The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Narrative der Krise
No full textProceeding from the insights about crisis as a metaphor and particular kind of cultural narrative delineated in the introduction to this special issue, this essay examines the competing narratives that have emerged in the wake of the crises generated by the Corona-virus pandemic and the Covid-19 illness. It argues that crisis narratives in general and the particular stories that have been disseminated to report on and explain the ongoing Corona crisis always consist of both a diagnosis of the present state of affairs in a society and an attempt to project scenarios of possible futures. The first section introduces the ongoing battle between competing narratives and the concomitant question of whether the Coronavirus pandemic qualifies as a ‘Black Swan’ (sensu Nassim Nicholas Taleb), i. e. the kind of highly improbable event that causes massive consequences. Taking its cue from the question „Crisis compared to what?“ posed by the anthropologist Janet Roitman, section 2 explores the relation between crisis narratives, the diagnoses of the present that they entail, and the underlying norms and values of such judgments about crises. Section 3 then examines the implications of the most salient competing narratives that have been disseminated about the Coronavirus pandemic and the Covid-19 crises. In section 4, we make an attempt to clarify what kind of crisis we are currently witnessing, asking whether the latter can be understood as a catalyst of a cluster or series of different crises, as a ‘deep crisis’ with various dimensions and layers, and as a ‘patchwork pandemic’. In section 5 we turn our attention to the contagious nature of narratives in general and competing stories surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic in particular, arguing that they constitute more than just an ‘infodemic’ in that they amount to nothing less than an epistemological and normative crisis. The essay concludes by exploring the underlying big questions that crisis narratives of the pandemic as critiques of non-sustainable forms of life raise and that the scenarios of possible futures they project inevitably entail, i. e. how do we want to live and how do we want to live together? The question mark at the end of the subtitle of this essay serves to indicate that any answer to the big questions raised by the pandemic and the current proliferation of crises narratives revolving around it will at this stage necessarily have to be provisional and tentative
The Janus Face of Inflation Targeting: How Governing Market Expectations of the Future Imprisons Monetary Policy in a Normalized Present
No full textModern ‘inflation targeting’ is widely praised as having achieved a level of technical sophistication and efficacy unprecedented by previous modes of monetary policy. Building on the Rational Expectation Hypothesis, it is premised on the idea that it is possible to influence future outcomes (inflation) by shaping and conducting
economic expectations in the present. Monetary authorities thus rely on the structure of market expectations as the medium that transmits their intended policy into the future, allowing them to focus on fine-tuning the ‘communicability’ (credibility and transparency) of their signals. However, even among practitioners the precise nature and functioning of this inter-temporal link remains contested, despite its seeming effectiveness and the lack of a practical alternative. In this chapter, I want to deploy some concepts and analytics from a recent literature in sociology and
anthropology on the coordination of social futures to query the link between present and future on which inflation targeting is premised. My objective is to uncover the social and organizational preconditions of this form of economic temporality, in order to better understand what limitations they place on central banks’ ability to ‘govern the future’. To this end, I look at the so-called Volcker experiment in which the fundamental procedures for governing the future were developed – although their significance only became clear later. The gist of my argument is that the consensus view of ‘modern’ monetary policy insufficiently distinguishes between the present future (the future as it is imagined and projected from the present) and the future present (as it materializes at a later point in time). Inflation targeting rests
on procedures which set up what, sociologically speaking, amounts to a tightly integrated and formalized ‘interaction order’ between central bank and financial markets. This interaction order enables a fine-tuning of expectational reactions by markets to policy signals – but at the price of decoupling monetary policy from the economic structures required for securing a congruence between present future and future present.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7142
The Aging Queer Body
No full textDue to discriminatory patriarchal belief systems, American society prizes youthfulness and celebrates an idealistic, yet virtually unattainable image of the human body. Such beliefs profoundly inform conceptualizations of aging in American society. In addition to a double standard of aging pertaining to sexist ideology that exposes elderly women to particular social sanctions, I seek to explore how individuals of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities experience a distinct kind of vulnerability stemming from the relationship between their aging bodies and heteronormative power structures. More precisely, this article looks at Stu Maddux’s documentary Gen Silent (2011) to argue for the necessity of a discourse on aging bodies that includes people of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities and thus demands a queering of normative assumptions about aging in general
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s ‘New Hollander’
No full textThe colonisation of Australia, at the end of the eighteenth century, coincided with the birth of (physical) anthropology. In Germany, it was the Enlightenment naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who began to utilise human skulls as scientific evidence for his hypotheses on human diversity and origin. He assigned selected skulls to be representative of each of his five human ‘varieties’. Due to this very fact, Blumenbach’s own historiographical representation is ambiguous – he has been depicted as both the forerunner of race sciences that were to follow in the 1900s and the humanist and universalist defender of human unity and universal value in the times of slavery. This article discusses how Blumenbach throughout his writing on humanity incorporated his notion of Indigenous Australians. In 1775, he outlined a sequence of human skulls, including those of ‘New Hollanders’, long before he began to assemble his (in)famous skull collection. Roughly fifteen years later, he obtained the skulls of two Indigenous Australian men which then represented the ‘black race’ of his diversified South Pacific ‘Malay variety’. The ‘Neuholländer’ in Blumenbach’s work, arguably, also reflects the tension inherent in his aim to scientifically prove humanity’s unity on the basis of its diversity
The Changing Image of Amalie Dietrich
No full textIn the context of her bicentenary in 2021, Amalie Dietrich will again be celebrated as a feminist paragon or condemned as a racist culprit. Her stay in Australia will be central to these contrasting approaches to her biography. There, she gathered a remarkable amount of native plants, animals, ethnological everyday objects – and human remains. In this context, she was subjected to suspicions of incitement in murder early on and to allegedly critical investigations concerning her role in the anthropological desecration of corpses in recent times. In this paper, we contribute some arguments to the clarification of this controversial subject. It focuses on the treatment of image of Amalie Dietrich in the German discourse from the Kaiserreich via the Weimar Republic, the fascist ‘Reich’, the Federal Republic as well as the Democratic Republic to reunited Germany. As a result, we argue that a critical biography of Amalie Dietrich must integrate the appreciation of her contribution to botany and zoology with a critique of her role in the racist history of anthropological grave robbery and desecration of human remains
Hungry franchises and the adaptation industry
No full textWhile entertainment franchises are usually not associated with engaging in adaptive work in the traditional sense of the term, the sheer necessity of creating new material for serialised properties makes adaptive work a necessity. Frequently, franchises will absorb other material, an aspect that has so far been neglected in studies of what Simone Murray calls the ‘adaptation industry’. This article discusses two entertainment properties that made a habit of lapping up cinematic trends and other properties in order to feed their appetite as ‘hungry franchises’: the Thin Man series (1934‐47) and the Pink Panther films (1963‐2009). They exhibit similar adaptive strategies to reconcile contemporary audience expectations and industrial trends with their needs as profitable studio properties. In the process, they also show somewhat Frankenstein-like tendencies towards monstrosity, eventually turning against their own creators
Critical Political Economy and Local Cinema: An Introduction
No full textCinema is an influential form of storytelling that depends on myths, capital and technology to perform sense-making and reality-building functions. In this chapter, I argue that local cinema is both important and vulnerable. As ideology is an inherent part of cinematic reality, local cinema is an important form of storytelling because it depends on and narratively reproduces myths and ideologies significantly different from and often antagonistic to those of global and national cinema. Compared to these, however, local cinema is a vulnerable form of storytelling because it cannot rely on an established apparatus and its narratives are often disruptive of established myths. While globalization and digitalization foster the commercial competitiveness of global and national cinema and the visibility of their ‘realities’, local cinema faces ‘market censorship’ and the risk of a market-
driven extinction. A critical political economy of local cinema is an analytical approach that can help analysts, practitioners and educators to appreciate and support local cinema. At the end of this chapter, I present the main features of this approach and the contributions of the essays in this volume.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7023
