Journal Service - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Not a member yet
1022 research outputs found
Sort by
Ceremony and sentient ecology
No full textMany cultures use songs to influence the world around them (e.g. Levin 2006, Feld 1982). In Australian Aboriginal societies, song can be a tool to influence one’s environment. Such practices can affect the physical world—people, animals, plants— and the non-physical world, where spirit beings reside, a realm referred to as the Altyerre in Arandic languages of central Australia (Dobson 2007, Turner 2010, Wallace & Lovell 2009, Green 2012). Like the Tuvan people of Siberia who use singing and other verbal practices “to coexist peacefully with these spirit-masters and gain access to the resources under their control” (Levin 2006:28), many Indigenous Australians engage in ceremonial and other vocal practices to influence their world. In this article we explore song as a means to experience sentient ecology in two contrasting Aboriginal Australian contexts. In doing so, this contribution invites us to consider more broadly the role of humanly created sound in society
The American Ghoul – Race in the Fallout Games in the Context of US Race Relations
No full textThis essay explores how the Fallout game series reimagines the zombie through its figure of the ghoul, questioning its role as a mirror of American racial politics. Unlike the generic video game zombie, which many titles use as a ubiquitous antagonist, Fallout’s ghoul foregrounds ongoing processes of racialization and de-racialization, showing how play, history, race, science fiction, and monstrosity intersect. Drawing on the cultural genealogy of zombie figures, the analysis details how the ghoul’s uncanny status as posthuman and monstrous Other invites players into affective and ethical entanglements that may reveal the persistence of racial antagonisms. While encounters with ghouls tend to expose the racist basis of xenophobia and anti-ghoul bigotry in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the later titles increasingly downplay or erase these dimensions. By tracing how ghouls oscillate between individualized voices and faceless hordes, the essay shows how game design mirrors larger cultural struggles to confront or suppress race. Situating Fallout’s shifting portrayals against the backdrop of US race relations, ranging from the Bush era’s War on Terror to Trump’s populist xenophobia, it reads the figure as a contested and complex site for America’s haunted racial unconscious
Frank Ocean’s Silent Aesthetic
No full textThis article contends that silence plays a central role in Frank Ocean’s musical aesthetic. Arguing that the increased use of silence across his body of work comes about in response to his becoming a celebrity musician in our media-soaked 21 st century, the piece uses his 2016 album Blonde as a case study to examine Ocean’s silences as key events in a “situated aesthetics” (Manzotti; see also Born, Lewis and Straw), heavily dependent on the musical material and the media contexts in which they occur. Drawing on P. David Marshall’s definition of the early 21 st century as the age of “public intimacy,” the article analyses Ocean’s music in the light of selected musical precursors and contemporaries (from John Cage to Beyoncé) in order to better understand his uses of silence: to protect his private life from the media, to control his public image in dealings with the music industry, and to draw his listeners in when creating music, both in the studio and during Ocean’s increasingly rare live performances
The Intertextual Aesthetics of Contemporary Art Manifestos: Self-Referentiality, Meta-Reflection, and Parody in Martine Syms’s “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2014, 2015) and Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto (2015, 2017)
No full textFollowing a period of decline into near obscurity, the manifesto has reemerged in the 21st century as a popular and provocative cultural form. No longer confined to printed pamphlets, contemporary manifestos are often published online, enabling new modes of anonymity, inclusivity, and intertextual engagement. While their tone may range from earnest to ironic, all manifestos share a defining impulse: the mobilization of a collective “we” to challenge dominant structures through bold, declarative rhetoric. In contemporary practice, however, this rhetoric is frequently accompanied by a self-conscious aesthetic—one that reflects on the manifesto’s own conventions, cultural authority, and historical legacy. This essay examines two key manifestos that exemplify such aesthetic strategies: Julian Rosefeldt’s theatrically bombastic art installation and feature film Manifesto (2015, 2017) and Martine Syms’s satirical “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2014, 2015). These works show how contemporary manifestos are deeply self-aware, using intertextuality, meta-reflection, and parody to engage with and critique their own form. Through intertextual dialogue, they expose the manifesto’s limitations; meta-reflection allows them to question their rhetorical excesses and effectiveness, while parody exposes and subverts established conventions. Where Syms deconstructs the manifesto from within—quietly undermining its radical posture through irony and restraint—Rosefeldt approaches the genre through theatrical excess. Alongside digital applications like the “Manifesto Machine” and the card game MANIFESTO!, these works invite playful engagement while also revealing how easily the genre’s once-revolutionary rhetoric can be modularized, rebranded, and repurposed
Poems by David Lehman: Frost at Midnight; Negative Capability; Bloomsday
No full textThree poems by David Lehma
To Cut Up Nightingales: What Makes an American Classicist?
No full textIf the American “classic” is involved in the dynamic of canons, value, and style, then what is the role of Classics as a field, and of the professional classicist? I argue that with the emergence of the professional classicist came significant anxiety, particularly regarding the transformative and unsettling consequences of specialist research. By discussing ostensibly established classicists like Basil Gildersleeve or Paul Shorey alongside Helen Magill, the first American woman to receive a PhD in Classics, I aim to destabilize the center of what establishment may or may not have meant in light of a shared, unsettled preoccupation with what a professional approach to a canon and a classic could be and ought to be
Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt: A Conversation with Professor Willard Spiegelman
No full textIn recent years, Professor Willard Spiegelman has devoted himself to one American poet above others, Iowa-born Amy Clampitt (1920–1994), whom Spiegelman knew personally and whose correspondence he edited in 2005 for a volume of selected letters, Love, Amy. In our conversation, we discussed his recent biography of the poet, Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (2023), the cumulation of many years spent engaging with her five extant poetry collections and his efforts to piece together biographical fragments from remaining archival materials in order to compile a narrative of her life. Tracing her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, her childhood in Iowa and early adult life in Manhattan, his biography narrates the surprise appearance of The Kingfisher, Clampitt’s first book of poems, published by Knopf in 1983 when she was sixty-three. All but overnight, Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, winning Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, accepting prestigious writer positions at Amherst and Smith, and endearing herself to critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler for a whirlwind eleven years before a premature death from ovarian cancer in 1994
Rechtsprechungsübersicht Öffentliches Recht
No full textRechtsprechungsübersicht Öffentliches Recht 1/202
The (Self-)Isolation of the Russian Academic Legal Community: A Case Study of Research Into Military Interventions for Humanitarian Purposes
No full textThis article explores the phenomenon of the Russian academic legal community’s isolation. It particularly focuses on the parts of the community conducting their research in international law and military interventions for humanitarian purposes. A quadrifactorial explanation for this isolation is proposed: domestic legal acts, the government’s educational policy, insufficient knowledge of foreign languages, and cultural and political beliefs impact the way Russian jurists perceive the international legal system as well as endow their writing with an excessive focus on theory of international law and peripheral issues. Additionally, these four factors reconcile the Russian academic legal community’s critical attitude toward the concept of military interventions for humanitarian purposes in general, condemnation of specific foreign interventions, and praise for Russian interventions. This article also argues that the Russian academic legal community perceives military intervention for humanitarian purposes as a two-tier threat: a political threat to the Russian Federation on one hand, and an epistemic threat questioning the validity of their largely theoretical knowledge on the other. Finally, the article argues that the Russian academic legal community’s perception of being threatened by military interventions for humanitarian purposes and its isolation are mutually enhancing
