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‘The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialisms’ sets into relation U.S. imperial and Indigenous conceptions of territoriality as articulated in U.S. legal texts and Indigenous life writing in the 19th century. It analyzes the ways in which U.S. legal texts as “legal fictions” narratively press to affirm the United States’ territorial sovereignty and coherence in spite of its reliance on a variety of imperial practices that flexibly disconnect and (re)connect U.S. sovereignty, jurisdiction and territory.
At the same time, the book acknowledges Indigenous life writing as legal texts in their own right and with full juridical force, which aim to highlight the heterogeneity of U.S. national territory both from their individual perspectives and in conversation with these legal fictions. Through this, the book’s analysis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the coloniality of U.S. legal fictions, while highlighting territoriality as a key concept in the fashioning of the narrative of U.S. imperialism.
Feminist Solidarities after Modulation produces an intersectional analysis of transnational feminist movements and their contemporary digital frameworks of identity and solidarity. Engaging media theory, critical race theory, and Black feminist theory, as well as contemporary feminist movements, this book argues that digital feminist interventions map themselves onto and make use of the multiplicity and ambiguity of digital spaces to question presentist and fixed notions of the internet as a white space and technologies in general as objective or universal. Understanding these frameworks as colonial constructions of the human, identity is traced to a socio-material condition that emerges with the modernity/colonialism binary. In the colonial moment, race and gender become the reasons for, as well as the effects of, technologies of identification, and thus need to be understood as and through technologies. What Deleuze has called modulation is not a present modality of control, but is placed into a longer genealogy of imperial division, which stands in opposition to feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism that insists on non-modular solidarities across seeming difference. At its heart, Feminist Solidarities after Modulation provides an analysis of contemporary digital feminist solidarities, which not only work at revealing the material histories and affective ""leakages"" of modular governance, but also challenges them to concentrate on forms of political togetherness that exceed a reductive or essentialist understanding of identity, solidarity, and difference.
The idea of critical childhood studies is a relatively young disciplinary undertaking in eastern Africa. And so, a lot of inquiries have not been carried out. This field is a potential important socio-political marker, among others, of some narratives, that have emerged out of eastern Africa. Towards this end, my research seeks out an archaeology of childhood in eastern Africa. There is a monochromatic hue which has often painted the eastern African childhood. This broad stroke portrays the childhood as characterized by want. The image of the eastern African childhood is composed in terms of the war-child, poverty, disease-ridden, and aid-begging. The pitfall of this consciousness is that it erases a differentiated and pluralist nature of the eastern African childhood. Therefore, I hypothesise that childhood is a discourse from which institutional vectors become conduits of certain statement-making both process-wise and content-wise. As such a critical childhood study is a theatre of staging and unearthing its joys, tribulations, cultural constructions, and even political interventions. To this end childhood and its literatures not only reflect but also contribute to meaning making and worldliness thereof. As an attempt to move from an un-nuanced depiction, which is often monodirectional, I seek to present a chronologically synchronic and diachronic analysis of childhood in the eastern Africa. Accordingly, I excavate a chronological construction of childhood within this geopolitical region. The main conceptual anchorage is Francis Nyamnjoh who tells of the African occupying a life on convivial frontiers. He theorises an Africa that is involved in technologies of self-definition that privilege conversations, fluidity of being and relational connections on a globalised scale. I also appropriate the notion of Bula Matadi from the Congo as a decolonialist epistemological exercise to break apart polarising representations and practices of childhood in eastern Africa. This opens a space for an unbounded reconfiguration of childhood in eastern Africa. This book works on and with archival matter, in a cross-disciplinary manner and ranges from pre-colonial to post-colonial eastern Africa. It is an exploration of the trajectory of the discourse of childhood in eastern Africa, in order to eclectically investigate childhood in eastern Africa, in fictional and non-fictional representations.
The political legacy of the Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is the subject of an ongoing debate among postcolonial literary scholars. Responding to an influential view shaping this debate, that Glissant’s work can be categorised into an early political and late apolitical phase, this dissertation claims that this division is based on a narrow conception of 'engaged political writing' that prevents a more comprehensive view of the changing political strategies Glissant pursued throughout his life from emerging. Proceeding from this conceptual basis, the dissertation is concerned with re-reading the dimensions of Glissant's work that have hitherto been relegated as apolitical, literary or poetic, with the aim of conceptualising the politics of relation as an integral part of his overall poetic project. In methodological terms, the dissertation therefore proposes a relational reading of Glissant’s life-work across literary genres, epochs, as well as the conventional divisions between political thought, writing and activism. This perspective is informed by Glissant's philosophy of relation, and draws on a conception of political practice that includes both explicit engagements with established political systems and institutions, as well as literary and cultural interventions geared towards their transformation and the creation of alternatives to them. Theoretically the work thus combines a poststructuralist lens on the conceptual difference between 'politics' and 'the political' with arguments for an inherent political quality of literature, and perspectives from the Afro-Caribbean radical tradition, in which writers and intellectuals have historically sought to combine discursive interventions with organisational actions. Applying this theoretical angle to the analysis of Glissant's politics of relation results in an interdisciplinary research framework designed to explore the synergies between postcolonial political and literary studies.
In order to comprehensively describe Glissant's politics of relation without recourse to evolutionary or digressive models, the concept of an intellectual marronage is proposed as a framework to map the strategies making up Glissant's political archive. Drawing on a variety of historic, political theoretical and literary sources, intellectual marronage is understood as a mode of radical resistance to the neocolonial subjugation for which the plantation system stands historically and metaphorically, as an inherently innovative political practice invested in the creation of communities marked by relational ontologies, and as a commitment to fostering an imagination of the world and the human that differs fundamentally from the Enlightenment paradigm. This specific conception of intellectual marronage forms the basis on which three key strategies that consistently shape Glissant's political practice are identified and mapped. They revolve around Glissant's engagement with history (chapter 2), his commitment to fostering an imagination of the Tout-Monde (whole-world) as a political point of reference (chapter 3), and the continuous exploration of alternative forms of community on the levels of the island, the archipelago and the Tout-Monde (chapter 4). Together these strategies constitute Glissant's personal politics of relation. Its abstract characteristics can be put in a productive conversation with related theoretical traditions invested in exploring the political potentials of fugitivity (chapters 5), as well as with the work of other postcolonial actors whose holistic practice warrants to be described as a politics of relation (chapter 6).
Some of the most frequent questions surrounding business negotiations address not only the nature of such negotiations, but also how they should be conducted. The answers given by business people from different cultural backgrounds to these questions are likely to differ from the standard answers found in business manuals.
In her book, Milene Mendes de Oliveira investigates how Brazilian and German business people conceptualize and act out business negotiations using English as a Lingua Franca. The frameworks of Cultural Linguistics, English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, and Business Discourse offer the theoretical and methodological grounding for the analysis of interviews with high-ranking Brazilian and German business people. Moreover, a side study on e-mail exchanges between Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company serves as a test case for the results arising from the interviews, and helps understand other facets of authentic intercultural business communication.
Offering new insights on English as a Lingua Franca in international business contexts, Business Negotiations in ELF from a Cultural Linguistic Perspective simultaneously provides a detailed cultural-conceptual account of business negotiations from the viewpoint of Brazilian and German business people and a secondary analysis of their pragmatic aspects.
Remembering the dismembered
(2020)
This thesis – written in co-authorship with Tanzanian activist Mnyaka Sururu Mboro – examines different cases of repatriation of ancestral remains to African countries and communities through the prism of postcolonial memory studies. It follows the theft and displacement of prominent ancestors from East and Southern Africa (Sarah Baartman, Dawid Stuurman, Mtwa Mkwawa, Songea Mbano, King Hintsa and the victims of the Ovaherero and Nama genocides) and argues that efforts made for the repatriation of their remains have contributed to a transnational remembrance of colonial violence.
Drawing from cultural studies theories such as "multidirectional memory", "rehumanisation" and "necropolitics", the thesis argues for a new conceptualisation or "re-membrance" in repatriation, through processes of reunion, empowerment, story-telling and belonging. Besides, the afterlives of the dead ancestors, who stand at the centre of political debates on justice and reparations, remind of their past struggles against colonial oppression. They are therefore "memento vita", fostering counter-discourses that recognize them
as people and stories.
This manuscript is accompanied by a “(web)site of memory” where some of the research findings are made available to a wider audience. This blog also hosts important sound material which appears in the thesis as interventions by external contributors. Through QR codes, both the written and the digital version are linked with each other to problematize the idea of a written monograph and bring a polyphonic perspective to those diverse, yet connected, histories.
From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles – biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.
Today’s focus on the 1930s as a time of radical politics paving the way for the apocalypse of the Second World War ignores the complexity of the decade’s cultural responses, especially those by British women writers who highlighted gender issues within their contemporary political climate. The decade’s literature is often understood to capture the political unrest, either narrating people’s chaotic movement or their paralysed shock. This book argues that 1930s novels collapse the distinction between movement and standstill and calls this phenomenon Dynamic Stasis. This Dynamic Stasis thematically and structurally informs the novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. By disrupting the oft-repeated cliché of the 1930s as the age of political extremes, gender politics and negotiations of femininity can emerge from the discursive periphery. This book therefore corrects a persistent gender blind spot, which opens up a (re)consideration of authors that have been overlooked in literary criticism of 1930s to this day.
This book endeavours to understand the seemingly direct link between utopianism and the USA, discussing novels that have never been brought together in this combination before, even though they all revolve around intentional communities: Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Howland’s Papas Own Girl (1874), Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). They relate nation and utopia not by describing perfect societies, but by writing about attempts to immediately live radically different lives. Signposting the respective communal history, the readings provide a literary perspective to communal studies, and add to a deeply necessary historicization for strictly literary approaches to US utopianism, and for studies that focus on Pilgrims/Puritans/Founding Fathers as utopian practitioners. This book therefore highlights how the authors evaluated the USA’s utopian potential and traces the nineteenth-century development of the utopian imagination from various perspectives.