“ … based on the skewed theory building of the postcolonial movement”: Media conflicts surrounding postcolonial studies and antisemitism in Germany
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Abstract
The increasing recognition of postcolonial studies gave rise to a revisionist counter-movement on the conservative side in Germany, which went largely unnoticed until 2019. In the course of media conflicts over antisemitism in recent years, however, a majority opinion emerged in the liberal and left-wing camps that fundamentally suspected and criticized postcolonial studies as antisemitic. The essay traces some of these conflicts in the German public sphere (around Achille Mbembe, the so-called Second Historians’ Controversy, the art exhibition documenta 15, and the reactions to 7 October 2023) and develops a model of three approaches (delimited concept of antisemitism, historical context of the Federal Republic of Germany, Eurocentrism) to explain this hegemony.
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Antisemitism: Theory Conflict, Division and Controversy Universities / Higher Education Post-Colonial Main Topic: Antisemitism
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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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“ … based on the skewed theory building of the postcolonial movement”: Media conflicts surrounding postcolonial studies and antisemitism in Germany. 2026: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/1369801X.2026.2728973
