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In present-day Germany, research on postwar academia, up through the 1960s and beyond, requires no special justification. But from the North American side, the point of this scholarly activity - including the many new editions and a flood of archive-based publications - is much less obvious. For the most well-established figures of the period, the primary international canonizations were already part of the first waves of the reception, the theoretical tectonics established themselves accordingly, and the theories were established as theories - which are in many quarters presumed to be just as reliable today as they were decades ago. One might say that the international and North American reception of European theory has manifested an overall tendency toward sedimentation, while the dynamic of scholarly research about theory, including the archival unearthing of new sources, tends to complicate and undermine the established corpus of "primary texts."
Rethinking smartness
(2023)
Like many metropolitan centers around the world, Berlin aspires to be a "smart city." Making a city smart usually involves constructing a dense net of sensors, often embedded in and around more traditional infrastructures throughout the urban environment, such as transportation systems, electrical grids, and water systems. The process also requires the city to solicit the distributed input of its inhabitants through active technological means, such as smart phone apps. Finally, the city employs high-end computing and learning algorithms to analyze the resulting data, with the goal of optimizing urban technical, social, and political processes. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, a smart city is not synonymous with a utopian - or even a specific - form of the city, which would then remain stable for the foreseeable future. In this sense, the smart city is quite unlike utopian cities as they were imagined in the past, when it was presumed that a specific form - such as Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" or the concentric circles of Ebenezer Howard's garden cities - would enable a specific goal, such as integration of humans into natural processes, or economic growth, or an increase in collective happiness, or democratic political participation. Rather, a city is "smart" when it achieves the capacity to adjust to any new and unexpected threats and possibilities that may emerge from the city's ecological, political, social, and economic environments (a capacity that is generally referred to in planning documents with the term "resilience"). In short, a smart city is a site of perpetual learning, and a city is smart when it achieves the capacity to engage in perpetual learning.
Shigeko Kubota's pioneering video "Sexual Healing" (1998) presents an ambivalent take on her disabled husband Nam June Paik in physical therapy. Accompanied by Marvin Gaye's titular pop song, it considers love, sex, and care in old age within the much-debated field of Fluxus collaborations, and its ideal of working together as equals when fusing life and art. "Worlding Love, Gender, and Care" delves into the four decades of Kubota and Paik's time together, reflects on feminist worlding, and investigates the vital contribution of female Fluxus artists to art history.
Umut Yıldırım's introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia - in particular, centenarian mulberry trees - as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state's denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
"War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East" identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
Havana's apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city's art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba's limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries - El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space - this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the 'worlding' of cultural institutions.
"Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories" presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante's late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of 'virtue and knowledge' as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses' many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.
The introduction informs about Black literary imaginations of Europe that reverse or complicate the (neo-)colonialist European gaze at the "African Other". It reviews the state of research and provides an overview of the aims and sources of the special issue, whose individual contributions take into account both national specificities and transnational contexts. Sandra Folie and Gianna Zocco emphasise the important role of comparative literature for the field of African European studies (and vice-versa).
This article compares Chika Unigwe's novel "On Black Sisters' Street" and Sudabeh Mortezai's film "Joy", both about Nigerian women trafficked for sex work to Belgium and Austria respectively. They share a genre genealogy with slave narratives but are primarily concerned with European (neo-)colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional theory as well as imagology, this article analyses the Black female re-imagination and strategic exoticisation of Europe in the two narratives.
This contribution gathers eight interviews with international scholars of different generations and disciplines who study Black European literatures: Elisabeth Bekers, Jeannot Moukouri Ekobe, Polo B. Moji, Deborah Nyangulu, Jeannette Oholi, Anne Potjans, Nadjib Sadikou, and Dominic Thomas. The aim is to make literary research on Black Europe more visible to scholars in comparative literature and to contribute to a discussion on research perspectives, theories, and future challenges and needs.
As is well known, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and what is considered beautiful is contextual. The itinerant symposium "Medicine, Beauty, and the Body: Materials, Texts and Artifacts" which took place from September 24 to 28, 2023 in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna explored this topic in an interdisciplinary way and examined the intertwining of beauty, health and medicine from antiquity to early modern Europe. The event was a cooperation between the programme "Figurations of Transitions" of the inter-university institution Science and Art of the Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg and the University Mozarteum in Salzburg, Schloss Ambras and the Museumsverband Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Not only the sheer diversity of sources in the field of historical beauty cultures became apparent, but also their circulation and transformation through time and space as well as their significance as social, political, religious, and economic variables. The practical approach of the event in particular showed new paths in the field of historical beauty studies.
In scholarly discussions, ancient didactic poetry is sometimes considered a 'technical' form of literature. The 'technical' aspect of didactic poems would seem to concern mainly their contents, not the poems' form, which is described instead as literary. And so, didactic poetry appears to be both 'technical' and, at the same time, more than just technical. To what extent were didactic poems considered 'artistic' in our modern sense? Or should we call them simply 'technical' poems in the sense that they deal with 'techne' as a form of practical expertise? Was the 'art' of ancient didactic poems one specific domain that ancient audiences easily identified? Or was this somewhat unclear? These are some of the key questions that I am concerned with, as I wish to explore to what extent the ancient poets themselves utilize the idea of 'techne' and what is the added value that the concept of 'techne' brings to their poetic works. I will present three authors to address these questions, namely in order: Ovid, whom I take as example of a poet who grandly advertises the presence of 'ars' in his poem; then, Archestratus of Gela, the first, partly extant poet to write 'didactic poems' in Greece in the manner that will impose itself in the following centuries, and an early example of how this poetry engages with what idea(s) about 'ars'; and, lastly, Aratus of Soli, the likely most canonical author of this type of poetry in Antiquity. This selection of authors, to be sure, does not provide a full picture of didactic poetry in Antiquity, with all its peculiarities. But it does have some paradigmatic meaning for two reasons. First, Archestratus and Aratus are significant within the history of didactic poetry, as I anticipated, because the former is a pioneer in this genre and the latter is a widely popular and influential author. Thus, analysis of their poems is useful to understand also certain features of the didactic genre more in general. Ovid's "Ars Amatoria", on the other hand, while perhaps being less influential for the whole history of the genre, becomes paradigmatic in so far as one explores the issue of didactic 'art'. For, this work features the topic of 'techne' much more extensively than many other didactic poems. But before I move to these authors, I wish to make a preamble about ancient didactic poetry as genre. For one might then wonder whether these questions about didactic poetry and 'techne' would find an easy solution if one considered first the meaning and category of the 'didactic' - a name that by itself seems to evoke the idea of knowledge and the sharing of a certain form of expertise.
This article studies two African American examples of provincialising Europe "from the inside", James Baldwin's essay "Stranger in the Village" and Vincent O. Carter's "The Bern Book", both set in 1950's Switzerland. It investigates how these texts reverse the ethnographic gaze at the "other" and use the rural Swiss scenario to imagine Europe as historically backward. While the authors differ in their intentions, both acts of provincialisation leave the superiority of European high culture intact.
The mother tongue at school
(2023)
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm's writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
This chapter proposes the scar as a productive image to conceptualize the relation of speakers to the particular language otherwise called mother tongue, native or first language. Thinking of this relation in terms of a scar avoids the biopolitical implications of concepts derived from the context of family and birth that have, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, come to present language as basis of a nation state. The image of the scar also avoids the biographical normalization and linguistic hierarchization implied in the term first language, as both are equally important biopolitical strategies of forming individuals and communities. Thinking of the mother tongue in terms of a scar emphasizes the intensity of lasting formation and identification entailed by acquiring this particular language, and it highlights the violence inherent to these processes that tends to be covered up by the naturalizing and family-related imagery of native or mother tongue as well as by the favour implied in the term first language.
Anarchival practises : the Clanwilliam Arts Project as re-imagining custodianship of the past
(2023)
Where is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the 'anarchive', a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner's linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue - the only way to conceive patriotism - is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious 'Heimat' (home).
Report on the Workshop "Trust, Crisis, Catastrophe III: Practices," organized by Nina Doejen, Gerald Hartung, Katharina Kalthoff, Florian Kappeler, and Cécile Stehrenberger, January 18–20, 2023, University of Wuppertal (Germany).