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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.
“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.
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.
In this introductory article to the special issue, we ask what role sexuality plays in the reproduction and contestation of border regimes and think sexuality towards its various entanglements with border control. As borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions, we argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering and illustrate how sexuality works as a key strategy for the capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement. Taking a transnational approach, we bring together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives to suggest that these strategies need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.
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.
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.
Introduction
(2021)
Digital surveillance fiction
(2021)
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.