Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
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Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.
Elicitation materials like language portraits are useful to investigate people's perceptions about the languages that they know. This study uses portraits to analyse the underlying conceptualisations people exhibit when reflecting on their language repertoires. Conceptualisations as manifestations of cultural cognition are the purview of cognitive sociolinguistics. The present study advances portrait methodology as it analyses data from structured language portraits of 105 South African youth as a linguistic corpus from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The approach enables the uncovering of (a) prominent underlying conceptualisations of African language(s) and the body, and (b) the differences and similarities of these conceptualisations vis-a-vis previous cognitive (socio) linguistic studies of embodied language experiences. In our analysis, African home languages emerged both as 'languages of the heart' linked to cultural identity and as 'languages of the head' linked to cognitive strength and control. Moreover, the notion of 'degrees of proficiency' or 'magnitude' of language knowledge emerged more prominently than in previous studies of embodied language experience.
Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.
This article merges discourses from Indian Ocean studies, Island Studies, performance art and decolonial methodologies to offer interdisciplinary ways of thinking about La Serenissima and its navigational histories. It is a transdisciplinary speculative entry, part empirical, part analytical, part applied phenomenology. We write this as a collaboration between two members of the Harmattan Theater company, a New York City based environmental performance ensemble applying environmental theory to site-specific performances engaging oceans and islands. The article is driven by the following research questions: What are the historic relationalities between the Venice lagoon and the Indian Ocean? How has the acqua alto flooding of Venice, accompanied by the mnemonic histories of the Venetian lagoon, impacted understandings of lagoon cultures in the global South, particularly the Malabar Coast of South Asia? This question has propelled the artistic and academic research of May Joseph and Sofia Varino across environmental history, island studies and performance. Drawing on histories of Venetian navigation and lagoon culture, Joseph and Varino propose a comparative lagoon aesthetics, one that would link two archipelagic regions, the Venetian Lagoon and the extended archipelagic region of the Laccadive Sea of India. While we believe a contemporary archipelagic study connecting these two regions does not currently exist, the historical archives suggest otherwise. We draw on the Venetian Camaldolese monk and cartographer Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi from the 15th Century to initiate this comparative dialogue between North/Southisland ecologies, seafaring histories and ocean futures affected by climate change and rising sea levels. This research is part of a book that Joseph and Varino are co-writing on islands, archipelagos, coastal regions and climate change, drawing on a ten-year collaboration working with large-scale site-specific environmental performance as research, activism and embodied phenomenology.
This paper investigates a pervasive phenomenon in video-mediated interaction (VMI), namely, simultaneous start-ups, which happen when two speakers produce a turn beginning in overlap. Based on the theoretical and methodological tenets of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the present study offers a multimodal and sequential account of how simultaneous start-ups are oriented to and solved in the context of English as an additional language (L2) tutoring. The micro- and sequential analysis of ten hours of screen-recorded video-mediated data from tutoring sessions between an experienced tutor and an advanced-level tutee reveals that the typical overlap resolution trajectory results in the tutor withdrawing from the interactional floor. The same analysis uncovered a range of resources, such as lip pressing and the verbal utterance 'go ahead', employed in what we call enhanced explicitness, through which the withdrawal is done. The orchestration of these resources allows the tutor to exploit the specific features of the medium to resolve simultaneous start-ups while also supporting the continuation of student talk. We maintain that this practice is used in the service of securing the learner's interactional space, and consequently in fostering the use of the language being learned. The results of the study help advance current understandings of L2 instructors' specialized work of managing participation and creating learning opportunities. Being one of the first studies to detail the practices involved in overlap resolution in the micro-context of simultaneous talk on Zoom-based L2 instruction, this study also makes a significant contribution to research on video-mediated instruction and video-mediated interaction more generally.
Against „Values“?
(2022)
Im Kontext fortschreitender Globalisierung, die sich durch zunehmende Migrationsbewegungen, weltweite Mobilität und globale Kommunikationsformen auszeichnet, ist es nicht länger möglich, ‚Kultur‘ nationalstaatlich im Sinne einer geteilten Sprache und homogen anerkannter Wertordnungen zu verstehen. Vielmehr sind Gemeinschaften unter Bedingungen der Globalisierung sprachlich und kulturell so heterogen geworden, dass Sprecher*innen, die die gleiche ‚Sprache‘ sprechen, nicht die gleichen objektiven Bedeutungen indizieren, sondern stattdessen auf subjektive Erinnerungen, unterschiedliche moralische Ordnungen, Wahrheiten und Überzeugungen verweisen.
When moral authority speaks
(2023)
