Reparations and the Human: A Conversation with David L. Eng.

Respondents: Sonali Thakkar and Jack Halberstam

 

Please join the University Seminar on Cultural Memory for a discussion with David L. Eng (University of Pennsylvania) about Reparations and the Human (2025). Eng’s new book investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.

 

A book chapter for discussion will be circulated to registered attendees in the coming weeks.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

 

Advance registration is required. Please register for the event by Tuesday November 11. Please contact cumemory@gmail.com if with any questions.