Habil and PhD Candidates- Prof. Raussert

Re-Negotiating Blackness in the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Practices, Actors and Networks (AT). Bielefeld.

Susana Rocha ist Inhaberin eines Brückenstipendiums.

(Re-)negotiating ‘Home’ in 21st-Century Caribbean Diaspora Writing: Canada and the US

The 21st-century world is characterized by extreme inequalities, considerable levels of interconnectivity and mobility, mass migrations, global capitalism, and (neo-)colonial practices. Though these processes are not new, particularly when we direct our gaze towards the histories of the Americas, it seems as though questions of belonging and ‘home’ have become particularly pressing in the present. This transdisciplinary research endeavor takes recent explorations in the often overlapping fields of diaspora studies, (transnational) migration studies, postcolonial studies, inter-American studies, literary and cultural studies, social and human geography, and globalization studies as a starting point and critical framework for the investigation and (re-)negotiation of ‘home’ in a carefully selected corpus of 21st-century Anglophone fiction and non-fiction writing by Caribbean writers who reside in the United States or Canada. Central to this investigation will be the interrelated questions of how actors of the Caribbean diaspora mobilize and perform their inherited and/or constructed complex and frequently contradictory locations and positionings to challenge and (re-)negotiate ideas and (pre-)conceptions of ‘home’ and how such processes are materialized in writing through the experiences of literary characters. In this way, the project aspires to the elaboration of innovative insights in regard to questions of ‘home’ and its (re-)negotiation in such literary texts and beyond. Further objectives include the critical assessment and development of migration- and diaspora-related terminologies as well as paradigms of translocation and translocational positionality (Anthias 2012), which serve to conceptualize and (re-)imagine the complex positionings of the (Caribbean) diasporic subject. Moreover, the project explores the Caribbean, Canada, and the US as migrant locations, the challenges and opportunities that arise from such agglomerations of heterogeneity, as well as the individual and collective experiences that take place in, in-between, and across these locations. It conceives the Caribbean, Canada, and the US as geopolitically and historically differentiated, as well as inherently complex, separate, and connected. It thus critically challenges and ventures beyond a reductive North-South (center-periphery) divide and instead enters into a dialogue of multiple relations.

Alterity and Road Movies in the Americas (AT).

This research takes into account the powerful agency of the road-movie films as representations of other realities, which directly challenge the culture of conformity and which focus on those who are not only different but even marginal, portraying the most victimized social groups in the western patriarchal system as their main characters and thus becoming resistance narratives. Given that the road-movie is a "fluid and open-ended genre which uses the narrative trajectory of road as an extended metaphor of quest and discovery through which to approach fundamental concepts of identity” (Everett, 2004), the exponential increase in the production of road-movie films in the Americas for the last two decades proves a new preoccupation with identity and alterity issues in the region. This film genre’s current relevance is also explained by “the importance of spatial mobility and the presence of mobilized identities in the search for roots among many routes, (…) in times of heightened migration and globalization" in the Americas (Raussert and Martínez-Zalce 2012). The dissertation focuses on the main characters of recent road-movie films from North-America, the Caribbean, Central and South America, who are characterized by their marginality and disempowerment and who, nonetheless, embark into voluntary journeys, pursuing goals and dreams that would be customarily denied to them. By analyzing such films, the thesis aims to reflect on how the Indigenous, the Black, the LGBT, the old and sick, the disadvantaged female, the young and vulnerable, and the extremely poor are capable to use their geographical and cultural displacement as a means of self-discovery, demonstrating a claim for self-agency and an endurance to resist a status quo that pretends to confine them in the ignominy. Furthermore, these films reveal unknown geographic inlands to their own local and regional audiences, thus influencing new representations of the reality and history of the continent, while the audience assists, simultaneously, to the internal journeys of the characters in movement, a journey in which the re-discovery of the other through the travel and intercultural interaction becomes an important part of the inner metamorphosis.
 

Mental Illness as Cultural Narrative: Contemporary Literature from the Contact Zones between the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean (AT).

De e lo invisible a patrimonial: Tradición oral del Pacífico Colombiano 2019

“Performed Invisibility — Asexual Representations in US Film and TV and Streaming Series Between 1970 and 2020”

This research project maps out changes in the aesthetic and narrative constructions of asexuality in U.S. American films and TV and streaming series between 1970 and 2020. It takes two events as signposts in the development of asexuality as a concept: first, the wider acknowledgement of asexuality as a phenomenon in the 1970s, indicated by an increase of research and publications on asexuality such as Lisa Orlando’s “Asexual Manifesto” (1972); and second, the establishment of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) in 2001.

To shed light on the development of asexual representations, this project analyzes asexual aesthetics and narrative constructions. While research on asexuality has taken various forms and not one but several studies have measured and quantified asexuality by analyzing the “relationship characteristics, frequency of sexual behaviors, sexual difficulties and distress, psychopathology, [and] interpersonal functioning” of asexual individuals (Brotto et al. 599), this dissertation does not seek to quantify asexuality by defining it, but rather to determine the functions of certain narratives and representations of asexuality in a particular cultural framework of sexual orientations, gender(ed) performances and identity constructions.

This research draws attention to the development in representations of asexuality in U.S. films and TV and streaming series from diverse forms of asexual lifestyles and features to a more rigid, normative, naturalizing representation and narrative constructions of asexuality as an identity category. While this can be read as a form of strategic essentialism or as a contingent foundation in the attempt to ensure wider acknowledgement of asexuality as a sexuality proper, it can also be understood as a hegemonic practice that incorporates asexuality into existing heteronormative narratives of sexuality, identity, reproduction, and productivity. By outlining asexual aesthetics and identifying their touchpoints to aesthetics of negativity, as well as reoccurring patterns in the narrative construction of asexuality, the project investigates the power dynamics and hegemonic techniques involved in the negotiation of signifying processes of asexuality on screen.

Who decides? I do! Not…
Exploring ‘Translocational’ Belonging in Life Narratives connecting North America and the Dutch Caribbean
My research project explores ‘translocational’ belonging (Anthias 2008, 2009, 2012, 2016) in life narratives of transnational and transcultural mobility between North America and the Dutch-Caribbean. For this project I have selected contemporary authors from Canada and the USA who have lived in or travelled to Suriname, and authors from the Dutch Caribbean (Curacao, St. Maarten, and Suriname) who have lived in the USA. The writings include travel tales and journals, biographies, and collections of poems.
According to Anthias, multiple identities co-exist within one person, related to social categories such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as to profession, stage in the lifecycle, political beliefs, religion, and values. The concept of ‘social locations’ sees these categories in relation to constructed social stratification systems that shift in time and space. Anthias claims that narratives of ‘translocational’ belonging aid in making sense of the inter-related social places people inhabit, and the subsequent contradictions and symmetries of power.
When researching mobility across the Americas and its resulting interconnected networks and collaborations, one explores not only the productive aspects, but also the unequal power relations and practices of control and exclusiveness (Graham and Raussert 2016). Thus, questions I pose include: How is (un)belonging experienced through formal and informal networks? What are the affective aspects? How, and by whom are acts of inclusion and exclusion performed and experienced? Analyzing differences and similarities in the selected life narratives, I aim with this project to contribute to the discussion on identity, belonging and transculturation in the Americas in a Dutch Caribbean context.

Doctoral Thesis

Facing the Unknown ̶ Fictional Representations of Sharks after 1950

Haie als das scheinbar absolut »Andere« zum Menschen im Sinne Derridas sind Stoff zahlreicher Fiktionen vor und nach Spielbergs »JAWS« sind insbesondere Großhaie (pop-)kulturell kaum mehr wegzudenken. Die Doktorarbeit setzt sich transmedial mit Darstellungsformen von Haien auseinander, wobei insbesondere den Fragen nach Stereotypmustern und möglichen semantischen oder ästhetischen Veränderungsansätzen in jüngeren fiktiven Werken nachgegangen wird. Verortet im Feld der Human Animal Studies soll, mit Blick auf so unterschiedliche Sektoren wie Horrorfiktion, Kunst oder Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, das Bild des Haies samt seinen realweltlichen Auswirkungen beleuchtet werden. - Sharks as the absolute »other« in Derrida's sense are the frequent fishes in popculture, especially since Benchley's and Spielberg's »JAWS« . As popcultural icons and endangered species, many large pelagic sharks are omnipresent in global media productions. This project is looking for semantic and aesthetic patterns to explain and analyze stereotypes and also changes in the representation of fictional sharks, linking them to the real-life animals. Part of the Human Animal Studies field, this thesis includes different genre examples such as Horror fiction, modern and postmodern art and children's literature in order to prove real-life repercussions of these cultural animal narratives.
 

Tabea Weber ist Inhaberin eines Brückenstipendiums.

 

Dr. Brian Rozema

Representing the Hawaiian ‘Local’ across Genres:  A Sociolinguistic Analysis of ‘Pidgin’ Usage from ‘Haole’wood to Honolulu.

Hawaiian Creole English or Pidgin as it is termed by its speaker community on the Hawaiian Islands is one of the many homegrown languages of the United States that tends not to receive much attention in the mainstream media. When the variety is showcased for the English-speaking American public, the message tends overwhelmingly to be one that is negatively nuanced by standard language ideology, discussed in the news media on the meta-linguistic level (e.g. the language variety is blamed for poor test results in schools on Hawai'i) or is portrayed stereotypically as the language of aggressive or unintelligent residents of the islands (e.g. antagonists or comic relief in Hollywood film).

The research in this project seeks to shed light on what Pidgin is and does beyond these particular and prevalent outsider perspectives. Specifically, this paper explores how Pidgin is used across literary genres by Pidgin speakers themselves to create a cultural space for the Pidgin language community both on the islands and in the diaspora. On a fundamental level, this usage challenges standard language ideology in the United States by right of its existence and resists the "colonial matrix of power" at the level of language while simultaneously inviting non-Locals to participate and educate themselves as readers, viewers and listeners.

“Imaginarien des Bösen. Narrationen und Narrative räumlicher Vorstellungen des Bösen in hispanoamerikanischer Literatur der Moderne." (with Kirsten Kramer)

 

Doctoral Thesis

The Cuban Post-Socialist Exotic: Contemporary US-American Travel Narratives about Cuba

Travel writing is more than the simple account of a journey. It is a political act. There is an entire market of travel books about Cuba that emerged in the 1990s in the United States, which subscribe to a long tradition of narratives serving as a space of pro­jection for U.S. political fantasies. The stories that take shape as an outcome of those journeys are an intri­cate maze of perspectives and personal impressions, which translate history and politics with a considerable dose of sentimentality. Using an interdisciplinary approach anchored in the field of Inter-American Studies, this thesis investigates the relation between the Cuban cultural imaginary and U.S. American exceptionalism in a series of travel narratives to the island that reveal Cuba as the Carib­bean locus of a post-socialist exotic. The general purpose of this project is to raise awareness of the othering discourses at work in travel writing that foster hidden political agendas, and which may easily be overlooked when reading travel literature for leisure. In reality, the cultural labels endorsed by travel writing shape our expectations, our interpersonal relations, and the way we see the world.

Doctoral Thesis

(Re-)framing Testimonio:
Multimedia Narratives of Undocumented Youth in the United States

This project explores multimedia narratives of undocumented students. Living 'illegally' in the United States since they were little children, many undocumented students did not only grow up in the United States but also cannot imagine returning to their country of birth as they have inhabited U.S. American values and norms. New Media, in particular, are being used by these youths to form a new, student-led immigrant rights movement that pushes the debate forward in favor of thousands of their peers who face daily struggles due to their undocumented status. A major question of this project is how autobiographical narratives of these youths illustrate a central move in the fight for immigrant rights, in youth activism and the civil engagement of undocumented students. In these narratives, issues that arise due to the undocumented status are connected to family and community, as well as ethnic identity, gender, and mental health. Applying selected methods from literary, media, and postcolonial studies, one can discover thematic structures, narrative strategies, and a political message in all of the chosen forms of media, yet, in a different manner. This leads to the question how the narratives correspond to, or change traditional paradigms of postcolonial literature. With regard to the latter question, this project contemplates a possible re-formation of the traditional Latin American genre of 'testimonio' for the purposes of today's young generations, arguing for a shift towards the 'digital testimonio' that Rina Benmayor suggests.

Doctoral Thesis

Projektskizze "Toward Diversity and Emancipation: (Re-)Narrating Space in Contemporary U.S.-American Novels"

The dissertation project focuses on the salient role which space and spatiality assume in plot and discourse of contemporary US-American literary narratives. Embarking from a spatialized approach to cultural and literary narratives, it is hypothesized that space represents a central part of contemporary US-American prose. Selected contemporary US-American novels by Jonathan Franzen, Toni Morrison, Luis Urrea and Sherman Alexie are subsequently analyzed according to this theoretical foundation in order to work out and illustrate space and spatiality as central underlying discourses in contemporary US fiction. In this selection of contemporary US fiction, pivotal and utopian concepts, but also expansive, repressive and violent ideas of US-American cultural ideology ("city upon a hill", "American Revolution", "the West", "Manifest Destiny", "the (New) Frontier") are being reinterpreted by the novels' protagonists. On the one hand, they affirm the centrality of space in US-American discourse and so confirm their US-American identity. On the other hand, they undermine the traditional WASP-hegemonic conception of space by claiming the prerogative of interpretation over it, integrating their respective perspective of space into the larger cultural/historical narrative. This dialectic of simultaneous affirmation and subversion of "SPACE [as] the central fact to man born in America" (Olson, Call me Ishmael) results in an integrative and emancipatory function of space chronicling the current dynamic towards a more transcultural, diverse and conflictive post-national(ist) US-American society.

Doctoral Thesis

Emotional taubstumm ? der gefühllose Protagonist im Werk von Bret Easton Ellis

This thesis is about the whole work of the contemporary American author Bret Easton Ellis working on the special problem of emotionless relation. The development of an exercisable concept of affect and emotion on the one hand and proving the practicability of this new found terminology concerning the literature of Ellis on the other hand are the two research objectives. Demonstrating the so far released novels as a complex, coherent work, it is characterized by the theme of unfeelingness and a style of insensibility.

¡Cuéntame algo! Narrating Chicana Lives Today ? (Sexual) Narrative Identity Politics beyond the Borderlands

"[P]ersonal sexual stories are everywhere, and they make a difference [?]" (Plummer 16).

Ausgehend von dieser schlichten Prämisse - andernorts auch simpel und doch eindrücklich zusammengefasst als "stories breed stories" (59) - erarbeitet der Soziologe Ken Plummer in seiner Studie Telling Sexual Stories ein für mein Dissertationsprojekt höchst relevantes und nützliches theroretisches Rahmenwerk. So nennt er die Spezies Mensch ?homo narrans? (5), eine Gattung von Geschichtenerzählern. Jeder Mensch erzählt Geschichten aus unterschiedlichsten Gründen, und jede erzählte Geschichte hat einen Rezipienten, der wiederum selbst erzählt. Aus dieser basalen Beobachtung lässt sich schlussfolgern, dass jede der unzähligen Geschichten, die den menschlichen Alltag begleiten, etwas bewirkt, etwas ausmacht, eine Reaktion provoziert, wie Plummer in dem oben angeführten Zitat behauptet. Im Rahmen meines Dissertationsprojektes übertrage ich Plummers allgemeinsoziologische Thesen auf die Referenzgruppe der Chicanas, mexikanischstämmige Frauen mit ihrem Lebensmittelpunkt in den USA. Exemplarische lifestories von Chicanas sowie die sinnfälligste Einordnung dieser Erlebnisberichte in das Genre testimonio sollen gemeinsam mit Plummers Theorien eine tiefgehende und innovative Lesart ausgewählter Werke dreier wegweisender Chicana-Autorinnen ermöglichen: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros und Michele Serros ist gemein, dass sie Erzählerinnen mit männlicher Hegemonie, institutionalisiertem Rassismus und kulturell/religiös geprägten Verhaltensanforderungen kollidieren lassen, um sie dann retrospektiv durch den Akt des Erzählens an Erkenntnis gewinnen zu lassen. Somit erreichen diese Werke, so hoffe ich aufzuzeigen, durch symbolisches Handeln innerhalb der Narration auf sozialer Ebene beim Leser den Effekt des testimonio, wie ihn John Beverley beschreibt: die "obligation to respond" (1), eine obligate Reaktion, die dann im Sinne Plummers weitergetragen wird.

A River of Han: Tragedy, Korean American Literature, and New Approaches to Ethnic Fiction.

In the past 20 years, Korean American literature has flourished with a number of prominent authors, such as Chang-rae Lee and Susan Choi, achieving levels of critical and commercial success that put Korean American literature at the forefront of modern ethnic fiction in the USA. The rediscovery of past works by the Nobel-prize nominated Richard E. Kim and the postmodern artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has contributed to this growing interest in the work of Korean American authors. However, traditional critical approaches to ethnic fiction are poorly equipped to understand the appeal of this literature. Conventional approaches form a marriage between ethical criticism (which evaluates literature in relation to a better future or ideal state) and socially deterministic cultural theories (which stress the power of the environment in the production of literary texts). Such theoretical foundations, which stress political oppression and the need for social agency, have been the engine of ethnic studies for decades, but suffer from an inability to deal adequately with aesthetic qualities and innovation. By reintroducing questions of literary form and paying attention to new developments in cognitive science, I hope to develop a new model for the study of ethnic fiction that balances the ethical desires of critics against the literary functions of key narrative strategies, and the strength of social constructions of meaning against the individual?s power for innovation. Applying such methods to Korean American literature leads us away from political demands and towards an understanding of how Korean American literature, in various ways, orientates itself towards the tragic mode. These modern tragedies stem not from the Western tradition, however, but from the Korean concept of han, a feeling of tragedy that is related to but significantly different from that defined by Aristotle. Ultimately, I hope to show that tragedy should be considered a transnational art form that developed independently in different cultures. While the core of the project will be an analysis of specific works of Korean American literature, I hope to show that the methods used can produce new ideas in other areas of ethnic fiction and literary studies.