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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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recollecting bones
(2020)
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2020)