 Well, hello and good evening. I am Dean Franco, Director of the Humanities Institute, and along with Professor Kami Chavis, I co-chair the Steering Committee for the Slavery Race and Memory Project. The Slavery Race and Memory Project exists to guide the research, preservation, and communication of an accurate depiction of the university's relationship to slavery and its implication across Wake Forest history. And before proceeding, we honor the land on which Wake Forest University now resides and the land on which the original campus resided. This land served for centuries as a place for exchange and interaction for indigenous peoples, specifically Sara, Pataba, Cherokee, and Lumbee in this location, and Shikori, Eno, Susapaha, and Okanichi in the original campus location. Over the last three years, we have invited guest speakers to help us think through the relationship of the past and present, how this institution's participation in slavery, segregation, and other forms of white supremacy bear on its present operations and its assembly of community. Memorializing the past through building names, traditions, and institutional ceremonies is an enactment of present values, but those values must be assayed with a true reckoning of the institution's history. In this way, memory is not a reflexive response to the past, but a way of relaying our present values for the future. To help us think through what this means, we have invited tonight's guest, a leading scholar of Holocaust studies and memory studies, Professor Michael Rothberg. Michael's visit is made possible with support of the Humanities Institute and the Slavery, Race, and Memory Project. I wanna thank Amy Meffam, Kimberly Scholl, and Sean McClure for administrative assistance. And as is the case with all Humanities Institute's events, I thank the NEH, which has made this event possible through a generous grant to our endowment. Michael Rothberg is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the 1939 Society Samuel Getz Chair in Holocaust Studies at UCLA. Michael is the author and editor of far too many books and articles to mention here, but I will note that his work reaches from Holocaust studies to critical race studies and post-colonial studies. And that in addition to his three highly influential monographs, he has guest edited five special journal issues along with an edited volume of essays on Holocaust memory. I think it's safe to say that there's no one in the humanities who is thinking more broadly with and through a range of fields, histories, and their related texts. And Michael's work on memory is indispensable to anyone endeavoring a memory project such as ours. Michael's monographs include Traumatic Realism, published in 2000, Multidirectional Memory, published in 2009, and the recently published The Implicated Subject. Multidirectional Memory has been enormously influential in Holocaust studies and memory studies more broadly. In that book, Michael argues against competitive memory, I put in quote marks, and argues for multidirectional memory, term of his coinage. That phrase indicates the way emergent memory of the Holocaust during the post-war period influenced decolonial and anti-racist philosophy in Europe, Africa, and the U.S. And Michael argues that emergent public memory of the Holocaust was likewise influenced by contemporaneous discourses on race and colonialism. We have asked Michael to speak with us specifically on the insights of his recent book, The Implicated Subject, Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, published by Stanford in 2019. In this book, Michael examines literature, theory, art, and film from the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and Gaza in order to posit a theory of implication. Implication is an apt analytic for the way it allows us to understand both our distinct positions in relation to historical crimes, such as slavery, and the complicated ways we dwell in the present that this history has produced. Implication tells us about the present and not only about the past and helps us understand how all of us, regardless of our social location or institutional position, are somehow interrelated through and with the past trauma's perpetuation. And I quote from Michael's book, the framework of implicated subjects can open up a space for new coalitions across identities and groups. It has the potential to do this because it does two things simultaneously that stand in tension with each other. It both draws attention to responsibilities for violence and injustice greater than most of us want to embrace and shifts questions of accountability from a discourse of guilt to a less legally and emotionally charged terrain of historical and political responsibility. Close quote. For Michael and I dare say for us, and I quote once more, the ultimate point is not to dwell on or in implication but to transfigure it, to acknowledge and map implication in order to reopen political struggles beyond the defensive purity of self-contained identities. I have asked Michael to speak with us. He's gonna talk for about 40 minutes. The Q and A will be open during his talk. I will be able to see your questions. After Michael's formal talk is over, I will be note taking on your questions and I will relay those questions in bundles as appropriate to Michael. So he and I will have a discussion following. The whole event will last from start to finish for about an hour and a half. I hope you can join us for as much of that as possible. Michael, I turn it over to you. Okay, thank you so much. It's a real honor to speak to you today. I too want to acknowledge that I am here in Los Angeles on the traditional and unceded land of the Tongva and Gabriolino peoples. I'm grateful to my friend and colleague, Dean Franco, for the invitation and for that really kind introduction which already sets out some of the points I wanna go into this evening or this afternoon here in Los Angeles. I'm grateful to the Humanities Institute and especially to the Slavery Race and Memory Project for the important work that you all do. I know that you're in the middle of an important process at wait for us to confront the legacies of slavery in your institution. Unfortunately, I don't think I can offer concrete recommendations of how you should engage in that process. However, I'm hoping that by introducing some of the ideas from my book, The Implicated Subject, I can sort of offer a conceptual framework that might speak to you in some aspects of your work. And I wanna emphasize that it's not a framework that's meant to be all-encompassing. Rather, it kind of comes at some of these issues from a particular angle that I think is missing from a lot of the sorts of discussions that we are all engaged in and that are so important. So let me share my screen and get started. So what I wanna do today is to first provide kind of overview of some of the central concepts of the book, The Implicated Subject. And then in the second half, turn more specifically to questions regarding the legacies of slavery. But before I get to that, I wanna frame the discussion by referring to a relevant and very contemporary struggle, the struggle over so-called critical race theory. And if I have time at the end, you'll have to see, I may come back to some of these issues I raise here. So as you all I think are probably well aware, since January, 2021, 34 states have proposed anti-CRT legislation and 14 states have passed such legislation. Now, of course, this is not really about critical race theory, theory that emerged in law schools and not in public schools. It's rather about how we narrate the history and present of the United States and prominently how we think about the legacies of slavery and segregation as well as questions of gender and sexuality. The language that is used to attack critical pedagogy and race and gender in these different bills that have been emerging is strikingly the same as you've probably noticed. And here is some language from the vetoed North Carolina law. And what I find striking in all of these bills is the way that they target specifically how we conceptualize historical and political responsibility as well as how we're supposed to feel about such responsibility. And as wrong-headed as these laws are on every level, I think one of the reasons that they've proliferated so successfully is that they target a problem for which we have lacked adequate vocabulary. And that's the problem of responsibility for collective historical injustices. And that's really what my work in the implicated subject has been about. So in the first section of the talk, I wanna describe to you how I came to this topic, how I came to the notion of the implicated subject and that implication. And I wanna talk you through some of the core arguments of the book. The book had really two origins. One was more intellectual and one was more personal, though obviously they're intertwined. It emerged first from this book, Multidirectional Memory, that Dean mentioned a moment ago in the introduction. And this was a book that tried to address these particular questions. What happens when memories of different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies must a competition of victims ensue. I started writing that book about 20 years ago and the consensus at the time was, and I think it's still very much with us, at least partially, is that this kind of confrontation of different memories in the public sphere worked according to a particular logic which I identified as the logic of the zero sum game. That is the idea is that the presence of one memory, say the Holocaust, kind of actively blocks the presence of other memories, say the memory of slavery or vice versa, too much memory of slavery would, according to this logic, prevent us from also remembering the Holocaust. And this struck me as a, not really the right way to think about the way that memory works in the public sphere. And what I came to argue was that in contrast to this model of competitive memory, memory actually works what I called multidirectionally, which is to say, productively and dialogically. So that even conflicts of memory, and I recognize that these conflicts are also very uneven, but even these conflicts of memory produce more memory rather than less. So I argue that as we've come to talk more about the Holocaust in the last few decades, we've also come to engage more with other histories of violence. But I also argue that memory of the Holocaust itself has always been wrapped up in and twined with confrontations with colonialism, slavery, and racism as well. And I trace that all the way back to the early post-war period. Thinkers like M.A. Sayzer, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Hannah Arendt, who were bringing these things, these different histories together, sort of from the start of the post-Holocaust period. I've got a lot of different examples of this kind of dialogical memory in my book. Many of them actually focus on the context of the Algerian War of Independence in France, which emerged as a very rich kind of moment for thinking about these intertwinings of memory. But I wanted to just mention one today that is more directly relevant to our topic. One of the chapters treats Andre Schwartz-Bart, who was a French Jewish writer of Polish origin whose parents were deported to Auschwitz and killed, who himself fought in the anti-Nazi resistance and survived the Holocaust and went on in the post-war period to write novels examining both Jewish history and also the history of the Black Atlantic. Sometimes he did this alone. Sometimes he did this together with his partner, Simone Schwartz-Bart, who was a Guadalupean writer. And he often brought the two histories together, and they often brought the two histories together. As for example, at the very end of this 1972 novel, A Woman Named Solitude, which is a novel of the transatlantic slave trade, transatlantic slavery, and ends with a kind of narrator visiting the site of a slave uprising, a slave revolt that had featured in the sort of main story of the novel. And so the novel ends like this. If the traveler insists he will be permitted to visit the remains of the old Denglement plantation. If he is in the mood to salute a memory, his imagination will people the environing space and human figures will rise up around him, just as the phantoms that wander around the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are said to rise up before the eyes of other travelers. So in this novel of slavery, he ends by evoking the Warsaw ghetto. The Warsaw ghetto is one of these sites that also for someone like Du Bois has often been a location for thinking comparatively about these different histories of racial violence. In linking slavery and the Holocaust in this way, Schwartzbart is for me a good example of what I mean by multidirectional memory and also a kind of cross-ethnic solidarity. And as you can see in this essay that he wrote about the writing of that novel, why I wrote La Mundata Solitude to a woman named Solitude, he, this coming together of different histories is founded on a kind of shared history, shared experiences of victimization. So he writes there, certainly this word slavery affected me as a Jewish man, member of a community that had just experienced the price of human life. And yet as strange as it might seem to you, the word touched me above all as a Jewish child, as the far flung descendant of a people born in slavery. And I believe that it is that Jewish child whose fathers were slaves under Pharaoh before becoming so again under Hitler who was taken by a definitive fraternal love for West Indians, right? So he's describing here a kind of identification with people from the Caribbean that he develops on the basis of a shared history of enslavement of genocide. And now, oops, down here, I think it makes a lot of sense for someone like Andre Schwarzbart, a Holocaust survivor to make that link between histories on the basis of a shared history of victimization. And I was inspired by that in multi-directional memory, but I was also aware that for me, the relationship between these two histories had to be different. As a Jewish person, of course, I inherit a long memory of oppression, a vicarious one, not one that I've experienced directly. And I'm, of course, also aware about the continued presence of anti-Semitism in our societies today. But I also know that as a white American, my relation to slavery is quite different from the one that Schwarzbart articulates there. And so in the wake of multi-directional memory, I became interested in exploring how other relations to history could factor in these questions of memory. How other subject positions beyond that of victim could be ways of accessing the connections between different histories. And as I started to think about that, and here is the more autobiographical personal side of the book, I thought back to these conversations that I had in my early 20s with other young Jewish people from immigrant families like my own, sometimes themselves actually immigrants. And you would hear quite often this argument, what does the history of slavery have to do with me? My family wasn't here, I wasn't here. I'm not responsible for this. Why should I feel guilty about this? Why should I feel responsible? So in some ways, anticipating that language that we see in the anti-CRT legislation. Now I knew that this was the wrong way of thinking about these questions. And I argued with them, but I also felt like I lacked the conceptual vocabulary to make effective argument, like counterarguments against that sort of, what do I have to do with this history? And it was only many years later, when I discovered this book by the German philosopher, Karl Jasper, it's called The Question of German Guilt, that I started to develop a more analytical vocabulary that eventually led to the scholarly work that I did. So this was a book that Jasper's wrote immediately after the end of the Nazi period and the Holocaust, in which he was trying to convince his fellow Germans of the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Trials and of the fact that they had something to do with what had just unfolded in their country, that they weren't completely innocent. And in order to make that argument, Jasper's makes a distinction between four versions of what he calls guilt, criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt and metaphysical guilt. Criminal guilt refers to the guilt of the perpetrator, an individual who commits a crime, a crime against humanity in this case or some other sort of crime. That's criminal guilt. Political guilt for Jasper's was what described the larger German collective. That's the kind of responsibility that you bear by virtue of your membership in a political community, for example, the nation state. And this one becomes very important for me. Moral guilt has to do with the individual's responsibilities and the responsibility not to go along with unjust orders and this sort of thing, also important of course. And metaphysical guilt is sort of the guilt of being human and seeing that there is suffering in the world. Kind of a religious version of guilt which was less interesting for me. For me, the two most important categories were criminal guilt and what he calls political guilt. So the individual responsibility on the one hand, the kind of collective on the other hand. But I was a bit uncomfortable with the use of the word guilt especially for the political version that he describes. And so there I was also inspired by Hannah Arendt who was a friend of Jasper's and in dialogue with Jasper's who kind of turns the question more toward the issue of responsibility. What she calls your personal responsibility or collective responsibility that what I would also call political responsibility. So I then make a distinction between on the one hand criminal guilt that refers to perpetrators and political responsibility which has to do with this more indirect participation in mass criminal deeds. And Jasper's writing so immediately after the war was really talking about what just did happen, right? People's participation in German society during the Nazi period. As we get further from the events that question of political responsibility also becomes a question of historical responsibility, right? What are our responsibilities over time for events in which we did not directly participate that maybe even took place before we were born, right? What kind of responsibility is that? That's what I set out to theorize in my book and that kind of takes me to the book and to the first core argument of it which is that the first thesis in a sense is that we must enlarge our understanding of the actors involved in injustices beyond the most invoked figures of victims, perpetrators and bystanders. I'm not suggesting that we do away with the categories of victims and perpetrators especially. I can't imagine thinking of any history of violence that didn't honor victims in some sense take account of their experiences. And on the other hand, did not hold perpetrators accountable. My argument is not that we need to do away with them but that they are insufficient for understanding the dynamics of violence and exploitation more generally. And so I offer the implicated subject in a sense more as a replacement for the category of the bystander which for me is a weak category that implies kind of detachment and passivity. And I think the story is more complicated than that. So I come up with this concept of the implicated subject which is meant to compliment the categories of victims and perpetrators and give us a new kind of purchase on histories of violence. The implicated subject as I use it is a kind of umbrella term meant to describe various relationships of indirect participation in violence and exploitation. So I talk about the way that implicated subjects enable violence, perpetuate it, benefit from it or otherwise inherit. These are all different versions of implication and of the implicated subject as I'll say more about in a moment. I wanna stress that for me the implicated subject is not an essential identity. It may indeed be something that we're born into. It can be very deeply seated and constitutive of who we are but it really is a subject position that means it is socially and historically produced which means it's changeable and dynamic and not locked in once and for all. And also as I'll talk more about that we occupy multiple subject positions that as we always do we have different relations to different histories of violence. Like the proximate term complicity, for me it's a bit different. The etymology of implication is similarly has to do with the way that we are folded into events and structures. And I then build on that and borrow an argument from the Italian philosopher Simona Fortia a wonderful book called New Demons where she talks about the subject as a transmission belt of domination. So when I talk about implicated subjects I'm not talking about people who direct or initiate histories of violence but serve as sort of transmission belts through which violence is communicated both in the present and in some sense across time. Implication for me takes place in two time frames, two interlocking time frames that I talk about as synchronic and diachronic. By synchronic implication, what I mean is I'm referring there to histories of violence that are unfolding in the present by diachronic. I'm talking about histories that have taken place in the past that take place historically. So on the sort of far synchronic side an example of what I mean by synchronic implication would be something like what I call enablers. So that those of us in the developed West are in some sense enablers of global capitalism who through our consumption prop it up. We are enablers of foreign wars through our tax dollars. We make these things possible. We enable them without necessarily being perpetrators of those things. On the sort of far diachronic side I have the category I call successors and it could be something like heirs as well but I wanted to try to break a little bit out of the familial logic there. So for me the classic example of the successor would be something like a post Holocaust German of a second or third generation. Someone who by virtue of their national belonging inherits a certain responsibility for the Holocaust even though it's these are events that preceded their birth or preceded their political maturity. And I think that can happen in other situations as well. The beneficiary is a form of implicated subject that works I think equally in synchronic and diachronic terms. Our topic today is going to be legacies of slavery and this is what for me has to do with the diachronic dimensions of being a beneficiary. We benefit from histories that may have concluded many years ago or ostensibly concluded many years ago but we also benefit again from the unequal relations of the present from let's say global capitalist relations even as that unfolds right now. The perpetuator is then a figure which I think speaks to a blurring of the synchronic and the diachronic and I use it especially in the context of settler colonialism. So if you are like myself a non-indigenous person living in a settler colonial context to me the word perpetrator again doesn't seem quite right but we are perpetuators of this settler colonial system which is not a once in for all event but a structure as we've been taught and our role within that structure is the role of perpetuator it seems to me. Now as I said a moment ago these are subject positions they're variable they change historically and we're also situated in multiple ways. So implication is frequently what I call complex. Complex can be a kind of empty word I think a lot of the time but I've tried to use it in a fairly precise sense to indicate when the subjects have lines of connection both to histories of victimization and to histories of perpetration. And I think again this can take place both on synchronic and diachronic axes. So the form of implication can be either of the present day synchronic form or it can be historical. The history of victimization can similarly be one that is unfolding in the present or it can be one that is sort of inherited and here I build on Mariana Hirsch's notion of post-memory. So a kind of second generation experience of victimization is what she calls post-memory and I think one can occupy that position of post-memory and still be implicated in other kinds of histories and to show you what I mean and try to make this a little bit more concrete. Here are a few examples that are taken from work I've done or just topics that have interested me or that I've come across. So for example in the top right quadrant this is a project I'm working on with Yasemin Yildiz on the way that Turkish Germans negotiate with Holocaust memory in Germany. So Turkish Germans are racialized immigrants who suffer frequently enough from everyday forms of racism as well as extreme forms of racial violence at the same time they've integrated or immigrated rather into a context of implication in which they also bear some sort of responsibility especially if they become German citizens toward that recent German past of the Holocaust. So how do you kind of bring those things together? How do you balance them in a certain sense? On the top left-hand quadrant I was thinking here of a project I became aware of and had some conversations with about Japanese Canadian incarceration and dispossession. It's a project that came out of the University of Victoria and it's the history of Japanese Canadians is in some ways very similar to that of Japanese Americans during the Second World War but as I read into the project I was really struck by the fact that on the one hand you have these really radical forms of dispossession that take place for these racialized immigrants at the same time the land that they are being dispossessed of is land that was already taken away from indigenous peoples, right? So there's a double dispossession, this double dispossession that takes place and people are then situated in a complex way. Again, back to the things that interest me both intellectually and personally on the bottom half of this chart and what we'll talk about more today is what does it mean to be again a white American Jew in relation to the history of slavery, right? Where you have a post-memory of the Holocaust or anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe at the same time in coming to the US you become white, you become a beneficiary of this history of racialization and racial violence or similarly, and this is another one that concerns me quite a bit what does it mean to be a Jew in the wake of the Holocaust but also to be implicated in injustice like the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And these are all really messy cases. I think that's clear and ethically very tricky ones. And I guess what I hope is that drawing attention to the complexity and being able to map this out kind of analytically helps us to understand why some of these issues let's say especially the Israeli-Palestinian one for my purposes is so charged and so difficult to resolve and I don't think pointing this out is gonna solve the problem obviously but it helps to explain a little bit the dynamics of some of these struggles and some of these complex kind of ethical and political positions. So that's my kind of quick mapping out of some of the key aspects of the book. And now I wanna zero in a bit more on the question of the legacies of slavery and what it means to think about redress and restitution from within that framework that I just introduced. And there's a chapter in the book where I do precisely this to try to think through these questions and I do it by bringing together these two very different projects, if you will. One is Jamaica Concades, well-known essay, a small place, a very caustic kind of critique of neocolonial relations and tourism to the Caribbean, especially to the island of Antigua, but also with slavery in the background, as we'll see. And then on the one hand, and on the other hand, this interesting historical project called Legacies of British Slave Ownership which was developed by the historians Catherine Hall and Nicholas Draper and colleagues. And what they've done is to create a database related to the reparations that were received by slave owners, right? Not slaves, slave owners in the wake of abolition. And they use those reparations, that compensation that was paid to slave owners as a way of kind of mapping out the way that slavery in the slave system seeped into all aspects of a British life. So the question that I wanna raise in this context, drawing on the notion of the implicated subject is what does it mean to think about redress or restitution for slavery beyond the victim perpetrator binary? And I'll try to explain what I mean by this, why I think this is an important question. I think back to this landmark book by Eleazar Barkin called The Guilt of Nations from 2000, which was really one of the first books to look in a comparative way at different quests for restitution in the wake of historical violence around the world. And Barkin makes an argument, and I think it's a good argument, that the novelty of the discourse of restitution is that it is a discussion between the perpetrators and their victims, right? So this bringing together of perpetrators and victims is what is at stake in a certain sense in discussions about restitution. I think for example, I don't think it's one of Barkin's main case studies there, but I think of something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which really brought together in complicated ways and sometimes problematic ways victims and perpetrators. But to me, there are a couple of problems, as important as all that is of course, there are a couple of problems that start to emerge. One is what I call the problem of social heterogeneity, which is to say that no society is as cleanly organized and divided as is implied by Barkin's phrase here of perpetrators and victims. There are always going to be people who occupy other positions than that. So how do you start to factor in this more complex social heterogeneity and these more complex subject positions into discussions of restitution? Second point, and I think it's the one that's especially relevant here is what happens over the course of generations, right? In so far as a historical crime remains unexpiaided, like something like slavery clearly does, it produces transgenerational legacies, it produces transgenerational hauntings of various kinds. As we cross the generations, that question of identity starts to become more complicated again, right? Can we talk simply about victims and perpetrators after two, three, four generations have passed? It seems to me we have to think a little bit differently about those things. My particular interest in the context of this book, again, it's not saying this is the only interesting question, but for me, this was something that I think has not thought about as much is what does it mean to be implicated in slavery when you are not a descendant of those who are enslaved? This is what I'm really, this is what I'm trying to think about. What is the implication of the non-descendants of enslaved people? What does, in other words, what historical responsibility look like for implicated subjects? If you live in a post-slavery society and you are not a descendant of those enslaved who are enslaved, then it's very likely that you are the kind of implicated subject, right? That I and others would call a beneficiary, right? And that is we will continue that we, you, I, me, we continue to benefit even after the event is over. And I distinguish in the book between two kinds of beneficiaries, one that has to do with what I call genealogical implication, one that has to do with structural implication. Genealogical implication refers to those who can trace a direct and generally familial relation back to the perpetration of the crime. So I'm thinking here specifically about the great, great, great grandchildren of slave owners, or if you were, again, switch context to the German context, right, the grandchildren of Nazis. That's a kind of genealogical implication. Structural implication refers to those like myself who do not have that familial link back whose families immigrated into this history, at least in my case, and yet are still beneficiaries of that past history based on our structural position in a white supremacist society, right? So we are structurally implicated, even if we are not genealogically tied back to the events. And borrowing language from Nicholas Draper of the British slave ownership project, I describe genealogical implication as intimate yet diffuse, which is to say it's intimate in the sense that it is familial, right? But it is diffuse in the sense that over the course of generations, the family tree kind of gets diffused into a lot of different branches. And I'll show an example of what I mean by that in a moment. Structural implication I describe in opposite terms as diffuse and yet intimate. It's diffuse because we don't have that direct line. The implication comes from our location in a complex society from different parts of that society. And yet ultimately that implication is actually also intimate because it constitutes who we are. Who we are is structurally determined by our location in a post-slavery society. So the legacies of British slave ownership project becomes a nice way of thinking about genealogical implication, right? You can type in the names of people who were slave owners or who benefited from the system of slavery. Like for example, this guy, Sir Christopher Bethel Hodrington who inherited enslaved people and plantations from two uncles. And upon abolition was awarded with 30,000 pounds. I'm not exactly sure what that would be today, but I think it's a significant amount of money for having held at that time 1916 enslaved people, including the entire island of Barbuda, which is part of Antigua and Barbuda and Betty's Hope, which was the original sugar plantation in Antigua. And he used these profits and his position in British society to secure a seat in parliament, which he held for a long time to renovate this estate called Doddington Park, which kind of established the fashionability of the Hodrington family. Simon Gekondi talks about that in his book. And this estate was then held by the family up until the 1980s. And so this kind of case study gives us an opportunity to think about the way that benefits from a system like slavery are transmitted across generations as inheritances. And as Draper remarks, people rarely decline such inheritances. But so what does this all mean? It's very easy. I did, when I was working on the book, I did a quick Google search and within about two minutes came up with a family tree of the Hodrington family. And so it's actually really easy to find out who are the descendants of this slave owning family in the Caribbean. And the question then becomes though, what do we make of this, right? What do we make of these genealogical lines of connection? And I don't have an easy answer to that. I honestly don't know because like I say, these are both intimate connections and also diffuse connections. It seems to me that something is owed but what exactly that is, is not always so clear. And that something could well be symbolic as well as material, right? But it's a complicated question. It's not an obvious answer, especially as we get farther away from the events themselves. I then turned though to Jamaica Kincaid for further thought about this question of implication and benefit. And it turns out, and so my example of the Hodrington family is not randomly chosen that they actually figure in a few places in Kincaid's essay as prominent slave owning family in Antigua and Barbuda. She always writes the name as Conrington but it's the same family but the family is actually Conrington. And so she helps us to trace the way that genealogical implication I was just evoking transforms into something else closer to what I would call structural implication. So here's one of the places where the Hodrington family shows up in a small place. The papers of the slave trading family from Barbuda, the Conrington, the records of their traffic in human lives were being auctioned. The government of Antigua made a bid for them. Someone else made a larger bid. He was the foreigner. His bid was the successful bid. He then made a gift of these papers to the people of Antigua. What does it and what does it mean? The record of one set of enemies bought by another enemy given to the people who have been their victims as a gift. It's a very provocative passage. There's a kind of xenophobic strain that seems to be intentional in aspects of a small place as you might see if you've read it. But I think what she's describing is something very interesting. And so this foreigner is a kind of foreign business man, kind of who is exploiting the island today together with complicit elements of the Antiguan kind of neocolonial government. So it's a story about how this genealogical connection, the Hodrington family, turns into a new form of implication among people who are not genealogically related to the original slaveholders, but are in fact rather foreigners in some sense to this history, but are still implicated in it, are still perpetuating it and benefiting from it in a certain sense. So that as we go on in time, in a certain way genealogical implication is superseded by a larger scale structural implication. And indeed a small place is quite directly addressed to structurally implicated white tourists. Her address in the book in the text is quite explicit. And this is a very famous passage, which is on the one hand an indictment of neocolonial structures in the present and the way they play out in the context of tourism, but it's also brings up questions of historical responsibility in an interesting way. And so she's describing this tourist, she's not only describing, she's addressing, she's speaking to a tourist visiting Antigua. She says, you must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it. Oh, it might all end up in the water. You were thinking of taking a swim in. The contents of your lavatory might just might graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water. For you see in Antigua, there is no proper sewage disposal system, but the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is even bigger. It would amaze you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed. So there are a lot of things that I think are kind of amazing about this passage and very powerful about this book in general. One of the things is the way she's bringing together the synchronic and the diachronic here, right? On the one hand, talking very clearly about neocolonial relations in the present. On the other hand, evoking the history of slavery as the kind of backbone of this history. And what I'm especially interested in here is this notion of the contents of the lavatory, kind of grazing gently against your ankle. And it seems to me what she's trying to do in this direct address is to evoke a kind of bodily sensation, a kind of feeling. What does it mean in other words? If I have time, I'll come back to this in the conclusion. What does it mean to feel implicated in the history of slavery? And I think evoking that feeling is not itself, of course, justice, but it might be read as a call for some sort of response, for some sort of restitution. It's a provocation to get the implicated subject to think about who they are, where they are, how they have benefited, how they are situated in relationship, both to this unequal present and to this history of violence and exploitation that underlies it. When I kind of try to draw some conclusions for how we think about redress in this chapter of the book, I think about the ways that these two different examples, the legacies of British slave ownership on the one hand, the concave text on the other hand, both offer us something that I think is interesting and important for thinking about reparations and thinking about restitution. And I write, and this is in some ways tentative and it remains too general, but maybe a starting point or at least for me, a kind of starting point. Approaching reparations from the side of implication involves explaining how white subjects in former slave holding and slave trading societies are collectively responsible for the legacies of the past without being criminally guilty. It involves mobilizing both the historical lessons that a project such as legacies of British slave ownership can make available about the centrality of slave capital to capitalist society and the rhetorical power that that concaids a small place uses to produce feelings of discomfort. An approach based on implication suggests the need for work both in the realm of recognition, the deconstruction of a white identity founded on the denial of implication in historical injustice and in the realm of material wellbeing where some form of redistribution in the direction of equality would offset the persistence of ongoing inequities. And I don't address this so much in the book but I wanted to kind of raise and I don't have again an answer for it here but in the context of the project that you all are or some of you all are involved in at Wake Forest I wanted to ask if we can also think about these different forms of implication in terms of what we might wanna call institutional implication, right? So if institutions have benefited from these histories of violence, does it make sense to make this kind of or can it be helpful? Can it be illuminating in any way to think about these two forms of the beneficiary relationship, right? Can an institution be genealogically implicated and then structurally implicated at the same time? And it seems to me there might be something to this, right? That as with implicated subjects more generally the question of institutional identity is a question of genealogy of trace, right? Any institution traces back its history and if that history involves the kind of implication in something like slavery it has to confront that at the core of its identity. But at the same time universities like other institutions are structurally implicated in the present, right? Endowments don't just come from those past events but they are invested today in stock markets part of a global system of exploitation and both of these things are happening at once, right? There's a kind of genealogical side and there's a kind of structural side at the same time. And so perhaps what is needed then from institutions is both a kind of reconfiguration of institutional identity as well as a commitment to some sort of meaningful redistribution in the direction of greater equity in the present. I wanna try to conclude very quickly here because I think I've gone on probably long enough. What I wanted to do in the conclusion and maybe can just sketch this very quickly is come back to the question that I raised for me is raised in the light of those anti-CRT laws but also in that passage by Kincaid about the lavatory. What does it mean to feel implicated in injustice, right? And this is something I've been thinking about since finishing the book. And so far what I've come to think is that there's a very strong relationship between affect a very strong and important relationship between affect and implication and that affect plays out on three levels in questions of implication. That affect itself can be a vector of implication. You think here of something like patriotism, nationalism, love of your country, patriot of others. These can actively produce histories of violence as we can see around us everywhere today. At a second level, there is a either conscious or unconscious reaction to feeling implicated, to sensing that one is implicated in a history of injustice. And that can produce things like guilt, shame, or I think especially resentment. And I think that's what we see playing out in this legislation. So for me that the anti-CRT legislation has a lot to do with this second level of implication is like at some unconscious level, people recognize that they are in fact implicated in these histories and it produces a response of resentment which then leads into these kinds of bills. But I think affect also plays out importantly at a third level, which is the level at which new forms of solidarity come into being, right? And that affect becomes also a motivation for contesting implication. And there's no easy mapping of a particular affect to a particular level or a particular result, right? So love can lead to violence, but love can also lead to solidarity. Same, I think with something like shame or anger or what have you. And again, if you look at those anti-CRT race theory laws around the country, you see again and again these questions of what it means to feel implicated, to feel uneasy, to feel guilty, to feel responsible. To me, what that leads to is an understanding of these different levels of implication and affect as dynamically related, right? That what we see at play in those laws is a kind of funneling of this second level of affect back into the reproduction of new forms of implication. In other words, into the production of new forms of racial violence. And what we have to work toward, what we want to work toward in any kind of anti-racist struggle is a transformation of those affects that emerge when we feel implicated into new forms of solidarity. And for me, and I talk more about this in the book and I won't go into it at any length here, to me what is necessary in any anti-racist struggle is something that I call differentiated solidarity. That means when we come together to fight injustices of race, but of course it could be other things as well. We don't come to it assuming that we all occupy the same position, right? We are not all Trayvon Martin as the slogan once went, some of us are quite definitely not Trayvon Martin. And the coalitions that have to emerge have to acknowledge those different structural positions. In other words, for some of us, at least we have to acknowledge our implication and turn it into some new form of differentiated solidarity. And I'm gonna stop there and look forward to a conversation. Michael, I want you to catch your breath. Yeah. I thank you very much for this presentation. I wanna remind people who have logged in that the Q&A feature is live. So if people wanna pose questions for Michael, I will read the Q&A and I will relay those questions to Michael. So I will see them, they won't necessarily be shared with the entire audience and your name is anonymous, but you're welcome to pose questions. I will say two things before we move on. One is that for anybody who wants to read Michael's work, I can assure you it's as clear as the talk he presented just now, which I thought was crystalline. So the book itself is rich and substantial and super clear and I recommend it. One thing I wanna say, Michael, is as you were speaking just now, for instance, and you were showing this taxonomy of affects, let's say, but also in other diagrams as well, I kept thinking that your argument would be even more enhanced if these were in motion because so many of the positions you describe are really dynamic. As one changes, the other changes as something is brought to the surface, people react to that and then there's a reactionary response and then a reaction to the reaction and so on and so forth. And so I wondered, first of all, have you been thinking too, it sounds like you have been, especially given that last slide you show, about that dynamism and where there are points of entry, you spoke about the need for anti-racist work to enter into and redirect some of these affective energies. So have you been thinking about that, about where these points of entry are? Yeah, I mean, again, I don't have easy answers to that. I mean, I think you're right that this is a really important aspect of the whole question is to, in a sense, tap into this kind of dynamism. I don't have the PowerPoint skills, I guess, to like make that all visible. I do think actually that like the making visible of some of these relations is clarifying. Like for me, at least I find it sometimes useful. You know, I understand something differently when I'm able to find a form to put it in and I guess as a literary, and this isn't quite answering your question, but I'll say this first, like as a literary and cultural critic, one of the reasons I look to literature and art and someone like Kincaid, but there are a lot of other examples in the book, of visual artists like William Kentridge, who I showed one image from, is because I see kind of figurations of these problems that I think are really potent sources for understanding the complexity of the issues and the problems. And so I'm very committed to, so I guess maybe one thing to say is that, I think it's actually in art among other places that we find the kind of dynamism that you're talking about, right? So in a text like a small place, it's a very well-known text, right? But it hits you, you know, when you read it, it's very, she moves you in a certain sense. She makes you angry, she makes you uncomfortable. The affect is itself a kind of dynamic force, I suppose. And I think we can find that in works of art. I think we are, we talked about being moved by works of art and I think that's true and I think that's real. I mean, I think we're also similarly moved by social movements and that social movements are sources of dynamism, right? So I wrote this book before, not certainly not before the Black Lives Matter movement, but before that kind of explosion that took place in 2020, and you know, which I won't say it's confirmed what I said or anything like that, but it was interesting to be thinking about the book which does start with the Trayvon Martin case, as you know, and thinking about the responses to Trayvon Martin and talking at a greater length about this particular project called We Are Not Trayvon Martin. I thought it was interesting to think with about this question of differentiated solidarity, but you know, those kinds of, those kinds of social movements are explosive and they generate ideas as well as actions and they force us to think and to rethink and you never know when they're gonna happen. There's a lot of contingency, of course, that drives these sorts of things. So I mean, I guess I would say the sources of dynamism are multiple. They can be deliberately staged as in a work of art. They can be contingent historical emergencies because history is not determined once and for all, but is itself dynamic and we have to kind of position ourselves in relationship to it and no doubt in other ways as well. One of the questions that comes up on college campuses when there are surfacing of acts of racism is that this thing that we think of as having happened in the past is in fact always ongoing and it's a constant citation of the past so that the past lives in the present. I used the phrase post-memory earlier which is often used in relation to generational descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. Do you think post-memory is the right term to use in regards to descendants of slavery or is there more of a collapse of time because of a kind of ongoing perpetuation of racist violence in the United States? Yeah, no, that's a really interesting question. It's when I talk about all the time with my students when I teach Mariana Hirsch's work on post-memory which has been important to me. I mean, I think Hirsch herself as she writes in her book, The Generation of Post-Memory was inspired not only by her personal story as a second generation Holocaust daughter of Holocaust survivors, not only by a work like Art Spiegelman's Mouse lately in the news, the story of a second generation Holocaust survivor but also by Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved and I think she's thinking of the novel as a whole in what it does but also particularly the character of Denver within the novel who is precisely a kind of post-memory figure born on the border between slavery and freedom growing up not with the direct experience of being enslaved but rather being haunted by her mother's stories and her mother's experiences especially. I think it's true that the generational dynamic is different and that that probably on the one hand sometimes we're farther away from that history than we are say from the Holocaust but when you read a book like Sadia Hartman's Lose Your Mother and she talks about traveling through the South with her, forget if it's her grandfather, her great grandfather telling stories that he had heard directly from family members who had been enslaved you realize this is also not that far in the past either and there is still intergenerational transmission as you would say in relationship to the Holocaust but I think the other big difference that you're alluding to which I think is a really important one is that we still we live in a different relationship to the history of slavery than I think we do to the history of the Holocaust at least in the United States where the afterlives of slavery in very material ways are still present. The history of racialization is still very much with us. I think that the Holocaust is in some ways closer temporarily but maybe more distant in terms of social relations and I don't wanna underplay either the fascist threat as it exists today continued anti-Semitism or the trauma that people live through who are still with us and as well as their children but I think it is a different there is a somewhat different dynamic there so I think one can use post-memory I think it can be useful to use post-memory in that in other contexts certainly beyond the Holocaust but one has to nuance it and one has to specify also the ways that it's different and that's also what I try to do in the book by saying post-memory is a great term for intergenerational relations but for me it doesn't work as well on the side of the perpetrators, right? So I offer the implicated subject in that diachronic sense as a compliment to the notion of post-memory, right? How do we talk about intergenerational relationships not on the side of victims but on the side of those who have either inherited histories of perpetration or beneficiaries of those histories of perpetration? I wanna remind people that they are welcome to pose questions in the Q and A we've had some come in. One other question I wanna ask bears more on a small college like Wake Forest it's been an ongoing surprise to me even though I've been here a long time but coming out of public universities it's been a surprise to me how much private liberal arts colleges are memory machines. They exist, part of their existence is constantly manufacturing and reiterating memory through practices of tradition, citations of famous figures, acts of memorialization and there is this constant sort of like effort to interpolate people, you know students come in as freshmen and then they are made to remember an institution that they had previously in many cases not been a part of. Does that strike you as unique in the memory business or is it the case that when we talk about memory that in fact we're really talking about all kinds of small institutions that exist to produce memories of the institution itself? Do you see the question I'm asking? Maybe, I think so. I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, I'm thinking first of all I think of the definition of memory that I work with comes from Jan Osman, right? Who together with Alayda Osman these are two of the prominent scholars of memory in recent decades, they're German. And Jan Osman defines memory in one of his essays as knowledge of the past with an identity index, right? So in some sense memory is always about that kind of interpolation that you're talking about, right? If there's no identity constituting force it's not memory, it's knowledge it's just history or something like that. So I think in a sense, yeah, all institutions and groups have an interest in reproducing themselves and therefore reproducing those identities and that reproduction of identity can only take place I think on a diachronic access or generally often takes place across a diachronic access. So it means memory has to be important there. I would say I don't think it's only small liberal arts colleges. I'm thinking, I think all colleges do that including large public institutions and the bad example that I was thinking about which is I think relevant to our overall discussion here and what you guys are thinking about is my former employer, my former place of work the University of Illinois, which has had over decades a long and difficult process of coming to terms with its Native American mascot figure, right? And these kinds of enactments of red face performance by college students and alumni of this fighting a line I figure, right? And this has been a huge struggle precisely because students are interpolated into this history and alumni hold onto it very, you know very strongly I suppose and it becomes difficult to get yourself out of those sorts of histories. And I think it's related to the kind of process that you're going through there and equally tricky in some ways even if it takes place on a purely kind of symbolic terrain, right? It's not, I don't know, yeah. So I think the answer is yes that groups and institutions are as you say memory machines in a sense and that in itself is not bad. I think it's important to insist on that, right? There's nothing wrong with having a collective identity. It really matters what kind of collective identity you're talking about. And I think I guess how open it is to reconfiguration and reformulation and how self-critical it can be. And that's what's at stake in a lot of these questions, right? Is the institution able to provide a kind of critical purchase on itself? And that can be very difficult because there are so many subject positions regarding to university. You have these, the kind of legacy position that is totally committed to a version of the history. You have students who show up every year, new students come in who have really no implication and they become implicated. And then as is often the case with universities, you have this kind of diaspora community of faculty who are not from this town, not from the state even. And they're still trying to figure out like what's this place I'm a part of and they bring other kinds of histories. But it seems to me that that churn of positions is also an opportunity for like, doing the kinds of work you're suggesting, surfacing our affects, thinking through our implications, building in, what did you call it a transmission belt of memory that is different from the one that is already operating? Yeah, I mean, there is a kind of, right? In a college community, there is a kind of built-in dynamism, right? That the population changes every few years in a pretty significant way. I mean, what's amazing is that so many, and I'm thinking again of the Illinois example, it's only one of many, but it's someone I know, how successful it is in inculcating itself across generations of students, despite the fact that every four years you've got a completely new student body and the faculty and the staff are changing to some degree too. So, yeah, I mean, it's on the one hand, it's an example of like how successful institutions can be in reproducing themselves, but as you say, it's also an opportunity for, when necessary, you hope a more critical engagement with that history. There's a question that came up in the Q and A, and it's kind of long, so I'm gonna try to paraphrase it. If the person who posted the question thinks my paraphrase is inaccurate, I invite them to reiterate, but the question seems to be something like, what's at stake in theorizing implication as opposed to the kind of work where we try to analyze structural racism and the perpetuation of legacies of racism that are not really about implication. So a lot of critical race theory is not specifically about implication and about the beneficiary, but we do land on the phrase white privilege, but rather a lot of structural relationship is interested in the material circumstances and after lives and after math of slavery as it is lived by people of color, let's say, what's at stake in bringing implication into that conversation. I mean, and again, just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be doing those other things or that they're not important and maybe more important. That's not at all my argument. I guess what I saw or what I felt was that, again, we had a kind of missing vocabulary item there, at least for me, maybe it has to do also with where I'm coming from, which is in some sense coming out of Holocaust studies in which you have this triumvirate of subject positions that we have tended to talk about, victims perpetrators bystanders and being dissatisfied with that vocabulary and feeling that especially again, this term bystander as I was saying is insufficient in a certain sense, doesn't really get at the dynamics of violence and thinking that that is true beyond the question of the Holocaust, right? Not just in that particular history. So I guess what I would say is, and in some ways I have to kind of admit this in a certain sense, but I guess I still stand by it, which is that phrase I used about the transmission belt taken from Simone of Forty that the subject is a transmission belt of violence. I guess there is a commitment to understanding not just material forces and structures, but the subjects that bear them and that these subjects that bear those structures and reproduce those structures are an important part of these histories of violence and the important part of the histories of structural racism. So that structural racism among other things is premised on the reproduction of certain kinds of subjects, right? Whether they're docile, whether they're, you know, whatever complicit, implicated, benefiting, perpetuating, what have you that subjects do play an important role in these structures. And it's not an individualist argument. I'm not saying like as individuals, we, da, da, da, but I do think that the category of the subject and especially various kinds of collective subjects are essential to these stories. And so, you know, I know that of course, it may be that if you're coming at this from the perspective of critiques of structural racism, you don't see the same need for this figure as I did coming from a different direction. But I guess I feel like it's useful for understanding how violence unfolds in the present but also about this diachronic relationship, right? And what it means to inherit these kinds of histories or to immigrate into them as in some of the examples I tried to give. So... Can I take that answer and relay it into another question? Sure. You know, from the position of structural, also the question is about reparations. And I know this is a sort of developing thought for you. So you're not on the hook to have a really big policy answer here. But speaking just for myself, when I think about the topic of reparations, which I do a lot in relation to structural racism, my answer is always that the structure should pay reparations, you know? And I find myself in some ways distance from it and it makes it much easier to say reparations are owed, they should be paid in this kind of passive voice, right? It gets different when I understand myself as an implicated subject or a beneficiary then reparation, it makes a lot more sense to think about reparations as like, I have to be a participant in the authoring of reparations. Another way of putting it is you said previously that memory is not a zero sum game, but it one wonders too, like is reparations a zero sum game? Do you have to have a stake in reparations if you are also an implicated subject? Yeah, man, I like the way you framed that. I also am not sure that I have the answer to it, but I think, I mean, you articulate one of the reasons why again, I feel like this concept can be productive and useful is to get people, white people, it's not only white people, of course, but just to be crude for a moment to see that they have a stake in that, that this isn't, it's our history too, that we benefit from it, that it is personal in some sense, even if we are structurally implicated, that is also intimate, right? As I was trying to explain diffuse and yet intimate. And, but is it a zero sum game? That's a good question. I mean, that's a difficult question. At some, you know, I guess my argument about, I don't argue that my argument about memory can simply be transformed to all social fields and social questions and you come out with the same thing, like it's not a zero sum game. Obviously some things are zero sum games. And yet I also think that we, that maybe it's more productive not to think about it in those terms, right? But to think about the kinds of benefits that we all get from living in a more just society, right? And, you know, we're thinking we both did our land acknowledgments at the beginning and obviously a land acknowledgement is an important but insufficient kind of gesture. And there has to be more to it. And I don't exactly know what that would be either. But I think one of the things, I mean, for me there and also thinking about Israel-Palestine, if I can make that leap for a moment, another settler colonial context, to me it seems like land is a zero sum question, right? I possess it, I have to give it back, now you possess it. But no, I think what I have learned from indigenous thinkers is and also again from thinking about the Israel-Palestine context is we also have to think a bit out of that property reduced box and think about different relationships to land which maybe aren't premised on propriety and single ownership of that sort. And then things start to open up in a non-zero sum way, right? We all can have a different relationship to this land which is not based on the sort of violence of possession. And how that would translate to the reparation, especially I'm not entirely sure, but it would be, it seems to me it's valuable to try to think beyond the zero sum logic in thinking about restitution and redress more broadly. You know, in my introduction, I read a line from your book where you talked about moving beyond self-contained identities and that seems really important as we think about reparation as well as implication. Michael, I wanna close simply by paraphrasing a comment that came up in the Q and A which is a real salute to what this kind of work is and what it is we're doing here. This is a talk, this is not material reparations, this is a kind of gesture and an address to use a term used earlier. We are recording this, we will be archiving this. My colleagues and I will be talking about this and what we hope happens is that an event like this becomes part of the institutional memory itself. The university is a memory machine, but there's also a materiality that goes with that memory and the more we can have events like this lodged in our memory and featured in our material recognition, the more we change as a university. Well, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad to play a very, very small role in this conversation and I wish you guys luck. I think what you're doing is incredibly critical. I wanna thank you so much, Michael, for being with us and I wanna thank all who attended and especially those who stayed all the way through the Q and A. We're going to put this up on the Humanities Institute website and we'll put it up on the Slavery Race and Memory website as soon as we've got it all processed and ready to go. So you can tell your friends and colleagues and whatnot to come check this out if they missed it. For now, I wish you all a good evening. Thank you, Michael. Goodbye, everyone. Thanks so much.