first time since the Second World War, the far right will form a government in Germany. Instead of asking – as often happens – who is to blame, Dr. Petra Rethmann maps out a few factors that have led to the increasing political and electoral success of the far right in Germany and beyond. The talk ends with a few considerations oriented toward political futures.

Dr. Petra Rethmann is professor of Anthropology, a faculty member in the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory program and a member of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. She is the author of Tundra Passages (2001) and co-editor of Globality: Frictions and Connections (in press) and the author of numerous articles that have appeared in edited volumes and in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, Cultural Critique, and Anthropologie et Société. Her research is based in two main areas: Russia and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of interrelated issues concerning: cultural creativity and agency; the afterlife of particular historical movements and moments; the production of history and the place of art within it; fetishization and the violence of culture. In her writings on all of these issues she attends to questions of cultural politics and representation. Petra is currently working on two book-length projects. The first one examines the cultural politics of left-wing collectives and movements that emerged in West Germany in the 1980s. The second project involves a critical interrogation of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, examined from a perspective of the future that never came into being.

Doors open 6pm; talk starts 6:30pm.

Presented in partnership with McMaster University Department of Anthropology as part of the Anthropologists in the City lecture series.