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The objective of the present paper is to explore the potentials and challenges inherent in con- ceptualizations of global citizenship education (GCE) in the context of foreign language edu- cation. Specifically, we argue for a critical approach to GCE that emphasizes the significance of language as symbolic power by drawing on the concepts of critical literacy (e.g., Freire 1983; Janks 2014) and symbolic competence (Kramsch 2006; 2011; 2021). To illustrate the necessity of such a critical approach to GCE, we critically analyze teaching materials designed for the English language classroom as provided by the curriculum framework (KMK/ BMZ 2016). The analysis reveals how reliance on dominant Western liberal and neoliberal epistemologies, norms, and discourses might inadvertently reinforce the very inequalities that GCE actually seeks to address. By foregrounding the relationship between language, symbolic power, and GCE, we further redesign these teaching materials and incorporate pedagogical and methodological principles which are in line with a critical literacy and symbolic competence.
The biosecurity individual
(2024)
Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
This study examines language ideologies and communicative practices in the multilingual Vaupes region of northwestern Amazonia. Following a comparative overview of the Vaupes as a 'small-scale' language ecology, it discusses claims from existing ethnographic work on the region in light of data from a corpus of video-recordings of sociolinguistic interviews and spontaneous everyday conversations. It shows how a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach combining language documentation methodology and ethnographic, structural linguistic, and interactional perspectives can contribute to understanding of macro and micro aspects of multilingualism, thus contributing to future work on the Vaupes, typologies of small-scale multilingual ecologies, and language contact research.
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 British Music Hall
(2010)
Victorian Women Artists
(2010)
Labour and Gender
(2010)
Introduction
(2010)
This essay takes an Anglophone Cultural Studies approach to reflect on the interdependence among as well as the individual (implicit) impact of the elements constituting our (embodied) power structures. These are, e.g., bodily experience/s such as shame and fear, everyday and institutional discourses and practices, but also manifestations of differences and particularities that we transform into phenomena such as “norms”, “binary systems” and “binary organisations”. The analysis of seemingly cyclic “Othering processes” and patterns of violence shows how people who identify as trans*, inter*, or non-binary have to live through and embody epistemological, emotional, and/or physical violence. At the same time, the descriptions illustrate numberless potential forms of resistance and change.
Language portraits are useful instruments to elicit speakers' reflections on the languages in their repertoires. In this study, we implement a "portrait-corpus approach" (Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy 2020) to investigate the conceptualisations of the languages Afrikaans and English in 105 language portraits. In this approach, we use participants' reflections about their placement of the two languages on a human silhouette as a linguistic corpus. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analyses using WordSmith, Statistica and Atlas.ti, our study shows that Afrikaans is mainly conceptualised as a language that is located in more peripheral areas of the body (for example, the hands and feet) and, hence, is perceived as less important in participants' repertoires. The central location of English in the head reveals its status as an important language in the participants' multilingual repertoires. We argue that these conceptualisations of Afrikaans and English provide additional insight into the attitudes towards these languages in South Africa.
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)
Welche Rolle spielt Kultur im Fremdsprachenunterricht, welcher Kulturbegriff eignet sich für die Kulturdidaktik und welche Zielsetzungen werden mit Blick auf kulturelle Lernprozesse verfolgt? Die Antworten der Fremdsprachendidaktik auf diese Fragen haben sich nicht nur in der Vergangenheit immer wieder verändert, sondern sind auch mit Blick auf die gegenwärtige Diskussion äußerst vielfältig.
Neue Mündlichkeiten
(2022)
Beyond humanitarianism
(2022)
Strategic label
(2020)
The Afropolitan Berlin novel Biskaya by SchwarzRund (2016) is probably the first novel written in German which demonstratively wears this label – on the front cover of the book, the author announces it to be an Afropolitaner Berlin Roman underneath the title. While addressing quite a few particulars of the Berlin-Brandenburg area, the novel writes itself willingly into the globally popular, yet controversial realm of African inflected cosmopolitanism. In this essay, I will argue that the author uses the label strategically to negotiate the global and the local – or worldliness and cultural specificity – with the aim to increase the visibility of queer of Color critique in Germany.
SchwarzRund’s approach may seem contradictory at first: Even though she could have called her novel queer, neuro-diverse, diasporic or Black, she chose Afropolitan. While she wrote an outspokenly political novel, she labeled it with a term often critically denounced as apolitical. Using Afropolitanism, she seems to aim at a rather mainstream audience, but at the same time, she published with a small, activist publishing house. While attempting to tap into the transnational cultural and literary capital of Afropolitanism, the language of the book is German and restricts it to the German-speaking parts of the world.
This essay will explore the Afropolitanism depicted in Biskaya and elaborate on the strategic choice of label. I will offer one possible interpretation of the characters and settings which illustrate SchwarzRund’s vision and version of Afropolitanism. In my analyses, I am interested in political questions around the characters’ identities and the setting. The Black protagonists of the novel, Tue and Dwayne, live in Berlin, but grew up on the fictional island Biskaya. This island is located somewhere close to the European mainland and part of the continent; it had an entirely Black population until a destructive event forced many to move to the mainland. The protagonists, now living in a mainly white society, are depicted in a state of interrogation of their own sense of self, measuring oppressive societal norms against other possible ways of interaction. The novel shows how people are deemed strange and not fitting into a network of unspoken rules because of racialized bodies, sexual preferences and#shor lifestyle choices. However, SchwarzRund counters those structures of inequality with her characters’ playful ways to deal with queerness, femininity and blackness subverting imposed norms. The novel challenges imperatives of subordination, creates new visions and inscribes Black Germans as political subjects.
Marronage or underground?
(2022)
I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.
Deleuze and the digital
(2021)
In his short and often quoted essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', Gilles Deleuze famously describes the structures of power in the dawning twenty-first century as driven by 'machines of a third type, computers', as novel and predominantly digital infrastructures. In fact, from a Deleuzian perspective the entire ecosystem of the digital transformation can be described as a larger shift in modes of production and the political economy. This essay proposes to read this 'technological evolution' as the power of algorithms and their material substance - digital infrastructures that entail a different mode of interaction between humans and technology. In looking at these infrastructures from a materialist position, my essay reconceptualises the digital as the unfolding logic of assemblages that have been shaping a 'long now' of technological modernity. In bringing a Deleuzian reading of infrastructures to the study of technology and society, this essay seeks to shed a new light on the political function-and the increasing abstraction-of infrastructures in the realm of the digital.
This article explores a sequence organizational phenomenon that results from the use of a loosely specifiable turn format (viz., That's + wh-clause) for launching (next) sequences while at the same time connecting back to a prior turn. Using this practice creates a sequential juncture, i.e., a pivot-like nexus between one sequence and a next. In third position, such junctures serve to accomplish seamless sequential transitions from one sequence into a next by presenting the latter as locally occasioned. The practice may, however, also be deployed in second position to launch actions that have not been made relevant or provided for by the preceding action and exhibit response relevance themselves. The sequential junctures then become retro-sequential in character: They transform the projected trajectory of the sequence in progress and create interlocking sequential structures. These findings highlight that sequence is practice, while pointing to understudied interconnections between tying and sequentiality. Data are in English.
Fin du globe
(2021)
This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism.
This book explores how capitalism shapes the formation of the economic subject in modern European writing. How are subject positions determined by the subject’s relationship to money and work? How fair is a society that predicates social inclusion upon employment? And what happens when full employment is impossible? The volume traces how literary authors and social theorists have answered these questions in different social and historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The contributions confront the imperatives of productivity, notions of success and failure, the construction of work cultures and environments, the (in)visibility of certain labour groups, and the implications of the body as a productive site.
Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.
Postcolonial surveillance
(2022)
Postcolonial Surveillance investigates the long history of the European border regime, focusing on the colonial forerunners of today’s border technologies. The book takes a longue durée perspective to uncover how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present and has morphed into EU border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. It exposes the racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems and highlights key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, biometric sorting, and deterrent media infrastructure. The technological genealogies assembled in this book reveal the unacknowledged histories that had to be rejected for the seemingly clean, unbiased, and neutral technologies to emerge as such.
For world literature studies, Indian writing in English offers an exceptionally rich and variegated field of analysis: On the one hand, a set of prominent Indian or diasporic writers accrues substantial literary capital through metropolitan review circuits and award systems and thus maintains the high international visibility that Indian writing in English has acquired ever since the early 1980s. Addressing a readership that spans countries and continents, this kind of writing functions as a viable tributary to world literature. On the other hand, a new boom of Indian mass fiction in English has emerged that, while targeting a strictly domestic audience, is always already implicated in the dynamics of world literature as well, albeit in a very different way: As they deploy, appropriate and adopt a wide range of globally available templates of popular genres, these texts have globality inscribed into their very textures even if they do not circulate internationally.
Sampling
(2022)
Schomburgk’s Chook
(2018)
Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.
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.
This essay sets out to theorize the "new" Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region (which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit articulations of the "Inuit Sea." In such a reading, Inuit conceptions provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also, in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
Afropolitan Encounters
(2022)
Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneous and malleable, which constitutes its strengths and, at the same time, creates tensions.
This book traces the theoretical beginnings of Afropolitanism and moves on to explore Afropolitan practices in London and Berlin. Afropolitanism can take different forms, such as that of an identity, a political and ethical stance, a dead–end road, networks, a collective self–care practice or a strategic label. In spite of the harsh criticism, Afropolitanism is attractive for people to deal with the meanings of Africa and Africanness, questions of belonging, equal rights and opportunities.
While not a unitary project, the vast variety of Afropolitan practices provide approaches to contemporary political problems in Europe and beyond. In this book, Afropolitan practices are read against the specific context of German and British colonial histories and structures of racism, the histories of Black Europeans, and contemporary right–wing resurgence in Germany and England, respectively.
Layer after Layer
(2021)
When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Obwohl schon viel über kommerzielle Materialien gesagt und geschrieben wurde, ist unser Verständnis sehr begrenzt, wenn es um lokal produzierte (hauseigene, nicht-kommerzielle) Materialien geht, die oft verwendet werden, um bestehende veröffentlichte Materialien zu ersetzen oder zu ergänzen. In diesem Beitrag geben wir einen Überblick über die Literatur zur Darstellung von Geschlecht und Sexualität in kommerziellen Lehrmitteln und unsere Überlegungen zu lokal produzierten Unterrichtsmaterialien, die in einem Englisch-Intensivprogramm an einer Universität in der Türkei mit Englisch als Unterrichtsmedium (EMI) verwendet werden. Wir unterstreichen die Bedeutung von Materialien für die Handlungsfähigkeit von Lehrkräften bei der Schaffung eines sicheren und inklusiven Klassenzimmers und bei der Bekämpfung von systematischer Unterdrückung, Diskriminierung und Ungerechtigkeit im und ausserhalb des Klassenzimmers.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
Introduction
(2021)
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.
Digital surveillance fiction
(2021)
East and South
(2022)
"What is 'Europe' in academic discourse? While Europe tends to be used as shorthand, often interchangeable with the 'West', neither the 'West' nor 'Europe' are homogeneous spaces. Though postcolonial studies have long been debunking Eurocentrism in its multiple guises, there is still work to do in fully comprehending how its imaginations and discursive legacies conceive the figure of Europe, as not all who live on European soil are understood as equally 'European'. This volume explores this immediate need to rethink the axis of postcolonial cultural productions, to disarticulate Eurocentrism, to recognise Europe as a more diverse, plural and fluid space, to draw forward cultural exchanges and dialogues within the Global South. Through analyses of literary texts from East-Central Europe and beyond, this volume sheds light on alternative literary cartographies - the multiplicity of Europes and being European which exist both as they are viewed from the different geographies of the global South, and within the continent itself. Covering a wide spatial and temporal terrain in postcolonial and European cultural productions, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, Global South studies and European studies"
Longevity narratives
(2018)
The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims.
Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.
This study explores the theoretical and political potentials of Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation and its approach to the issues of borders, migration, and the setup of political communities as proposed by his pensée nouvelle de la frontière (new border thought), against the background of the German migration crisis of 2015. The main argument of this article is that Glissant’s work offers an alternative epistemological and normative framework through which the contemporary political issues arising around the phenomenon of repressive border regimes can be studied. To demonstrate this point, this article works with Glissant’s border thought as an analytical lens and proposes a pathway for studying the contemporary German border regime. Particular emphasis is placed on the identification of potential areas where a Glissantian politics of relation could intervene with the goal of transforming borders from impermeable walls into points of passage. By exploring the political implications of his border thought, as well as the larger philosophical context from which it emerges, while using a transdisciplinary approach that borrows from literary and political studies, this work contributes to ongoing debates in postcolonial studies on borders and borderlessness, as well as Glissant’s political legacy in the twenty-first century.
The making of Tupaia’s map
(2019)
Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra‘iātea in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart’s cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia’s Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models.
Too Poor for Debt
(2020)
Deleuze launches his description/prediction of the emergence and imminent consolidation of the society of control as a postscript. The text thus announces itself as an afterthought, a supplement appended to some complete larger textual body, from which it is, however, unmoored as it is launched as an independent self-standing text that, moreover, does not indicate to what it is an addendum but instead, on what it speaks. By this token, the Postscript unhinges the conventional notion according to which a supplement signals “the addition of something to an already complete entity” (Attridge 1992: 77). By marking his text as the adjunct to an absent main body, Deleuze appears to concede and at the same time emphatically embrace the necessary incompleteness of this short précis on the post-disciplinary regime. My argument in the following will be that the supplementary status of the Postscript does not so much signal some subversive or dissident gesture in the name of the minor or the molecular (even though it does that, too); instead, it primarily serves to keep at bay and contain an exteriority that it aims to ‘confine by exclusion’1; and that exteriority, I will argue, is the Third World.
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.
Connecting worlds
(2020)
This chapter considers the benefits of working with linguistic landscapes for language education curriculum. It shows how introducing linguistic landscape exploration into the curriculum can support learners to read beyond words and to build critical understandings of intersections between words and worlds. The chapter explores data from two case studies in different educational contexts. The first study shows the effects of scaffolding in-service languages teachers to learn to read their worlds from multiple perspectives. The second study illustrates the types of insights that can emerge from school EFL learners when they explore the linguistic landscapes of worlds beyond their classrooms.
Recollecting bones
(2020)
Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies. Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook’s voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th-century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds – ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs, and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationship between science, religion, art and exploitation, displacement and annihilation.
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2020)
Postcolonial Justice' addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in "utopian ideals" of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.
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.
Tusitalas Wandlungen
(2017)
Kleine Kosmopolitismen
(2017)
Simulationen
(2020)
Bei Simulationen im Fremdsprachenunterricht handelt es sich um eine ganz-heitliche Lehr-Lern-Methode, in der Lernende mit einer realen oder realitäts-bezogenen Kommunikationssituation konfrontiert werden, um ihre Kompetenzen zur Bewältigung dieser Situation weiterzuentwickeln. Kennzeichnend für die Simulation sind u. a. der Spielcharakter, die Komplexität, Offenheit und Dynamik: Im Vergleich zu Rollenspielen übernehmen alle Lernenden eine Rolle in der Simulation, die in ihrer Ausgestaltung nicht festgelegt ist und den Lernenden Gestaltungsspielräume bietet. Der Verlauf und der Ausgang einer Simulation sind zumeist offen, so dass durch das Handeln der Lernenden eine eigene Dynamik in der simulierten Wirklichkeit entsteht, die wiederum zur aktiven Mitgestaltung motivieren kann.
Verfahren des Genre-Lernens
(2020)
Der Ansatz des genrebasierten Fremdsprachenlernens basiert auf der Grundannahme, dass sich Kommunikation in der Form kultureller Genres vollzieht, die eine spezifische textuelle und interaktionale Form aufweisen. Wer erfolgreich kommunizieren will, muss daher je nach sozialem Kontext und Kommunikationszweck eine Form der Äußerung wählen, die dem entsprechenden Anlass bzw. der Situation angemessen und für die Kommunikationsabsicht zielführend ist. Für den Fremdsprachenunterricht leitet sich daraus das Ziel bzw. die Aufgabe ab, Lernende beim Erwerb dieser Kommunikationsformate bzw. Genres zu unterstützen.
This article illustrates how pre-service English teachers’ diagnostic skills of pragmatic competences can be developed in an interdisciplinary seminar that focuses on assessing foreign language learners’ interactional competence (specifically turn-taking, action accomplishment, repair). A competence-oriented approach was chosen to model the linguistic and didactic skills required by language teachers to assess learners’ pragmatic competence in role plays.
Debates on the relevance of repatriation of indigenous human remains are water under the bridge today. Yet, a genuine will for dialogue to work through colonial violence is found lacking in the European public sphere. Looking at local remembrance of the Majimaji War (1905-07) in the south of Tanzania and a German-Tanzanian theatre production, this article demonstrates how the spectre of colonial headhunting stands at the heart of claims for repatriation and acknowledgement of this anti-colonial movement. The missing head of Ngoni leader Songea Mbano haunts the future of German-Tanzanian relations in culture and heritage. By staging the act of post-mortem dismemberment and foregrounding the perspective of descendants, the theatre production Maji Maji Flava offers an honest proposal for dealing with stories of sheer colonial violence in transnational memory.
Following recents calls for the inclusion of conceptual aspects into world Englishes research, I report in this article on conceptualizations of business negotiations by Brazilian and German business people. I conducted semi‐structured interviews in English with nine participants from each country. Subsequently, I analyzed conceptualizations of respect, success, and conflict in business negotiations by looking at ‘conceptual scripts’ underlying interviewees’ answers. Results point to differences in how the Brazilian and the German interviewees conceptualize business negotiations.
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.
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.
‘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.
Melancholia
(2019)
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.
This essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.
The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance and Reception in Contemporary Fiction
(2016)
Identitas Oriens: Discursive Constructions of Identity and Alterity in British Orient Travelogues
(2016)
Contrary to earlier studies dealing with the cultural identity development of diasporic minorities, this paper assesses the impact of homogeneity on intra-group cohesion and ethnic orientation. To this end, Oromo-Americans, an ethnic group originally located within the national borders of Ethiopia, will be compared to Armenian-Americans, British-Pakistanis and Somali-Americans. Despite different circumstances, all four groups share the experience of displacement owing to war and destitution. Additionally, all groups are confronted with the ramifications of a visible minority status. In the process of comparing these groups, their degrees of homogeneity in regard to language and religion - central aspects of culture and cultural identity - will be examined and juxtaposed at a macro level. Based on the correlative relationship of group homogeneity and social cohesion, I argue that the more homogeneous a group is in terms of language and religion, the more close-knit it will be. Consequently, exiled minorities who share the same language and religion are more likely to develop and retain a strong ethnic orientation than groups who are heterogeneous with regard to language and/or religion.