The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
Not a member yet
3117 research outputs found
Sort by
Queere Maschinen und das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Manifest und Manifestor*in
No full textAusgehend von der Beobachtung, dass in den letzten Jahren Manifeste Konjunktur haben, die das Potenzial von Technologie und künstlicher Intelligenz für queere und feministische Theoriebildung und Aktivismus thematisieren, diskutiert Carsten Junker die Diskrepanz zwischen den disruptiven Agenden ausgewählter Manifeste und dem wiederholten Mobilisieren von Genrekonventionen. Junker arbeitet einen Widerspruch heraus, der aus dem wiederholten Gebrauch des Genres resultiert: Während Autor*innen die Form nutzen, um Neues zu postulieren und zur Disruption aufzurufen - und damit das Manifest formal und inhaltlich aktualisieren - wird das kritische Potenzial des Manifests durch seine iterative und zitathafte Verwendung zugleich untergraben
World Fairs as a Transnational Series
No full textThis chapter examines the second world fair, the New York Crystal Palace of 1853 and 1854, as an important example for the formation of a specifically “modern” as well as “American” popular culture and argues that world fairs should be read as a serial cultural form. On the surface, the exhibition was an obviously derivative transposition of the first world fair at London’s Crystal Palace. But the American version also introduced significant innovations to the form, such as the establishment of a private, republican, and capitalist rather than royal enterprise or the explicit inclusion of popular entertainment – thus contributing to a nationalist agenda that sought to define Americanness in an ambivalent dialectic between distinction from and reliance upon European cultural forms. Due to this productive ambivalence, the New York Crystal Palace was a crucial instance in the establishment of the transnational, popular, and above all serial form of cultural self-fashioning that is the world fair. It consolidated and exemplified a cosmopolitan series whose respective instances asserted national specificity at the same time that they linked their national (ist) agendas to transnational modernity
Justice and Community, Ancient and Modern
No full textThat great byproduct of the scientific enterprise, technology, has opened the way to what we know as globalization, making it easy to abandon thereby the age-old question of what size community is best for the human being and for justice, a question reflected in what Aristotle had to say about the merits (as well as, perhaps, about the limitations) of the polis. Does the opening to globalization mean that we can no longer believe that we can (or even should) ever again control our lives by shaping the communities in which we live? This essay explores this issue drawing for inspiration upon a variety of literary texts, ancient and modern, including works by Shakespeare, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Aeschylus
Wake Up, Mario
No full textAbout the Poem
On April 19, 2021, Mario González died after being restrained by Alameda, California police. González was intoxicated, yet unarmed and nonthreatening; officers pinned him face down for approximately five minutes, weight on his back, till he became unresponsive. This police homicide occurred on the same day deliberations began in the Derek Chauvin trial. Lawyers for the family have now filed a wrongful death claim against the city of Alameda. A friend connected to the case contributed first-hand knowledge to the poem. The poem is also based on review of the police body cam video. González left behind a young son and an autistic brother.
About the Author
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed(2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican- American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. http://www.martinespada.net
From Dancing Bodies to Human-Animal Relations in Art, Anthropology, and American Studies
No full textJane C. Desmond is an eminent scholar, engaged public intellectual, former choreographer, and specialist in performance studies, human-animal studies, and transnational studies of the United States. A professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she also heads The Animal Studies Initiative at Illinois and serves as affiliate faculty in veterinary medicine and the Department of Dance. Throughout her career, she has been active in initiating transdisciplinary conversations with scholars and students around the world. She has held faculty appointments at Cornell University, Duke University, the University of Iowa and visiting professorships and fellowships at a number of universities abroad, including Budapest, Beijing, Edinburgh, and currently she is a Fulbright Professor at the University of Göttingen. The idea of this interview is to see how her fascinating career evolved through different stages—from being a dancer to an extremely versatile intellectual and thinker, who has done work in very different, yet related fields: choreography and performance studies, film and video, critical theory and Cultural Studies, American Studies and Anthropology, and, more recently, in the transdisciplinary field of Animal Studies, where, in her writing and teaching, she explores human-animal relationships in the context of veterinary medicine, practices of mourning, in zoos and natural history museums, and "on the margins of death"—in pet cemeteries, as taxidermy and roadkill—as well as diverse forms of nonhuman creativity, communication, and coexistence with human animals
Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction
No full textThis essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints.
My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes.
The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others.
My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale.
Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-selling non-fiction books: Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. Weisman’s The World Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People, Scranton’s We’re Doomed, Now What? Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, Rich’s Losing Earth and others. Academic books by Nixon, Scranton, Ghosh, Purdy, McClintock, and others
Ode to Shamash, or on The Problem of Absolutism in the Case of the Law
No full texta poem by James Dowthwait
Music, Country, and Migration
No full textThe UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) is a good opportunity for shining a light on language endangerment in Australia. In this paper, I argue that many causes of endangerment can be traced back to a relocation of speakers of Indigenous languages from their traditional land. A case in point is the endangered language Miriwoong. The analysis of a case study with the Miriwoong people will demonstrate that both their traditional educational practices and several current revitalisation projects rely on access to traditional Country. Miriwoong is no longer transmitted in natural contexts, i.e. it is not spoken and learned in the family home. Thus, in order to achieve the goal of countering endangerment, the community needs the support that Australian governments can provide via the mainstream education system. For such projects to be effective, self-determination needs to be part of any policies concerning formal education. This ensures that traditional beliefs and practices, such as teaching ‘on Country’, can be properly incorporated