This open access edited collection explores various aspects of how oceanic im/ mobilities have been framed and articulated in the literary and cultural imagination. It covers the entanglements of ...maritime mobility and immobility as they are articulated and problematized in selected literature and cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. In particular, it brings cultural mobility studies into conversation with the maritime and oceanic humanities. The contributors examine the interface between the traditional Eurocentric imagination of the sea as romantic and metaphorical, and the materiality of the sea as a deathbed for racialized and illegalized humans as well as non-human populations
This collection explores various aspects of how oceanic im/mobilities have been framed and articulated in English-speaking literary and cultural imaginaries. It covers the entanglements of maritime ...mobility and immobility as they are articulated and problematized in selected literature and cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. In particular, it brings cultural mobility studies into conversation with the maritime and oceanic humanities.
Dieser Band untersucht, wie ozeanische Mobilität und Immobilität in anglophonen literarischen und künstlerischen Texten verhandelt werden. Das Buch beschäftigt sich mit den verschiedenen Verknüpfungen maritimer (Im)mobilitäten in unterschiedlichen Fallstudien vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Die Beiträge bringen kulturwissenschaftliche Mobilitätsstudien mit dem Forschungsfeld der "blue humanities" aus unterschiedlichen Fächerperspektiven in einen Dialog.
The book traces the construction and function of the pirate in transatlantic American literature from the late 17th century to the Civil War, exploring in what ways the cultural imaginary teased out ...the pirate’s ambivalent potential as a figure of both identification and Othering, and how it has been used to negotiate ideas of legitimacy. The study recasts piracy as a discursive category moving in a continuum between the propagation of (post-)colonial adventure and accumulation on the one hand and critical commentary on exploitation and oppression on the other. Reading piracy narratives as symptomatic of various crisis scenarios in the US context, the book examines how the pirate was imbued with (de)legitimatory meaning during such periods in both elite and popular texts.
Die Studie zeichnet die Konstruktion und Funktion des Piraten in der transatlantisch-amerikanischen Erzählliteratur vom späten 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Sezessionskrieg nach und untersucht, wie das ambivalente Potential der Figur zwischen Identifikation und Alterisierung genutzt wurde, um Vorstellungen von Legitimität und Macht zur Verhandlung zu stellen. Das Buch begreift Piraterie als diskursive Kategorie im Kontinuum zwischen Propagierung (post-)kolonialen Abenteuers und Akkumulation einerseits und kritischem Kommentar zu Ausbeutung und Unterdrückung andererseits. Piratenerzählungen werden als symptomatisch im Kontext verschiedener kolonialer und nationaler Krisenszenarien verstanden, die u.a. Sklaverei, Geschlecht oder Identität zur Diskussion stellen.
Questioning the opposition of freedom and enslavement and of life and death, zombies and pirates have negotiated (post)colonial relations for centuries. Zombies, bodies or spirits doomed to serve a ...master beyond death, thematize histories of enslavement which also include rebellion. Similarly, pirates were used to articulate colonial adventure and exploitation on the one hand and the idea of a resistant collective beyond established power relations on the other. Both have been cast as figures of exception who are discursively located beyond law and state while simultaneously playing a constitutive role for both; both figures are marked by ambivalent characterizations - hero and criminal, rebel and slave, perpetrator and victim. This opening essay introduces the conjunctures of these figures in the Atlantic realm with a focus on their cultural-historical functions for empire and nation building, for legal discourses and the history of ideas, as well as for contemporary cultural and artistic research.
Reading Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf's canonical A Room of One's Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, ...has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women's road narratives. The study shows how women's literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque "open road", or, more generally, the "freedom of the road". Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it. The book analyzes stories about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnappees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatiality and mobility--debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn in the humanities. The analytical concept of transdifference is introduced to theorize the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the narrative tensions produced by such pluralities in order to better understand the textual worlds of women's multiple belongings as they are present in these writings. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and literary studies. Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey - Rosi Braidotti - Literary Studies - Spatial Turn - Gendered Space and Mobility - Nomadism - Road writing - Transdifference - American Culture - Popular Culture - Women's Literature after the Second Wave - Quest - Picara.
Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" (1855/56) is one of the best-studied texts both within Melville's oeuvre and nineteenth-century American literature in general. In recent decades, its ...puzzling structure and fragmented narrative perspective as well as its symbolism and themes have been subject to critical scrutiny mostly in the context of inquiries into the text's racial politics regarding the institution of slavery. More specifically, the canonical tale about a slave uprising on the ship San Dominick, its detection by a Massachusetts-born captain and its consequences, has been discussed in the context of Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic paradigm. Few readings of the tale consider the significance of the Pacific setting of a story grounded in the transatlantic slave trade but happening far away from the center of American slavery. Taking a fresh look at Melville's tale, this essay focuses on its translation of (black) Atlantic subject matters and epistemologies onto the Pacific. Not only do I read the tale as both an Atlantic and a Pacific text, demonstrating that the institution of slavery and its specters know no geographical borders in Melville's imagination; I also argue that piracy is an important trope in this context. Anticipating the shift of piracy cases and slavery to the Pacific towards the end of the nineteenth century, it both recalls a black Atlantic and predicts a bleak Pacific of violent imperial scenarios that would come to characterize US-Pacific relations.
Transgressive Television Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser, Nicole Poppenhagen
2015, Letnik:
264
eBook
Since the turn of the 21st century, the landscape of television has decisively changed. Whereas seriality had been part and parcel of television entertainment since the 1940s, the past two decades ...have witnessed the rise of new technologies and increasingly "complex and elaborate forms" (Jason Mittell), with HBO and Netflix playing leading roles. Particularly in its manifold transgressions of political, social, and ethical boundaries, the contemporary American TV serial serves as both a laboratory for and diagnostic platform of current epistemes and ideological codes.In fifteen interdisciplinary perspectives from the United States and Europe, this volume provides a critical diagnosis of the genre's politics of gender and ethnicity, difference, normativity and representational control. Contesting the popular term "quality TV, " 'Transgressive Television' provides original work on TV series as diverse as 'Twin Peaks', 'The Sopranos', 'Breaking Bad', 'The Wire', 'House of Cards', 'Homeland', and many others.
Starting from the fact that the International Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other ...Celestial Bodies/UNOOSA, 1967) has been modeled on international laws of the seas, this essay investigates the epistemic consequences of conceiving outer space archipelagically, or, more specifically and following Craig Santos Perez, terripelagically. By reversing center/periphery structurations in line with both archipelagic approaches to and philosophical theorizations of outer space by Jacques Lacan and Hannah Arendt, the article critiques the current discursive transformation in both science and popular culture of celestial bodies into desirable territories of capitalization, exploitation, and imperialism, and it suggests the term astropelago as an alternative conception. We argue that as a continuation of imperial exploratory mobilities, terripelagic outer space projections, which are becoming increasingly real, demonstrate the need for an outside of capitalism on ever new frontiers to continue ecological—human and nonhuman—exploitation on Earth. In a second part, we explore the initiative “For All Moonkind” and the TV series For All Mankind and the ways in which they center Mars and Earth’s moon respectively as spaces that reaffirm and renew imperial desires.
In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, Annette Kolodny asserts that women's literature claimed the West "as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity" ...(xii) rather than imagining the "massive exploitation and alteration of the continent" (xiii). Kolodny cites Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? (1839) as a key example of how women's narratives imagined the triumph of domesticity in the 'wilderness.' This essay argues that Kirkland articulates mobility—understood as "socially produced motion" (Cresswell 3) according to the "new mobilities" (Urry) paradigm proposed by recent work in cultural geography—as a basis for transformed notions of both home and the natural environment. Analyzing its environmental imagination, I explore how A New Home, on the one hand, casts migration as fundamental for a sensitized perception of the environment that challenges patriarchal notions of subduing the land as much as traditional ideas of domesticity. Kirkland undermines the conceptual binary between movement and domesticity in ways that question the environmental implications of both. At the same time, her western "removal" obscures the simultaneous removal of Native Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, erasing the 'Indian' not only from 'civilization,' but also from 'natural' American landscapes. The article discusses the environmental implications of a pioneer woman's account of the frontier as fundamentally tied to effects of migration and relocation.
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