Papers by Sultan Doughan
This dissertation deals with the question of citizenship in contemporary Germany. By taking the f... more This dissertation deals with the question of citizenship in contemporary Germany. By taking the field of civic education as a site of inquiry it probes into the educational methods of civic practices geared to train youth and professionals of migrant backgrounds to cultivate a sense of German citizenship. The dissertation demonstrates that the key question of citizenship, as one of tolerant conduct, is framed by the post-Holocaust condition. Thus, the dissertation focuses on civic educational programs funded to combat Islamic extremism and to foster secular tolerance by way of relating to the Holocaust and the murdered Jews. By doing so, the research focuses on programs dealing with the Holocaust as an exceptional event, yet constitutive of liberal democracy and tolerant subjects in the political present. The unit of analysis of the study is the group of civic educators hired to target and work with members from immigrant communities as Muslims. Here the dissertation focuses on how ...
RePlito, 2022
Holocaust memory has become the pillar of liberal democracy in a re-nationalizing Germany. After ... more Holocaust memory has become the pillar of liberal democracy in a re-nationalizing Germany. After the unification of both Germanies in 1990 and the surge in nationalist sentiments about who rightfully belongs to this new Germany, Holocaust memory emerged as a public frame of reference and gradually gave rise to museum and memorial spaces as part of a new official memory. Exhibiting and living with the ghosts of Germany’s past meant that a certain threshold was reached, Germany had matured, had endured and ultimately triumphed over evil.
TRANSIT, 2012
I should have listened to my father. The first time I played him my track he said, "What the hell... more I should have listened to my father. The first time I played him my track he said, "What the hell is this? This isn't even music. This sounds more like the stuff you have been listening to lately." I had been raised with the music of Ruhi Su, Aşık Veysel, Zülfü Livaneli, men who accompanied their singing with the saz, and whose voices were imbued with something you could call the Anatolian Blues. "If it at least sounded like Jimi Hendrix or even Frank Zappa, but this is just boom, boom, boom, boom, no instruments, no melody!" He gave me a look, as if he was waiting for an explanation. I was trying to suppress my tears, although I had expected such a response. I said, "Tomorrow" with a shrug. I was barely twenty years old and for three years, I had been in the grip of Hip-hop, listening to it for hours every day. I rapped along with the artists, memorized the lyrics, rapped alone with the instrumental versions on the B-sides of the maxi-tapes, tried to study different rappers' techniques and mimic their styles. Consumption is not without consequences, never. At some point, I began to write my own lyrics and to rap to B-sides. When I was sixteen, I had written poems in English, and three years later I could see that I had been trying to hide behind foreign words. Now I was rapping in German, it was 1993, "Ahmet Gündüz" from Fresh Familee was already out there, "Die Da" by Die Fantastischen Vier had already been number one in the charts, and this gave me hope. If four squares who acted like clowns and whose techniques, rhymes, and themes were mediocre could make it, why shouldn't the doors be wide open for me too? When I met Zack, then, a DJ I got along with and who crafted some beats for me, everything was crystal clear: I wanted to make Hip-hop in German! So we worked on our first track, the one I presented to my father. The song was about a guy who recounts all the mistakes he had made recently, situations he's ashamed of and that he thinks he'll never be able to forget. Almost twenty years later, I would have probably forgotten most of these things, if it weren't for these lyrics that I still remember along with all my other lyrics. It wasn't the next day, it was several weeks later when I tried to familiarize my father with the song. In the meantime, many friends had listened and partied to it, also because they had never heard anything like this in German, a piece that was personal without being embarrassing. I tried to explain to my father, what the missing melody was about, how the rhymes worked, what we meant by flow, and why the rhymes were often dirty. That we were trying to give poetry a modern form that what I was trying to do was not that far removed from from Ruhi Su, who had instrumentalized Yunus Emre's and Pir Sultan Abdal's poems. That he shouldn't be scared of the looped four-four time, that this was just the groove lying beneath the words, that we wanted to create worlds with these words and that the beat was just a means.
Der inspizierte Muslim, 2018
Sociology of Islam, 2019
Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one ano... more Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one another through a virtual conversation that revolves around Saba’s scholarly intervention, dedication to critical thinking, and her impact beyond the discipline of anthropology. By asking these scholars to reflect with us on their respective fields after Saba Mahmood, we aimed at disclosing and unpacking the mark Mahmood has left in fields relevant to her research. Just as in Mahmood’s scholarly engagement, collaboration and thinking beyond boundaries, disciplinary and area-wise, is central to the conversation that follows.
Sociology of Islam
Saba Mahmood kept open the definitions of her objects of inquiry. She focused on objects such as ... more Saba Mahmood kept open the definitions of her objects of inquiry. She focused on objects such as secularism, piety, and ethics in order to demonstrate what they usher into existence, neutralize, rearrange or disrupt. This mode of inquiry generated a host of questions and opened up new conversations with ongoing trajectories. Influenced by this mode of inquiry, we organized this special issue along the analyses, reflections, and conversations that she opened up, beyond the circle of her interlocutors.
RePLITO , 2022
Holocaust memory has become the pillar of liberal democracy in a re-nationalizing Germany. After ... more Holocaust memory has become the pillar of liberal democracy in a re-nationalizing Germany. After the unification of both Germanies in 1990 and the surge in nationalist sentiments about who rightfully belongs to this new Germany, Holocaust memory emerged as a public frame of reference and gradually gave rise to museum and memorial spaces as part of a new official memory. Exhibiting and living with the ghosts
of Germany’s past meant that a certain threshold was reached, Germany had matured, had endured and ultimately triumphed over evil.
But after evil, did Germans change? If Jewish religious difference and claims to political equality was the bone of contention in modern Germany, is any of that more acceptable in post-Holocaust Germany? And does it matter if we are talking about Jewish religious difference specifically or any other form of ethnic, political or religious difference? Is the right to religious difference enabled by Holocaust memory? What is
the relation between Holocaust memory and liberal democracy?Allow me to take these questions into the domain of civic education, where I conducted research in sites of formal and informal education.
JHI Blog, 2022
about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialis... more about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism. In recent years, several U.S.-based scholars have found themselves at the center of fierce public debates in Germany about the history and memory of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism and other forms of historical violence. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin put three scholars in conversation to explore these debates from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Sultan Doughan, an anthropologist, is the Dr. !omas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at Clark University. Her research on civic education programs for people from migrant backgrounds in contemporary Germany investigates these practices as strategies for incorporation into the secular nation.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2021
Historians claim that we live in a golden age of memorials. But what do memorials want? And wha... more Historians claim that we live in a golden age of memorials. But what do memorials want? And what do we want from memorials? Are memorials an expression of healing after violent events such as slavery, the Holocaust, World Wars, genocides and other forms of mass killings? Or are memorials a reminder that the experience of violence requires further healing and engagement in order to achieve justice? What is past and what does live on after mass violence, especially for the affected societies?
Sociology of Islam, 2019
Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one ano... more Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one another through a virtual conversation that revolves around Saba’s scholarly intervention, dedication to critical thinking, and her impact beyond the discipline of anthropology. By asking these scholars to reflect with us on their respective fields after Saba Mahmood, we aimed at disclosing and unpacking the mark Mahmood has left in fields relevant to her research. Just as in Mahmood’s scholarly engagement, collaboration and thinking beyond boundaries, disciplinary and area-wise, is central to the conversation that follows.
Unfinished Conversations with Saba Mahmood, 2019
This is the introduction to the special issue in honor of Saba Mahmood in the journal Sociology o... more This is the introduction to the special issue in honor of Saba Mahmood in the journal Sociology of Islam. The special issue comprises six peer-reviewed articles by a variety of scholars and a roundtable conversation with scholars Lisa Wedeen and Schirin-Amir Moazami.
Saba Mahmood kept open the definitions of her objects of inquiry. She focused on objects such as secularism, piety, and ethics in order to demonstrate what they usher into existence, neutralize, rearrange or disrupt. This mode of inquiry generated a host of questions and opened up new conversations with ongoing trajectories. Influenced by this mode of inquiry, we organized this special issue along the analyses, reflections, and conversations that she opened up, beyond the circle of her interlocutors.
Schirin Amir-Moazami (ed.), Der inspizierte Muslim. Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung, Bielefeld: transcript 2018
Das Wissen über Muslime 1 und muslimische Körperpraktiken wird in der Regel isoliert von anderen,... more Das Wissen über Muslime 1 und muslimische Körperpraktiken wird in der Regel isoliert von anderen, nichtmuslimischen Körperpraktiken produziert. Zudem wird der diskursive Rahmen, innerhalb dessen Muslime thematisiert werden, durch Ereignisse abgesteckt, die bereits bestehende Prämissen und Grundregeln der Meinungs-und der persönlichen Freiheit wiederholt bestätigen. Die inhärenten Widersprüchlichkeiten und die normativen Mehrheitsannahmen dieser Freiheiten werden dabei kaum thematisiert: Im öffentlichen Diskurs entsteht ein muslimisches Subjekt, das die säkulare Ordnung der liberalen Demokratie angeblich auf bisher ungekannte Weise fundamental auf die Probe stellt.
This is an interview by Rita Ender with Sultan Doughan for the Turkish contemporary law Journal c... more This is an interview by Rita Ender with Sultan Doughan for the Turkish contemporary law Journal called: Güncel Hukuk on how the German state has come to terms with her genocidal past. The interview is in Turkish and the interviewee points out how there is a contradiction between official memory politics inclduing its promiss and actual minority politics. The latter being rather an arena of legal-political negative discrimination and a social field of negative projection by the Christian secularized majority.
Translation of "Der den Klang der Worte liebt" by Selim Özdoğan.
Presentations by Sultan Doughan
This paper discusses the forms of discrimination that members of Jewish and Muslim communities fa... more This paper discusses the forms of discrimination that members of Jewish and Muslim communities face in Germany and how there are differential stances toward discrimination against Jews versus Muslims. The discrimination of Jews is ascribed to a temporality of backwardness that moves dangerously close to the telos of genocide while the discrimination of Muslims is ascribed to a temporality of future orientation. The paper presented at the ESA in Prague (2015) discusses two forms of discrimination against Jews and Muslims with comparable cases of hatwears (male kippa versus female headscarf) in order to exemplify the different temporalities ascribed to the unequal forms of discrimination. The circumcision debate is also discussed on order to demonstrate a case in which Muslims and Jews were located in the same temporality and the consequences it triggered.
Muslims in Germany have come under attack in public debate lately for failing to integrate into m... more Muslims in Germany have come under attack in public debate lately for failing to integrate into mainstream German culture. A variety of integration programs have been launched in the past six years to educate Muslims to be good German citizens. In 2007, a budget of 19 million Euros annually was passed to support programs that educate Muslims specifically on the Holocaust. The memory of the Holocaust, a dark chapter in the nation’s memory, is thus quasi packaged as a commodity that can be passed on to immigrants and their children, who do not share the same collective past or accepted public opinions about it. Meanwhile, citizens of Turkish origin, for example, readily subsumed under the category of Muslims, have shared half a century of common history with the German-born population – a history, which only recently and hesitantly finds its way into displays of national history. My presentation raises questions on how the debate on integration, democracy, and Islam has constructed collective memory by singling out one ethnic group on the basis of assumed Antisemitism. I would like to propose that educational background, social class, and migration histories will need to be taken into consideration to avoid wholesale generalizations. A question for national historiography and memorialization remains: Can the memory of the Holocaust be reframed not as a site of exclusion, but an entry point for other narratives of arrival, departure, and being perceived as foreign in Germany?
Articles by Sultan Doughan
Transit, 2022
Turkish migration to Germany has long been debated as not having been sufficiently documented and... more Turkish migration to Germany has long been debated as not having been sufficiently documented and given an adequate place in German national archives. But these debates have often reified a static and nationally organized logic of the archive. This essay instead traces the literary figure of the Ausländer as poetically claimed by the writer Semra Ertan and visually staged by media artist Cana Bilir-Meier in order to give an account of the unspeakable experience of racialization as ongoing foreignization in a Germany shaped by labor migration. Based on the discussion of Ertan’s select poems and the textual, visual, and audible material compiled by Bilir-Meier, this article demonstrates how the figure of the Ausländer animates “memory meetings.” Ertan’s words and personal experience are co-produced by Bilir-Meier’s interventions and given out to meet with contemporary intersectional anti-racist activists, who are enabled to make a claim about their own present in which the figure of the Ausländer has been mostly forgotten.
The article makes several claims based on the figure and the workings of the Ausländer in these memory meetings. The first claim is that the figure of the Ausländer allows a conceptualization of race in Germany that is grounded in the experience of alienation—as seeing oneself from a racializing gaze—resulting from unequal labor, institutional abandonment, and the devaluing of migrant-knowledge production. Another claim pertains to the nature of the archive itself. The material collected from various sources, including German and Turkish national media, in which the details about Ertan are rather marginalized or documented to be forgotten, are reorganized by Bilir-Meier from the margins to establish its own center. This archive is situated in migrant-knowledge, particular to the experience of Ertan’s migration and affectively charged, but able to tell a larger story about the racializing experience of migration. Taking these claims together, the article argues that migrant archives are not just dispersed documents waiting to be nationally organized and acknowledged. Rather, the “the migrant archive” is a form of embodied, lived, and practiced knowledge with others in moments of commemoration. The migrant archive then is a dynamic and shifting practice, able to adapt to transnationally moving experiences if it can find a ground for mnemonic interaction regardless of, or even in counter-position to, a nationally sanctioned status.
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Papers by Sultan Doughan
of Germany’s past meant that a certain threshold was reached, Germany had matured, had endured and ultimately triumphed over evil.
But after evil, did Germans change? If Jewish religious difference and claims to political equality was the bone of contention in modern Germany, is any of that more acceptable in post-Holocaust Germany? And does it matter if we are talking about Jewish religious difference specifically or any other form of ethnic, political or religious difference? Is the right to religious difference enabled by Holocaust memory? What is
the relation between Holocaust memory and liberal democracy?Allow me to take these questions into the domain of civic education, where I conducted research in sites of formal and informal education.
Saba Mahmood kept open the definitions of her objects of inquiry. She focused on objects such as secularism, piety, and ethics in order to demonstrate what they usher into existence, neutralize, rearrange or disrupt. This mode of inquiry generated a host of questions and opened up new conversations with ongoing trajectories. Influenced by this mode of inquiry, we organized this special issue along the analyses, reflections, and conversations that she opened up, beyond the circle of her interlocutors.
Presentations by Sultan Doughan
Articles by Sultan Doughan
The article makes several claims based on the figure and the workings of the Ausländer in these memory meetings. The first claim is that the figure of the Ausländer allows a conceptualization of race in Germany that is grounded in the experience of alienation—as seeing oneself from a racializing gaze—resulting from unequal labor, institutional abandonment, and the devaluing of migrant-knowledge production. Another claim pertains to the nature of the archive itself. The material collected from various sources, including German and Turkish national media, in which the details about Ertan are rather marginalized or documented to be forgotten, are reorganized by Bilir-Meier from the margins to establish its own center. This archive is situated in migrant-knowledge, particular to the experience of Ertan’s migration and affectively charged, but able to tell a larger story about the racializing experience of migration. Taking these claims together, the article argues that migrant archives are not just dispersed documents waiting to be nationally organized and acknowledged. Rather, the “the migrant archive” is a form of embodied, lived, and practiced knowledge with others in moments of commemoration. The migrant archive then is a dynamic and shifting practice, able to adapt to transnationally moving experiences if it can find a ground for mnemonic interaction regardless of, or even in counter-position to, a nationally sanctioned status.
of Germany’s past meant that a certain threshold was reached, Germany had matured, had endured and ultimately triumphed over evil.
But after evil, did Germans change? If Jewish religious difference and claims to political equality was the bone of contention in modern Germany, is any of that more acceptable in post-Holocaust Germany? And does it matter if we are talking about Jewish religious difference specifically or any other form of ethnic, political or religious difference? Is the right to religious difference enabled by Holocaust memory? What is
the relation between Holocaust memory and liberal democracy?Allow me to take these questions into the domain of civic education, where I conducted research in sites of formal and informal education.
Saba Mahmood kept open the definitions of her objects of inquiry. She focused on objects such as secularism, piety, and ethics in order to demonstrate what they usher into existence, neutralize, rearrange or disrupt. This mode of inquiry generated a host of questions and opened up new conversations with ongoing trajectories. Influenced by this mode of inquiry, we organized this special issue along the analyses, reflections, and conversations that she opened up, beyond the circle of her interlocutors.
The article makes several claims based on the figure and the workings of the Ausländer in these memory meetings. The first claim is that the figure of the Ausländer allows a conceptualization of race in Germany that is grounded in the experience of alienation—as seeing oneself from a racializing gaze—resulting from unequal labor, institutional abandonment, and the devaluing of migrant-knowledge production. Another claim pertains to the nature of the archive itself. The material collected from various sources, including German and Turkish national media, in which the details about Ertan are rather marginalized or documented to be forgotten, are reorganized by Bilir-Meier from the margins to establish its own center. This archive is situated in migrant-knowledge, particular to the experience of Ertan’s migration and affectively charged, but able to tell a larger story about the racializing experience of migration. Taking these claims together, the article argues that migrant archives are not just dispersed documents waiting to be nationally organized and acknowledged. Rather, the “the migrant archive” is a form of embodied, lived, and practiced knowledge with others in moments of commemoration. The migrant archive then is a dynamic and shifting practice, able to adapt to transnationally moving experiences if it can find a ground for mnemonic interaction regardless of, or even in counter-position to, a nationally sanctioned status.
In this essay, Sultan Doughan further unpacks the complex assignations of perpetrator and victim status examined in The Moral Triangle, with a particular attention to how religion has shaped the German sense of national moral responsibility for the Holocaust. As Doughan shows, secularized accounts of the German Protestant Church’s embrace of perpetratorship becomes central to German national historical memory. However, the consolidation of this frame produces challenges when secularized German religio-nationalist narratives of guilt become entangled with identifications of Jewishness with the state of Israel, and Palestinians with an (often racialized) conception of Islam.
The lectures will first introduce and provide an overview of the parallel emergence of antisemitism and racism from a modern-global perspective. In this part, students will be familiarized with key issues and debates of how the figure of the Jew and other minorities such as African-Americans are made into a problem in society and modern social sciences. The second part will provide students cases of unequal access to resources, such as civil rights, housing, and education in Europe, the Middle East and the US. In the third part, antisemitism and racism will be discussed in its contemporary emergence with alt-right movements, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments. This part will also offer an examination of current scientific, social and political prevention efforts and ask whether they are successful or rather reify the issue.
is mobilized in tolerance education and extremism prevention as a means of
integrating Muslims into German society. Yet while the German govern
ment invests in memorials and museums that commemorate the Holocaust,
Doughan argues, it also extricates itself from current forms of violence.
Holocaust commemoration as a European project is part of a triumphalist
narra tive that presents Vergangenheitsbewältigung as a successful tran
sition to liberal democracy—a reality that minoritizes and racializes Middle
Easterners as Muslims. In this interview with historian Mirjam Sarah
Brusius, anthropologist Sultan Doughan examines how Middle Eastern
ers in Germany relate to the figure of the Jew. Muslims and Jews operate
in this governed structure as opposing figures who must be religious and
histor ical enemies. While both have clearly assigned roles in German public
dis course, Doughan approaches their historical and contemporary positional
ities beyond clearcut concepts of Opferkonkurrenz , and thus rethinks this
discourse and points to past and future alliances.