Stadtgespräch. Metropolitan Perspectives #5

On the Traumatology of the Present
Serhat Karakayalı (Sociologist, Berlin/Istanbul)

We are living in the age of the trauma. We do not need to have experienced anything terrible to be traumatized. It is often enough to have a reference to the affected group, be it through relation or identity. Being traumatized produces a kind of collective identity, which works with affiliative forms of memory. Trauma connects and creates history. Memory, however, operates in reality along the needs and desires of the present. Which forms of political and social subjectivity does the reference to a trauma enable? In urban spaces two opposing moments meet one another: on the one hand, city space becomes the medium of historical, as well as national memory – for example through commemorative plaques and stolpersteine – on the other hand, transnational histories and traumas encounter one another, in particular, in the metropolises, and fight for recognition. The migration researcher and activist Dr. Serhat Karakayalı is invited to analyze the traumatology of the present European racism and its cultural consequences.

The migration researcher Dr. Serhat Karakayalı (born in Duisburg in 1971) collaborated in the research project Transit Migration and was the project leader of amira. At the moment, he is working as a research associate in the area of Diversity and Social Conflict at the HU Berlin with the focus on the history and present of illegal immigration, practices and media of solidarity in the migration society and transformation of integration policies. His most recent publications include Gespenster der Migration. Zur Genealogie illegaler Einwanderung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (‘Specters of Migration. On the Genealogy of Illegal Immigration into the Federal Republic of Germany’ 2009) and the reader Colonial Modern – Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (together with Tom Avermaete and Marion von Osten) (2010).