1. "Multicultural Europe on Film - The case of Germany and Austria". CODE R1

In this workshop, we will discuss the representation of national identity and transnational migration in films from Germany and Austria. After the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Iron Curtain, contemporary filmmakers have increasingly turned their attention to the influx of peoples from the former East. Their films question many Europeans’ sense of belonging to one country. Is being native tied to one’s language, cultural background, economic status, or education level? After a brief introduction, we will look at clips from a number of films that explore these issues. This seminar aims to introduce participants to the basics of film analysis.

Instructor: Fatima Naqvi, Rutgers University, Germanic, Russian and East European Languages and Literatures
Fatima Naqvi (PhD, Harvard University 2000) is assistant professor of German Studies at Rutgers University. Her areas of specialization are twentieth century literature and film, with an emphasis on the post-1945 period. She has written articles on melancholic loss and film adaptation, the sublation of history and cosmology in Christoph Ransmayr’s and Anselm Kiefer’s works, director Michael Haneke’s poetics of violence, as well as dilettantism and pedagogy in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Old Masters. She has also published on Bernhard’s controversial drama Heldenplatz and its discourse of victimhood, El Greco’s influence on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, laughter as a means of social action in Roberto Benigni’s comedy La vita è bella, and Catholicism’s continuing influence on contemporary Austrian literature. Her book manuscript, “Guilty Victims: The Contemporary Culture of Victimhood,” explores the current fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in Western European culture.

2. "Does Africa begin in the Pyrenees?" - Contemporary Spanish Culture and the Interrogation of "European" Identity. CODE R2

Spanish national identity, and Spain’s position within Europe, have always been complicated by the legacy of eight centuries of North African/Muslim rule in large portions of the Iberian Peninsula (al-Andalus) during the Middle Ages. Northern Europeans have oftentimes constructed Spaniards as “exotic others,” and Spaniards themselves have vacillated between celebrating and disavowing their presumed “difference.”
This workshop will focus on the ways in which contemporary cultural forms in Spain, and most particularly music, have contributed to this ongoing questioning of European and Spanish identity. On the one hand, there has been a notable trend within both classical and popular music to “recuperate” the medieval tradition, including efforts to excavate musical forms from the era of al-Andalus (undertaken, for example, by Begoña Olavide and Eduardo Paniagua) ,as well as to provide modern-day fora for collaboration across the Straits of Gibraltar (Radio Tarifa; Al Tall and Muluk El-Hwa, etc.). These musical developments function alongside academic and trade publications (such as María Rosa Menocal’s recent The Ornament of the World) to problematize the notion of a European identity opposed to the Islamic/Oriental/African “other.” On the other hand, popular musicians (such as the group Amistades Peligrosas), some of whom have personal ties to immigration (Manu Chao, the son of Spanish immigrants to France; Las Hijas del Sol, the Equatorial Guinean aunt-niece duo who reside in Spain), tend to highlight the “European-style” racism to which newcomers are subjected—even, or perhaps most especially, in Spain.

Instructor: Susan Martin-Márquez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University
Professor Martin-Márquez specializes in modern Peninsular novel, cinema and cultural studies. Her book Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen was published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, and she has published articles on the interconnections of gender, power and the visual in twentieth-century novels and films. Her current book project explores neo-colonialist representations of North Africa and Equatorial Guinea, and she is also working on a collaborative oral history of cinema-going in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s.

Talk and Discussion: "Inside Europe: Dynamics and Developments - What they mean when Teaching European Studies?"

Michaela C. Hertkorn, Ph. D. John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University. Adjunct Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University

This talk and discussion will deal with some of the following European/EU issues:
a) EU institution-building: an overview of a process (with a special emphasis on the constitution)
b) The future of a common EU foreign and security policy
c) The challenge of enlargement: where does it stop?
d) A common European (Union) identity?
e) Islam and Europe
f) Russia' s ties with the EU
g) Turkey: A nation between occident and orient.
h) Germany: Europe' s powerhouse?
i) France: La grande nation apres Chirac?
j) The (growing) influence of mid-size countries in Europe: the cases of Spain and Italy

Dr. Hertkorn is an expert on European, security and conflict and peace studies. She obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Institute of International Relations and Regional Studies with Free University Berlin. Her dissertation Conflict Prevention: A Comparative Analysis of Actors and Theory focused on preventive diplomacy. Most of her doctoral research was conducted as a visiting scholar of the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University and the German American Center for Visiting Scholars in Washington DC in 1999 and 2000. The revised English version was published by Mensch & Buch Verlag in Berlin in December 2002. From 2000 - 2001, Dr. Hertkorn completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC focusing on the common European foreign and security policy. Her research on transatlantic relations continued when she was a visiting scholar with the Center for European Studies of New York University from September 2001 to August 2004. Dr. Hertkorn has been an invited lecturer and speaker to numerous national and international conferences. She currently is the Director for Transatlantic Relations with the Düsseldorf Institute for Foreign and Security Policy, a German think tank established at the University of Düsseldorf. Michaela Hertkorn is on the faculty of the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations and is also an adjunct professor at the Center for Global Affairs, New York University.

KEYNOTE SPEECH + Q&A

Dr. Paolo Toschi

“Italy and the European integration process: From Rome 1957 to the European Constitution.”

Dr. Paolo Toschi
Vice Consul
Italian Consulate Newark