Sanctuary Space, Racialized Violence, and Memories of Resistance

Abstract

Sanctuary, which comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy,” has played a strategic role in political resistance for hundreds of years. Today the concept has returned as one of importance in the protection of refugees worldwide. In this article, which focuses on sanctuary practices in Germany, we examine the importance of the spaces of church-based asylum—the structure, physical spaces, and neighborhood of the church itself. We investigate the ways in which these spaces are constitutive of collective memories of alternative justice and resistance and how these memories are used to transform the actions and possibilities of the present. The article builds off other nonlinear, counterhegemonic concepts of space and time, such as the demonic, as ways of moving beyond normative assumptions of the cultural landscape. The demonic challenges both the abstract space of modern liberalism as well as the absolute space of the sacred; it is a radical reworking—one that relies on forgotten or hidden pasts yet remains new and open-ended. For sanctuary to contest the racialized violence of modern state governance it likewise must both remember and rework the idea of sacred space and sacred time in new, materialist, and fluid forms. Drawing on a case study from Berlin, the article explores ways to conceptualize the temporal and spatial anchoring of alternative, nonliberal memories and their potential for contemporary resistance. The Heilig-Kreuz church and its pastors and allies, as well as an associated church network, the German Ecumenical Committee on Church Asylum, provide the empirical case studies. Key Words: memory, race, refugees, sanctuary, space.