Publications

In Hanna Acke, Silvia Bonacchi, Carsten Junker, Charlotta Seiler Brylla & Ingo H. Warnke (eds.), Religious and national discourses. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Volume 33 in the Series Diskursmuster/ Discourse Patterns eBook ISBN: 9783111039633 PrintISBN: 9783111027739

The living body and the capitalist thinking of the modern economy seem to be irreconcilable objects. Nevertheless, their history and perception have been inextricably linked, at least since the times of industrialization and capitalization in the 19th century. Our volume follows this entangled history and the various contradictions it develops.
Since Pierre Bourdieu, we known that the body forms an incorporated cultural and social capital. It is a commodity and means of production, a sign of belonging to a social class, a place where sex, gender and power relations are negotiated or a pretext for social exclusions and racism. The body is the object of punishments, sanctions and social control, a support for affects, obsessions and illnesses as well as a site of rebellion and resistance. The 19th century novels analyzed in the contributions to this volume tell all this. From the perspective of current body studies, we propose a new reading of the great stories from Balzac to Zola, via Mirbeau, Maupassant, Louise Michel, Georges Sand, Rachilde, Eugène Sue and Huysmans to demonstrate, through their texts, how the images of the body and the policies of capital are entangled and, thus, form a central part of the imagination and the memory of 19th century French (and Northern/Western) society.
Contributions in French and German.

Arbeit und Wirtschaft in Bremen (43).

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 219-236. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17310

In Nele Austermann, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Heike Kleffner, Kati Lang, Maximilian Pichl, Ronen Steinke, & Tore Vetter (Hrsg.), Recht gegen rechts, 307–314. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 1-19. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17297

In Auteri, Laura, Natascia Barrale, Arianna di Bella & Sabine Hoffmann (eds.) Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik. Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) 6: 511-515. Bern:  Peter Lang Verlag.

This book contributes to the study of oceans, seas, coastal waters, and rivers within blue humanities by broadening, circulating, and interweaving knowledge about such waters, ocean epistemologies, and sea narratives from pluriversal epistemological, geographical, cultural, and disciplinary perspectives. The contributors from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and the Pacific explore the interconnections between oceans, coastal areas, rivers, humans, animals, plants, organisms, and landscapes in the fields of cultural history and cultural studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, marine and environmental studies, linguistics, literature, film and media studies.

In Meier, Christel, Carolin Führer, Marco Magirius & Silke Kubik (eds.) Evaluative ästhetische Rezeption als Grundlage literarischen Verstehens und Lernens: Theorie und Empirie (KREAplus Band 28) 243–256. Muenchen: kopaed. ISBN: 978-3-96848-095-4

This paper is about poetry as a vehicle for imparting knowledge in natural philosophy. It discusses the epistemological and cultural background against which early Greek thinkers such as Parmenides and Empedocles composed in verse, and it explores the rationale why poetry was thought to be a preferred means for transmitting important and often non-discursive knowledge about nature—in other words, how poetry was meant to make “a philosophical theme audible,” to prompt an insight that organizes a large field of experience. Much later, related assumptions find a (last) heyday in Goethe’s attempt to write a Naturgedicht in the vein of Lucretius. Even though new insights especially from classical German philosophy influenced Goethe, his reasons for writing nature poetry show striking continuities with those of his ancient peers. The paper ends with a brief look at later attempts to “make philosophical themes audible” in the context of an ever-increasing fragmentation of knowledge.

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group’s identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study’s epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation.

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate.

In Febel, Gisela, Sonja Kerth & Elisabeth Lienert (eds.) Wider die Geschichtsvergessenheit. Inszenierte Geschichte – historische Differenz – kritisches Bewusstsein. 39-53. Bielefeld: transcript. DOI: 10.1515/9783839459294-003

The chapter discusses the use of photographs in research on Linguistic Landscape. Based on the observation of a widespread use of photographic documentation, the status of photographs is critically reflected. The focus lies on a reading of Susan Sontag’s ([1977] 2014) Melancholy Objects. Here, conceptions of description and documentation are questioned, as they are common for some linguistic works, especially in the field of Urban Studies. Of particular importance is the examination of the tension between realism and surrealism as well as the question of the extraction of reality. The text, which is a remix of Susan Sontag’s ([1977] 2014) thoughts, is complemented by twenty photographs that address the limits of photographic representation in the linguistic text.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

After the revolutions of 1917 and a bloody civil war, the Soviet Union was founded on December 30, 1922. It dissolved on December 21, 1991. In between lay 69 years in which it left its mark on the world – through Stalinist terror, through its victory over the armies of Hitler’s Germany, as a nuclear power in the Cold War and with Gorbachev’s policy of détente. Its legacy still weighs heavily on the post-Soviet space today. Internally, under Stalin, it brought famine, deportations, the Gulag and arbitrary executions. But at the same time, the country underwent a fundamental modernization and the first man in space was a Soviet man. Susanne Schattenberg traces the years under the Soviet star and shows how they still have an impact today.

In Ingrid Bennewitz & Detlef Goller (eds.) altiu maere heute. Die Nibelungen und ihre Rezeption im 21. Jahrhundert.(Bamberger Germanistische Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitstudien 6) 11-43. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press. ISBN: 978-3-86309-884-1 DOI: 10.20378/irb-57732

This book extends the contemporary debate on the global concept of religion, conducted in the context of religious studies, to the field of the theology of religions. In applying poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives, it seeks to deconstruct central categories such as truth, universality, or religion, in order to contextualize them by making transparent their historical genealogy and entanglement with political, social, and scientific discourses. Further, it aims to outline new areas of thinking, which can serve as the experimental basis of an alternative, non-essentialist form of theology (of religions).

Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 39. 309–335. ISBN: 9783110787108

This article gives an overview of francophone African diasporic websites such as Africultures.com, africavivre.com and other digital magazines, networks and blogs that are present on different platforms. Taking recent novels, texts of liter- ary criticism, reviews and comments as examples, I analyse in what way they share in discourse about diasporic and migratory identity positions of Afropéens (‘Afropeans’) (and differ therein from other readings of the same novels). Methodologically, I draw on Stephen Greenblatt’s concepts of self-fashioning and circulation of social energy as well as on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the produc- tion of social capital. With respect to socially preformed discursive formation of Black people as an ostensibly homogeneous minority in the twenty-first century France, I refer to Pap Ndiaye’s ground-breaking study La condition noire from 2009 which closely analyses the complex situation of the Black migrant and post- migrant population. I focus on two narrative texts which are widely perceived both in France and on an international level: First, the autobiographically inspired novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (The Belly of the Atlantic) by Fatou Diome and second, Marie Ndiaye’s narrative triptych Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women). Studying remarks and comments of literary criticism concern- ing these texts on francophone African diasporic websites, I raise the following questions: What relevance do these narrated characters (still) have today? To what extent do they shape the discourse of Black migrants in France? What kind of interpretation of the colonial history and context do they offer? And which emancipatory moments and decolonial strategies create a new, proper symbolic capital and, thus, add to the Imagined Community of ‘Noirs en France’ (‘Black people in France’)?

Der Fokus des Bandes liegt auf Widerspruch als Gegenstandsbereich, unter den sprachliche Ausdrucksformen von Entgegensetzung, Paradoxie, Lüge und Einspruch ebenso fallen wie linguistische Methoden des Umgangs mit Widerspruch und Widersprüchlichkeiten in der sprachwissenschaftlichen Disziplinengeschichte. Dabei stellt sich die Linguistik nicht als homogene, sondern vielmehr als eine heterogene, vielseitige Disziplin dar, die es erlaubt, den Forschungsgegenstand aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln zu betrachten; die Beitragenden präsentieren insofern verschiedene innerdisziplinäre Schwerpunkte von linguistischer Widerspruchsanalyse, darunter der Blick auf Sprachhandlungen zum Ausdruck von Widerspruch in wissenschaftlichen, historischen, (post)kolonialen, narrativen oder alltäglichen Diskursen. Es werden einzelsprachliche Untersuchungen nicht nur europäischer Sprachen vorgenommen, sondern auch die crosslinguistische Vielfalt von widerspruchsindizierenden Konstruktionen betrachtet.