WiSe 2019/20: Contact Zones in the Study of Culture

Isabel Paehr (Berlin) & Johanna Schaffer (Kunsthochschule Kassel)

Ambivalences of Visibility (Revised)

12.11.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR

The book ‘Ambivalences of Visibility’, that Johanna published in 2008, was above all a plea to engage with the forms of specific representations, and not with questions of quantity (‘more visibility for…’). For, as Peggy Phelan has argued, if there were a causal connection between visual representability and political power, then in the liberal democracies of the West, young, scantily-clad heteronormative female performing persons would necessarily have quite a bit of power. In our changed media realities, we need to rethink the analytical/political usefulness of the concept ‘visibility,’ for in digital media realities visibility (= views = monetization) almost entirely loses its oppositional connotations. If ‘visibility’ is a concept that belongs to historically specific media realities and their critical languages, what can be learned from them for our current examinations? We also would like to suggest some other terms along the lines of ‘distributed agency’ and ‘infrastructure’ in order to discuss crucial interventions in the field of digital visuality and data-rich environments.

Rita Felski (University of Virginia)

Hooked: Art and Attachment

19.11.2019, 18-20, room 012, Alter Steinbacher Weg 44

My talk makes a case for “attachment” as a key word for the humanities. The word directs our attention to what carries weight: it has both affective and ethical force. Drawing on a range of examples, I discuss two important aesthetic ties: identification and attunement. Finally, I clarify how the language of attachment is relevant to pedagogy and to practices of interpretation in the classroom.

Mary Neuburger (University of Texas at Austin)

Meat Unpacked: Global Protein Narratives and the Making of a 20th Century Bulgarian Bio-imaginary

03.12.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR

This talk will explore the place of meat within the larger framework of global encounters between East and West, before and during the Cold War.  It will explore evolving connections (imagined and real) of meat—its mass production and regular consumption—to progress, and more pointedly, political and economic power. Consumption of meat expanded exponentially in the US, Europe and globally particularly after World War II, reflecting changes in commerce and taste, but also given new assumptions about the role of protein in twentieth century development narratives. Influential writings and polices grounded in the scientific community and international organizations like the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Health Organization posited that a lack of animal protein in “national” diets was both the cause and the effect of underdevelopment, which was tantamount to “hidden hunger” and even a global “protein crisis”. As the talk will explore, however, such notions competed with global counter-narratives grounded in bio-ethics, biopolitics, religious practice, and/or differing opinions within food science. Using the capacious concept of the bio-imaginary, I will explore how such narratives were appropriated and deflected in the course of 20th century Bulgarian history, before and under socialism. Bulgarians appropriated both pro- and anti-meat assumptions from global religious, scientific, and policy-minded thinkers. They also domesticated and contributed to this global conversation and set of practices in a range of locally grounded ways. This took on particular forms under socialism, when Soviet-dictated food ideology required an embrace of meat—as fortification for the socialist body, as well as nutritional and gastronomic proof of the superiority of the system’s utopian promise. Even then, anti-meat narratives emerged as part of the Bulgarian “thaw”.

Erin James (University of Idaho)

Narrative in the Anthropocene

10.12.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR

When scholars speak of narrative and the Anthropocene, they tend to do so in one of two ways. The first is the conversation that dominates work in the environmental humanities and positions narrative as part of the problem of and solution to environmental crisis. Change the stories, these scholars suggest, and change the damaging attitudes and behaviors that have brought us to this point. A second group of scholars link narrative and the Anthropocene in a much less optimistic way, suggesting that narrative is a rhetorical mode deeply unsuited to our current epoch. These critics argue that narrative is intimately tied to human perspectives and, as such, cannot adequately represent the broader timescales and wider conception of inhuman lives that our current moment of environmental crisis demands. 

In this talk, I offer a third option for considering the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene—one that questions what contribution the epoch stands to make to narrative studies and vice versa. I bring together the until now disparate conversations of the environmental humanities and narrative theory to propose an “Anthropocene narrative theory,” or a theory of narrative sensitive to matters commonly associated with the epoch, to explore how narrative and the Anthropocene inform and are influenced by each other. I do this by thinking through various ideas and issues that we associate with our new geological epoch—especially those relevant to representations of narrative time and space and the processes of narrative production and interpretation—and envisaging their possible narratological correspondents. As my talk explains, an Anthropocene narrative theory poses the following questions: how does narrative help us think differently about the Anthropocene? How do narratives provide us with safe contexts in which to explore how humans make and inhabit worlds in their own image? How does the reading of strata in rocks, tree rings, and ice cores, which are themselves material representations of sequences of events, challenge our most basic conceptualizations of narrativity? How do the materials that we associate with the Anthropocene—rocks and ice, but also the fiber cables and LCD screens of digital medias—change the way that we interact with narrative? How do the new, broad conceptions of geologic time and planetary space associated with the Anthropocene diversify models of narrative chronologies and spatializations? How does an awareness of collective agency of humans as a geological agent shed new light on types of narration and narrators?

Wendy Bracewell (University College London) & Leyla von Mende (University of Jena)

(In)Sights on Europe from the (Near) East

28.01.2020, 18-20, room 001, MFR

Accounts of travels from Western and Central Europe to Eastern Europe haven been an object of academic research for a rather long time. These travel accounts have played a significant role in the formation of “mental maps” as scholars have demonstrated with regard to notions of “Eastern Europe” (Wolff) and collective imaginations of the “Balkans” (Todorova) as well as cultural constructions of “Europe” more generally. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to dynamic identity formations in the context of these encounters and, more specifically, the role of perceptions of Europe from alternate viewpoints. While the perception of Germany in Russia has been studied (e.g. Kopelew), the perspectives from south eastern directions have received less scholarly attention so far. In our master class we will discuss perceptions of Western and Central Europe and specifically perceptions of South European states in the eyes of travellers from the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.