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‘Hasty observations’?
(2018)
This article examines geographical field research in Albania and Montenegro under Austro-Hungarian occupation, which lasted from 1916 to 1918. It focusses on one of the most important German-speaking geographers of the early 20 th century, Eugen Oberhummer (1859–1944), a pupil of Friedrich Ratzel, the founder of German geo-politics. In 1917 and 1918, Oberhummer went on two expeditions to Montenegro and Albania during the First World War. He already had travelled in four continents and vaguely knew the Western Balkans from an expedition in 1907. It will be argued that the actual situation in Albania and Montenegro did not alter, but did rather reinforce Oberhummer’s attitudes and opinions on the ‘other’ he encountered. Thus, the two war expeditions – Oberhummer primarily met high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officials and only few locals – confirmed his expectations basing on his ‘Ratzelian’ theoretical conceptions. It will further be argued that – in contrast to the much younger and less experienced ‘scholars-at-arms’ of the expedition of 1916 – war and violence were of secondary relevance for the well-travelled and renowned professor of geography in his late 50s. Neither in Oberhummer’s articles nor in his diaries the war and the occupation of Albania and Montenegro made up an important part. In Oberhummer’s ‘Ratzelian’ view, humans could not change or over-come the basic features of geography, as humans were clearly subordinated to the elemental forces of geography. People, over generations, adapted to geography, not the other way round. The on-going First World War was an opportunity for Oberhummer to travel to Albania and Montenegro, but the guerrilla warfare in large parts of Montenegro, the violence against the civilian population, and the fighting at the Albanian front were of secondary relevance and interest for him. Nevertheless, what Oberhummer observed offers great insights into the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro and Albania from the perspective of a renowned and – given the general circumstances – pleasantly relaxed Ratzelian geographer at the height of his academic career.
Previous studies suggest that there are special timing relations in syllable onsets. The consonants are assumed to be timed, on the one hand, with the vocalic nucleus and, on the other hand, with each other. These competing timing relations result in the C-center effect. However, the C-center effect has not consistently been found in languages with complex onsets. Moreover, it has occasionally been found in languages disallowing complex onsets. The present study investigates onset timing in German while discussing alternative explanations (not related to bonding) for the timing patterns observed. Six German speakers were recorded via Electromagnetic Articulography. The corpus contained items with four clusters (/sk/, /kv/, /gl/, and /pl/). The clusters occur in word-initial position, word-medial position, and across a word boundary preceding different vowels. The results suggest that segmental properties (i.e., oral-laryngeal coordination, coarticulatory resistance) determine the observed timing patterns, and specifically the absence or presence of the C-center effect.
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.
In an overt visual priming experiment, we investigate the role of orthography in native (L1) and non-native (L2) processing of German morphologically complex words. We compare priming effects for inflected and derived morphologically related prime-target pairs versus otherwise matched, purely orthographically related pairs. The results show morphological priming effects in both the L1 and L2 group, with no significant difference between inflection and derivation. However, L2 speakers, but not L1 speakers, also showed significant priming for orthographically related pairs. Our results support the claim that L2 speakers focus more on surface-level information such as orthography during visual word recognition. This can cause orthographic priming effects in morphologically related prime-target pairs, which may conceal L1-L2 differences in morphological processing.
Recollecting bones
(2018)
This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific disinterest'. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.
Urbanity and literature
(2011)
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
Magic screens
(2016)
Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Capac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way. (1) Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent - they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.(2) While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an 'indigenous' painting style. The artists from up-country - such was the reproach - could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how 'provincial', truly, was this art?
Khal Torabully
(2017)
Khal Torabully creates poetry and a poetics for those forgotten by history, a theorem and theory which construct a tangible and sensual landscape, allowing for an empathetically shared experience and expressing the dramatic climax of the third phase of accelerated globalization: a project that would be unthinkable without the cultural theory we now have at our disposal in the present surge of globalization. In his poetic and theoretical texts, he has paid a literary tribute to the Coolies, usually from India, but also China and many other countries. Given Torabully’s Mauritian roots, but also the worldwide migration of the Coolies themselves, the world of Coolitude is culturally and linguistically extremely diverse, making the act of translation very relevant and giving it multiple meanings. Literature brings these forgotten lives back to life and allows us to share this experience thanks to its aesthetic force. It traces the movements, which sketch trajectories functioning to this day as palimpsest-like vectors of our own paths and trajectories. The author of Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies breaks the chain of mutual exclusions, replacing it with a type of writing belonging to a wider array of expressive modes which in diasporic situations unleash polylogical and archipelagic imaginaries.
Towards Eurasia
(2019)
In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.