Auf den Spuren sich verändernder Dinge : Internationale Konferenz im Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum Paderborn, 3.-5.11.2000

Unter Leitung von Prof. Dr. Gisela Ecker (Universität Paderborn) veranstaltete die Arbeitsgruppe „Kulturwissenschaftlerinnen NRW“ vom 3. bis 5. November 2000 eine internationale und interdisziplinäre Fachkonferenz zum Thema „Kulturelle Transformationen der Dinge“. In den Räumen des Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForums stellten elf eingeladene Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus England, Belgien, der Schweiz, Österreich und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland ihre Forschungsergebnisse zu einzelnen Fragen des Umgangs mit Dingen in Kunst, Literatur, Philosophie, Film und Fotographie vor und diskutierten sie mit den Mitgliedern der Arbeitsgruppe sowie einem großen Publikum von ca. 80 Interessierten

Hardboiled Performance and Affective Intimacy: Remediations of Racism in the Cenk Batu Tatorte

Although not around to stay, the first Turkish German detective to be featured in the Germany’s most popular television crime series, Tatort nonetheless represented a major TV event (2008–12). In his sixth episode as an investigator in a series famous for its continued engagement with topical social issues, Cenk Batu would be killed off after his loyalty to the German state had been tested by the schemes of a ruthless killer trying to exploit Batu’s love for a woman. Cast in the role of an undercover agent rather than regular police investigator, Batu’s portrayal more fully tapped into—and reworked—the topoi of the hardboiled genre than did most Tatort detective teams. In this sense, the Batu episodes can be read as a performative remediation of Germany’s heightened debates on Muslim immigration taking place at the intersection of post-September 11 anti-Islam(ist) culturalisms and an established, cross-media tradition of stereotyping Turkish German ‘thug’ masculinity. However, paradigms that deploy performativity as both a critique and reconfiguration of hegemonic discourse only partially capture the nature of the cultural interventions undertaken in these episodes. Via innovative aesthetics that blur the lines between cinema and TV, the Batu episodes also contributed to a twenty-first century visual culture focused on experiences of sensation, perception, and affect. This aesthetics of sensation challenged Tatort audiences to affectively engage with their first Turkish German Tatort investigator. In exploring remediations of racism in this context, this article rearticulates established paradigms of performance studies by bringing them into dialogue with recent conceptualizations of affect and of narrativity

An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany

Item embargoed for five year

Religious Turns: Immigration, Islam, and Christianity in Twenty-First Century German Cultural Politics

32 pagesThe paper analyzes recent German headscarf legislation in the context of early twenty-first-century religious turns, that is, on the one hand constructions of “Islam/ism” as the newly dominant figure of cultural difference on the political stage, and on the other hand the renewed prominence of Christianity in public discourse. Against the background of current academic work on and in political theology, I analyze the “post-secular” concepts of collective identity developed under the sign of the headscarf by associating them with two different theoretical models. Berlin’s headscarf legislation can be compared to the French “Law on Laicity,” which has been criticized as a vehicle of hidden political theologies in Carl Schmitt’s sense: the Republic performs its sovereignty through the ways it manages religious exceptions. The openly asymmetrical headscarf bans passed in a number of other German states, however, do not just make “exceptions” for Christianity; rather, they privilege “Christian tradition” as the foundation of the “secular” German state. Critically relating this rhetoric to the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek conceptualize the (presumably inescapable) destabilization of secular democracy through the forces of heteronomy and tradition, the paper pleas for replacing such uses of political theology in both politics and theory

Literary Dreaming (Under the Weight of Political Nightmares)

Looking at literature and the arts as media of dreaming is by no means a new idea. In modern European aesthetics alone, it has been prominent from Romanticism via Sigmund Freud’s methods of (literary) dream interpretation to Ernst Bloch’s conceptualization of the arts as utopian daydreaming. Recently, though, the conceptual keyword of dreaming has seen a renaissance across the arts and humanities, as a topic of Biennales (e.g., Venice 2022) as well as scholarship in queer studies, radical Black and indigenous theory. This may seem counterintuitive in a historical moment of neoliberal exhaustion, renewed fascism, and planetary exhaustion much more conducive to apocalyptic fear and fantasy. But as I propose in this talk, we can best contour the current resurgence of dreaming in the arts and humanities from precisely this angle, in a two-fold sense. First, the return of dreaming constitutes an explicit countermove towards political hope and futural imagination in the face of political nightmares. Second, it operates as an experimental practice that does not (naively) deny or (miraculously) overcome, but actively includes the negativity of surrounding worlds. As Hengameh Yaghoobifarah puts it in a play on the linguistic overlap of the German words for “dream” (Traum) and “trauma,” the dream factory of literature and the arts doubles as a trauma processing plant (“Traumafabrik,” Ministerium der Träume, 229). In our ongoing moment of shrinking humanities programs, the renewed interest in dreaming also contributes to the discussion of what literature, film, and the other arts offer towards the goal of reimagining and remaking contemporary worlds. My talk will address these questions in initiating a dialogue between several recent novels from Germany’s literatures of migration and the indicated range of theoretical traditions (mindful of not short circuiting different contexts of historical trauma and political violence). In addition to Yaghoobifarah, I plan to draw on Dinçer Güçyeter’s Unser Deutschlandmärchen (2022) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum (2021). The talk will conceptualize their literary dreaming practices in the encounter of twentieth-century European models of literary dreaming with contemporary work in queer, Black, and indigenous theory.Non UBCUnreviewedFacult