People on Stages, People in Cages. Ethnic Shows and Looking at Racialized Others in Estonian Cultural Memory
We kindly invite you to a seminar with Margaret Tali "People on Stages, People in Cages. Ethnic Shows and Looking at Racialized Others in Estonian Cultural Memory". The meeting will be chaired by Zuzanna Bogumił.
The seminar will take place online, 17 February 2026, at 9:30 am CET.
Please register in order to participate >>
Abstract:
My presentation focuses on representations of race and racial difference in Estonia by connecting present and past in the memory of ethnic shows. I will discuss how historical representations have shaped contemporary discourses of race and racism and consider how particular visual tropes have transmitted those discourses. Furthermore, I revisit how the experience of layered colonialisms and Estonia’s geographical location in the parallel influence zones of the Russian Empire and Germany have influenced understanding and representing racial difference.
Bio:
Margaret Tali is Lecturer in Cultural Theory at Tallinn University. Her recent work focuses on decolonization, material culture, transnational and transcultural histories of museums in the Baltic region and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (2018) and co-editor of ‘The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe’ in Memory Studies (3/2022).
About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852