Sean Bray

Sean Bray is a PhD candidate in German Studies, focusing on film, visual media, and critical theory. His dissertation examines the period after fascism (1960s-80) as a moment of racial formation in East and West Germany. His research uses film as a vehicle for understanding how race is being conceptualized and spoken about – or perhaps, tellingly, not spoken about – at this time. Operating across the Cold War divide, he identifies a twofold mechanism of emergence and inheritance: new formations emerge in response to shifting social and political dynamics, and yet older formations are also inherited at least in part from the earlier periods of both fascism and colonialism. The project, in short, may be summarized as trying to elucidate how understandings of race and racism are being navigated in the wake of the Nazi racial state.