@phdthesis{HeidemannMalreddy2015, author = {Heidemann-Malreddy, Birte}, title = {Lost in a liminal space?}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {300}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Ogone2015, author = {Ogone, James Odhiambo}, title = {Domesticating modernity in Africa}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {229}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @article{Eckstein2015, author = {Eckstein, Lars}, title = {Maps drawn on the sand: of mimicry and depropriation on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition}, series = {Journal of Australian studies}, volume = {39}, journal = {Journal of Australian studies}, number = {4}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, issn = {1444-3058}, doi = {10.1080/14443058.2015.1076024}, pages = {512 -- 528}, year = {2015}, abstract = {In this essay, I explore various politics of mimicry on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition. Following Michael Taussig, I read mimicry as embedded in a complex economy of gift exchange which disrupts the binary categories of self and other, subject and object, man and nature. Mimetic exchanges, in other words, bear the potential for a non-dualistic dynamics of depropriation, a dynamics which may be avowed or disavowed by various actors in the colonial encounter. Focussing on three actors in particularLudwig Leichhardt himself, his British botanist Daniel Bunce, and the intriguing figure of Mr Turner, an Indigenous AustralianI trace the ways in which mimicry-as-depropriation is dealt with across the colonial archive.}, language = {en} } @article{HurleySchwarz2015, author = {Hurley, Andrew Wright and Schwarz, Anja}, title = {"The greatest son of our Heimat": reading German Leichhardts across the National Socialist era}, series = {Journal of Australian studies}, volume = {39}, journal = {Journal of Australian studies}, number = {4}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, issn = {1444-3058}, doi = {10.1080/14443058.2015.1076025}, pages = {529 -- 545}, year = {2015}, abstract = {The article discusses German commemorations of Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848) in the National Socialist era when officials, journalists, educators and writers, spurred by the double anniversary of the explorer's 125th birthday and the 90th anniversary of his disappearance, began to re-imagine the explorer's life and fate in the light of the ideological imperatives of the day. Our analysis of this period pays particular attention to how these reimagined Leichhardts emphasise or neglect some of the key elements that make up his story to this day, among them: Leichhardt's ethnicity; his sense of attachment to place and home; his homosocial relationships; his evasion of Prussian military service; his role in the British colonial project; and finally, his engagements with Aborigines. On the one hand, our analysis reveals, how Leichhardt was portrayed first on the local and, later, the national level in ways that increasingly sought to elide ambiguous aspects of his life and deeds. However, it also uncovers some of the ideological labour required to render him useful to the National Socialist cause. Often enough, these re-imagined Leichhardts escaped party politics, and cast up some of the logical inconsistencies and limits to key terms in National Socialist thinking.}, language = {en} } @article{Ogone2015, author = {Ogone, James Odhiambo}, title = {Remediating orality: the cultural domestication of video technology in Kenya}, series = {Critical arts : a journal for cultural studies}, volume = {29}, journal = {Critical arts : a journal for cultural studies}, number = {4}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, issn = {0256-0046}, doi = {10.1080/02560046.2015.1078541}, pages = {479 -- 495}, year = {2015}, abstract = {The influence of globalisation and its attendant modern technologies has reconfigured the manner in which orality functions in the contemporary African context. Confronted with the powerful presence of media technologies that threaten to supplant its central role in many African societies, orality has been compelled to reinvent itself by means of appropriating the same media for its survival. The result has been a process that seeks to recontextualise imported technologies in locally relevant ways. This article focuses on how video technology adapts to local Kenyan cultural contexts. Arguing that vernacular video films form part of contemporary cultural productions in Kenya, the article demonstrates how strategies of remediation, such as subtitling, re-oralisation, repurposing and immediacy, contribute to the reactivation of orality. It emerges from the analyses that local knowledge cultures actively engage modern technologies in a way that debunks any simple linear perceptions of the impact of mediatisation on African epistemologies. Through local agency, communities actualise their aspirations for a domesticated modernity that is simultaneously fresh and familiar, and therefore less culturally alienating.}, language = {en} } @misc{Spahn2015, author = {Spahn, Hannah}, title = {Poetics of character: transatlantic encounters, 1700-1900}, series = {EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE}, volume = {50}, journal = {EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE}, number = {2}, publisher = {Univ. of North Carolina Press}, address = {Chapel Hill}, issn = {0012-8163}, pages = {616 -- 621}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Senft2015, author = {Senft, Christoph}, title = {Contemporary Indian writing in English between global fiction and transmodern historiography}, series = {Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 190}, journal = {Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 190}, publisher = {Rodopi}, address = {Leiden}, isbn = {978-90-04-30906-7}, pages = {239}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Christoph Senft provides a set of re-readings of contemporary Indian narrative texts as decolonial and pluralistic approaches to the past and thus offers a comprehensive overview of the subcontinent s literary landscape in the 21st century.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Reimer2015, author = {Reimer, Anna Maria}, title = {The poetics of the real and aesthetics of the reel}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {298}, year = {2015}, abstract = {The dissertation proposes that the spread of photography and popular cinema in 19th- and 20th-century-India have shaped an aesthetic and affective code integral to the reading and interpretation of Indian English novels, particularly when they address photography and/or cinema film, as in the case of the four corpus texts. In analyzing the nexus between 'real' and 'reel', the dissertation shows how the texts address the reader as media consumer and virtual image projector. Furthermore, the study discusses the Indian English novel against the backdrop of the cultural and medial transformations of the 20th century to elaborate how these influenced the novel's aesthetics. Drawing upon reception aesthetics, the author devises the concept of the 'implied spectator' to analyze the aesthetic impact of the novels' images as visual textures. No God in Sight (2005) by Altaf Tyrewala comprises of a string of 41 interior monologues, loosely connected through their narrators' random encounters in Mumbai in the year 2000. Although marked by continuous perspective shifts, the text creates a sensation of acute immediacy. Here, the reader is addressed as implied spectator and is sutured into the narrated world like a film spectator ― an effect created through the use of continuity editing as a narrative technique. Similarly, Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) coll(oc)ates disparate narrative perspectives and explores photography as an artistic practice, historiographic recorder and epistemological tool. The narrative appears guided by the random viewing of old photographs by the protagonist and primary narrator, the photographer Paresh Bhatt. However, it is the photographic negative and the practice of superimposition that render this string of episodes and different perspectives narratively consequential and cosmologically meaningful. Photography thus marks the perfect symbiosis of autobiography and historiography. Tabish Khair's Filming. A Love Story (2007) immerses readers in the cine-aesthetic of 1930s and 40s Bombay film, the era in which the embedded plot is set. Plotline, central scenes and characters evoke the key films of Indian cinema history such as Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" or Raj Kapoor's "Awara". Ultimately, the text written as film dissolves the boundary between fiction and (narrated) reality, reel and real, thereby showing that the images of individual memory are inextricably intertwined with and shaped by collective memory. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the past as and through film(s) conquers trauma and endows the Partition of India as a historic experience of brutal contingency with meaning. The Bioscope Man (Indrajit Hazra, 2008) is a picaresque narrative set in Calcutta - India's cultural capital and birthplace of Indian cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. The autodiegetic narrator Abani Chatterjee relates his rise and fall as silent film star, alternating between the modes of tell and show. He is both autodiegetic narrator and spectator or perceiving consciousness, seeing himself in his manifold screen roles. Beyond his film roles however, the narrator remains a void. The marked psychoanalytical symbolism of the text is accentuated by repeated invocations of dark caves and the laterna magica. Here too, 'reel life' mirrors and foreshadows real life as Indian and Bengali history again interlace with private history. Abani Chatterjee thus emerges as a quintessentially modern man of no qualities who assumes definitive shape only in the lost reels of the films he starred in. The final chapter argues that the static images and visual frames forwarded in the texts observe an integral psychological function: Premised upon linear perspective they imply a singular, static subjectivity appealing to the postmodern subject. In the corpus texts, the rise of digital technology in the 1990s thus appears not so much to have displaced older image repertories, practices and media techniques, than it has lent them greater visibility and appeal. Moreover, bricolage and pastiche emerge as cultural techniques which marked modernity from its inception. What the novels thus perpetuate is a media archeology not entirely servant to the poetics of the real. The permeable subject and the notion of the gaze as an active exchange as encapsulated in the concept of darshan - ideas informing all four texts - bespeak the resilience of a mythical universe continually re-instantiated in new technologies and uses. Eventually, the novels convey a sense of subalternity to a substantially Hindu nationalist history and historiography, the centrifugal force of which developed in the twentieth century and continues into the present.}, language = {en} }