During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the Whore of Babylon. Out of this reputation ...for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette , Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.”
Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte ( Kokotte ), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette ), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.
Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center ...populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the "New Berlin" is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany's largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.
Gaining Freedoms reveals a new locus for global political change: everyday urban contestation. Cities are often assumed hotbeds of socio-economic division, but this assessment overlooks the ...importance of urban space and the everyday activities of urban life for empowerment, emancipation, and democratization. Through proximity, neighborhoods, streets, and squares can create unconventional power contestations over lifestyle and consumption. And through struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, competing claims across groups can become platforms to defend freedom and rights from government encroachments.Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork in three contested urban sites—a downtown neighborhood and a university campus in Istanbul, and a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin—Berna Turam shows how democratic contestation echoes through urban space. Countering common assumptions that Turkey is strongly polarized between Islamists and secularists, she illustrates how contested urban space encourages creative politics, the kind of politics that advance rights, expression, and representation shared between pious and secular groups. Exceptional moments of protest, like the recent Gezi protests which bookend this study, offer clear external signs of upheaval and disruption, but it is the everyday contestation and interaction that forge alliances and inspire change. Ultimately, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of conflict.
Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to ...traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.
This book brings the Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) into a new critical spotlight by examining the author's poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu. Gökberk ...contextualizes these posthumously published pieces in an approach informed by studies on memory, identity, place, and remembering as literary representation.
"Between 1941 and 1945, some 6,500 Berlin Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the capital of Nazi Germany. The ...experience was brutally difficult, and most did not survive. Yet the experiences of 1,700 who did demonstrate a remarkable and hitherto unconsidered level of agency among the survivors. This book sheds light on the daily life of those who hid and on the city that was both the source of their persecution and the site of their survival. "
Wie hat sich die Berliner Stadtlandschaft im Laufe der Verwandlung von einer geteilten Stadt zur Kreativmetropole verandert? Trotz des gewaltigen Erbes und groer Entwicklungsprojekte ruft Berlin ...immer noch Bilder von Lucken und innerstadtischer Brachen hervor. Das Buch macht die leicht veranderlichen und komplexen politischen Zusammenhange dieser unbestimmten Orte deutlich. Fotografien von Orten aus den Jahren 2001 und 2016 zeigen, wie aus Niemandsland neue Wohnbauten und wie aus Untergrundtreffpunkten Geschaftszentren geworden sind. Sie zeigen aber auch verbliebene Nischen unerwarteter Wildnis und Freiheit. Die begleitenden Texte renommierter Urbanisten untersuchen diese wichtigen und oft stillen Reserven und fordern dazu auf unseren Einsatz fur die Zukunft der Stadt zu hinterfragen.
In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and ...classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.
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