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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.
This text is a contribution to the research on the worldwide success of evangelical Christianity and offers a new perspective on the relationship between late modern capitalism and evangelicalism. For this purpose, the utilization of affect and emotion in evangelicalism towards the mobilization of its members will be examined in order to find out what similarities to their employment in late modern capitalism can be found. Different examples from within the evangelical spectrum will be analyzed as affective economies in order to elaborate how affective mobilization is crucial for evangelicalism’s worldwide success. Pivotal point of this text is the exploration of how evangelicalism is able to activate the voluntary commitment of its members, financiers, and missionaries. Gathered here are examples where both spheres—evangelicalism and late modern capitalism—overlap and reciprocate, followed by a theoretical exploration of how the findings presented support a view of evangelicalism as an inner-worldly narcissism that contributes to an assumed re-enchantment of the world.
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.
Die Dissertation untersucht von Autorinnen (Louisa Johnson, Jane Loudon, Maria Theresa Earle, Gertrude Jekyll, Elizabeth von Arnim) verfasste Ratgeberliteratur zum Hausgarten für ein weibliches Lesepublikum, mit dem Anspruch an eine praktische Gartentätigkeit, im Zeitraum von 1839 bis 1900. Die Genderperspektive steht hieraus folgend im Mittelpunkt der vorliegenden Arbeit. Der Fokus auf die bürgerliche Mittelklasse ergibt sich aus der Autorinnenperspektive und der angesprochenen Leserschaft. Die Behandlung des Gartens wird einer Analyse unterzogen, die nach der weiblichen Sicht auf den Garten und einem spezifisch weiblichen Selbstverständnis der garteninteressierten bzw. gärtnernden Frauen fragt. In ihrer Beschäftigung mit dem Garten leisten die Frauen einen Beitrag zur Konzeption von männlich und weiblich, zur Bewertung von Geschlechternormen und deren Verhandlung. Das Schreiben und Lesen über den Garten sowie hieraus resultierende Handlungen waren mit der Konstruktion weiblicher Identität verknüpft. In ihrer befreienden Konzeption des Gartens heben sich diese Frauenstimmen zu Weiblichkeitsvorstellungen von anderen gesellschaftlichen zugeschriebenen Wirkungsbereichen ab. An die bürgerliche Frau herangetragene Rollenerwartungen werden in den Werken weder affirmativ bestätigt noch offen subversiv hinterfragt. Es handelt sich vielmehr um ein subtiles Unterlaufen durch das Anbieten von Handlungsfeldern, die dem Wunsch nach Selbstverwirklichung und Selbstbestimmung entgegen kamen. Im Garten als vermeintlich kleinem, hausnah-restriktivem Kontext nehmen die Frauen neue Rollen an und variieren diese. Der Beschäftigung mit dem Garten kommt daher ein protofeministischer Charakter vor dem Einsetzen der Ersten Frauenbewegung zu, so dass von einem Gartenfeminismus als Instrument zur weiblichen Bewusstwerdung gesprochen werden kann.
The author examines the cultural identity development of Oromo-Americans in Minnesota, an ethnic group originally located within the national borders of Ethiopia. Earlier studies on language and cultural identity have shown that the degree of ethnic orientation of minorities commonly decreases from generation to generation. Yet oppression and a visible minority status were identified as factors delaying the process of de-ethnicization. Given that Oromos fled persecution in Ethiopia and are confronted with the ramifications of a visible minority status in the U.S., it can be expected that they have retained strong ties to their ethnic culture. This study, however, came to a more complex and theory-building result.
Reading song lyrics
(2010)
The Culture of Lyrics
(2010)
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"
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.
Lost in a liminal space?
(2015)
Digital surveillance fiction
(2021)
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.