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Nidesh Lawtoo
John Hopkins University
Abstract:
The Mimetic Experience of Community: A Genealogy
In the wake of the philosophical articulation of the concept of “community” by Jean-Luc Nancy’s ground-breaking, The Inoperative Community [La Communauté désoeuvrée] in 1983, a number of influential thinkers—from Benedict Anderson (1983) to Giorgio Agamben (1990), Roberto Esposito (1998) to J. Hillis Miller (2014), among others—have contributed to disseminating the problematic of the “in-common” in the heterogeneous field of literary theory in general, and American studies in particular. And yet, despite the popular attention given to this concept, its genealogical foundations remain largely to be retraced. This paper offers a first step in this direction by unearthing the conceptual and affective influences central to Nancy’s account of “inoperative community.” In particular, it follows up on Nancy’s untimely claim that Georges Bataille “has gone furthest in the crucial experience in the modern destiny of community” from a mimetic, and thus double, perspective. On the one hand, I build on my diagnostic of Bataille’s account of “the laughter of community” (Lawtoo 2013) in order to show how the “inner experience” of mimetic communication opens up a relational conception of the subject which is shared (partagé) and paves the way for a political thought of community. On the other hand, I argue that Nancy’s account of the sharing of community, which involves both sharing and division (partage), cannot be dissociated from his communal intellectual experience with his philosophical alter ego: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Together, these two perspectives contribute to revisiting the foundations of the theory of community from the angle of a mimetic experience community—perhaps yet to come.
Bionote:
Audrey Lötscher
University of Lausanne
Abstract:
National Identity, Communities and the US Politics of Environmental Unsustainability
Amidst growing international concerns regarding resources scarcity and climate change, ecological issues remain largely absent of the American political debate and agenda, and rather unsurprisingly, the US emerges as one of the least sustainable countries in terms of energy footprint and per-capita energy consumption. The refusal to address pressing environmental issues, or indeed to even consider an issue, among other, the half a decade-long Californian drought, owes to an ideology of abundance that is almost consubstantial to national identity. Out of the necessity to maintain actual this narrative of an abundant land, for fear of rewriting the main national paradigms, arises a politics of environmental unsustainability precluding the development of self-imposed restrictions, limitations and other constraining measures necessary to ensure a sustainable course. This talk will explore the tensions between the dominant political discourses forming and informing the body politic, or the imagined community of a unified American land and people subscribing to the pregnant myth of the infinite abundance, and the heterogeneous communities that have emerged in the wake of the growing pauperization of the middle class, which are built around solidarity but also out of necessity, as illustrated by the community gardens in Detroit. In outlining the fault lines between dominant master-narratives feeding unsustainable environmental discourse and practices, and emerging alternative views and understandings of America and its various communities, we shall consider the following questions: how do these communities, if they perceive themselves as such, view themselves in respect to the dominant discourses of abundance and perpetual growth? How are they, in turn, portrayed in political discourses? Do members of these communities consider their situation a transient state before regaining access to economic growth, or is this type of social organization paving the way for a new understanding of the nation? By underlining the various levels on which communities evolve and come into conflict, I propose to reflect on the articulations but also the tensions at work between the imagined/imaginary community of “America” as constructed by elite political discourses and made of atomistic consumer-individuals, and new arenas of popular political power, or poleis organized around communities in the true sense of the term, namely entities owning something in common, such as a livelihood.
Bionote:
A graduate of the University of Lausanne, I have been pursuing a PhD in American Studies in this institution since February 2016. My areas of specialization are cultural studies, critical theory and discourse analysis. Owing to a diversified curriculum, I have developed an interdisciplinary profile and my interests lie at the crossroads of disciplines ranging from continental philosophy to political economy and sociocultural anthropology. My doctoral project interrogates the cultural causes of unsustainability in the US, and more specifically the relationship between dominant narratives underlying the national identity and the unsustainable environmental discourse and practices that have accompanied its economic and cultural development.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
University of Lausanne
Abstract:
From Brook Farm to Burning Man: Alternative Communities in the United States
The question of community has been at the heart of how the United States defines itself from the very start, especially if we consider that the Puritans founded their original colonies as the first ‘alternative communities’ in the New World. Since then, America has continually reinvented itself through an ongoing series of experiments in how to live together as groups united less by ethnic or traditional ties and more by choice, affiliation, common purpose and political and/or religious values. What I propose to do in this talk is present a short history of alternative communities in the United States up to the present, examining in particular the principal kinds of impulses that have led people to decide to withdraw from the so-called ‘mainstream’ and establish an alternative society based on a desire to apply one’s values to a total way of life. One of the questions that is raised by the issue of alternative community is what exactly is a community, in both its practical and spiritual aspects. By practical, I refer to issues of definition – is, for example, the ephemeral city in the desert erected each year in Nevada, known as Burning Man, a community – as it claims? By spiritual I wish to evoke the deeper sociological issues raised by Emile Durkheim in the 1910s when he argued that human existence in groups is essentially and emotionally linked to the experience of religion, including the feeling of belonging to something larger than one’s self, the feelings of awe, love and deep attachment that are awakened by the divine as by one’s group, and the rhythm of life distributed between the mundane and the effervescent. In evoking this connection I intend to explore the question of whether alternative communities are always necessarily sites of alternative or heightened spiritual/religious awareness/practices. Finally, I am interested in how these issues of spiritual being in the world have been historically linked on the part of alternative communities to an interest in an ecological engagement and environmental being in the world.
Bionote:
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature and co-director of the New American Studies Master’s Specialization Program at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She has published a monograph, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010, Ashgate) and is completing a monograph on American war narrative. She has also edited or co-edited several volumes: Writing American Women (2008, Gunter Narr Verlag), The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (2012, Routledge), Emotion, Affect and Sentiment (2014, Gunter Narr Verlag), War Gothic (2016, Routledge), and Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age (2016, Manchester University Press). Her research and publication topics include melodrama, horror and military adventure, as well as race, gender, war and nationalism.
Pierre-Héli Monot
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Abstract:
The One, The Many and The Few: Communal Democracy after Tocqueville
This paper outlines a conceptual history of the notion of community in Romanticism and in classical Tocquevillian democratic theory. I will to draw special attention to the philosophical origins of the discourse of community in romantic hermeneutics: While German and American romantics emphasized the neoplatonic dialectic of the One and the Many, abolitionists around Frederick Douglass pointed out the strident political overtones of romantic knowledge practices and proposed a fully developed philosophical counter-position centered on the community, the faction, and the Few. In this respect, Douglass suggested a solution to the classic problem articulated by Tocqueville in Chapter XVIII of Democracy in America: How can a democratic society manage the claims of partial groups or factions if it conceives of itself as the mutual absorption of individual and collective claims, thus implying that these partial groups lack all democratic function and legitimacy (in Tocqueville’s terms: “the intermediate space is empty”)? In this presentation, I will present some of the crucial sources pertaining to the discursive shift set in motion by Frederick Douglass, notably his readings of the American Constitution. If Emerson maintained that the coming American poetics would convincingly stage the neoplatonic national motto (e pluribus unum), Douglass argued for a reading of the Constitution that would allow for popular coalitions of interests geared towards societal change. Ultimately, this paper argues for renewed understanding of the community as the crucial legal and constitutional category in American political theory between 1800 and 1865.
Bionote:
I received my Ph.D. in American Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2014. I was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2009, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University in 2012-2013, and a Fulbright Scholar in 2014. I am currently an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. My dissertation, Man as Method: General Hermeneutics and Partial Democracy, will be published with Winter (Heidelberg) in June. I am currently working on a second book, titled One Hundred Years of Tenderness, which discusses the construction of “legitimate kindness” in authoritarian political theories of the 20th century.
Thomas Nehrlich
Freie Universität Berlin
Abstract:
“We’re Not Fighting for the People Anymore… We’re Just Fighting.”
American Superhero Comics Between Criticisms of Community and Critical Communities
Discussing the significance of communities with regard to superhero comics opens up two levels of analysis. On the one hand, superhero comics have a large following; the fans form communities that engage in lively discussions on a great variety of topics, often occupying a meta-space between fandom and academic debate (Henry Jenkins dubbed such critics aca- fans). This metatextual form of community has been the topic of studies both in sociology and in cultural studies. On the other hand, ‘community’ is a much debated concept within the superhero narratives themselves. From its very creation, the figure of the superhero seems to challenge the community’s bond with him or her. Superheroes, by sheer extraordinariness, are their readers’ opposite by definition; simultaneously embodying and transgressing the law, they clash with the official institutions of the USA while still representing truly ‘American’ values. Historically, this ambiguity has led to superheroes being used in a nationalistic context, even advocating American military mobilization (e. g. Superman and Captain America fighting Hitler and promoting the ‘American way of life’). At the same time, however, superhero comics were paradoxically accused of weakening the authority of the state and causing juvenile delinquency (Fredric Wertham’s 1954 Seduction of the Innocent is the best-known example of such critique that contributed to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, a system of self-censorship within the comics industry). Such tensions have fueled stories within the medium itself that focus on the relationship between superheroes, the people, and the government. Some of the most acclaimed superhero comics feature a government’s attempt to limit the powers of the superheroes, forcing them to cooperate or to become outlaws, excluded from their communities. Essentially, these are sto- ries about the conflict between control, registration, bureaucracy on the one hand, and free- dom, abnormality, secrecy on the other, or, in other words, between the individual’s and the community’s interests. We propose to analyze this antagonism and its reception amongst fan communities in some of the most famous superhero comics. A masterpiece of publisher DC’s ‘dark and gritty’ era which rejuvenated the genre, The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (1986) features an aged and disillusioned Batman, forced to fight a corrupt US president (easily identifiable as a caricature of Ronald Reagan) and a Superman degenerated into a government lackey. Equally influential, Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986/87) depicts a group of once-revered superheroes, disempowered by political pressure. One of them perfidiously attempts to prove their relevance by turning against his fellows and the community they swore to protect. Despite deconstructing the image of the shining superhero, both comics have been extremely popular with fans and were adapted into movies, increasing their impact on the genre and on popular culture in general. Decades later, Mark Millar’s Marvel comic Civil War (2006/2007) implicitly deals with the political situation in the US post 9/11 and specifically with the USA PATRIOT Act that aimed to remove legal impediments to identifying potential acts of terrorism. In the story, Captain America – Marvel’s classic representation of US-America itself – goes against his own government (and his friend Iron Man) when a ‘superhero registration’ act is approved by congress. The comic not only reflects a heated debate about what it means to be American in its plot; the way it was received is an excellent example of fan communities participating in and thereby shaping a cultural and political discourse. Therefore, the two levels of analysis meet: the comic narrative presents a critique of community that was itself criticized by the fan communities. All these comics outline the end of superheroism in the face of uncooperative governments and decreasing support from the population. They debate the legitimacy of superheroic yet unregulated violence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism, thereby dealing with the genuinely political within a medium of popular culture.
Bionote:
Thomas Nehrlich received his BA and MA in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2011, he has been teaching in the German Department of the University of Bern. In 2015, he was a visiting lecturer at the California State University Long Beach. His PhD project focuses on literary rebels after 1945. He is also involved in the critical edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s complete essays. His publications include books and articles on E. A. Poe, Heinrich von Kleist, as well as the history and theory of superheroes.
Maria Verena Peters
University of Siegen
Abstract:
Constructions of Blackness and Whiteness at the Superbowl Halftime Show 2016: Black Music and the Modern Civil Rights Movement
The 50th Superbowl Halftime Show was supposed to be the climax of their career for the British band Coldplay, which had been booked as the main act. In the end, however, lead singer Chris Martin found himself sidelined by his two supporting acts, Beyonce and Bruno Mars. What is more, his failed attempt to “fit in” with these two performers garnered him much ridicule on social media platforms (e.g., a meme captioned “When you’re trying to fit in”). The talk will shed light on the dynamics of exclusion/inclusion of these performances through a semiotic reading of the verbal, acoustic and visual markers which excessively marked Beyonce’s and Mars’ performances as other from Coldplays’ presence. The analysis will highlight the dense intertextual play in which the first two engaged on stage and elucidate how Coldplay failed to enter into a dialogue with this richly evocative text. The evocation of a history of black music through a re-imagination of icons such as Michael Jackson and James Brown, the references to the Civil Rights Movement both past and present and to black music’s history as a medium to speak about experiences of disenfranchisement on the basis of race and gender discrimination, which can all be found in the performances at the Superbowl Halftime Show 2016, serve as proof that the generic label “black music”, while it has been severely criticized, is a necessary evil to be able to talk about a particular musical field with regard to its political genesis and impact. Far from taking an essentialist approach to the term, the talk will highlight its ability to point to the historical contingency of musical styles and the latter’s propensity to call up a community spirit by means of inclusion/exclusion.
Bionote:
Dr. des. Maria Verena Peters graduated from Ruhr-University Bochum with a master in Anglistik/Amerikanistik and Komparatistik. After teaching in Bochum and Göttingen, she is now working as a lecturer at the University of Siegen while also teaching in Dortmund. Her PhD-thesis is dedicated to the intersectionality of age and gender: At the example of Twilight and Harry Potter, she analyzes concepts of coming of age both in fantasy literature for children and in literary criticism that chastises unruly – that is, adult – readers of children’s literature. She has published on various literary and cultural studies subjects such as religion, gender, bodies, and monsters and their representation in popular culture.
Jesse Ramírez
University of St. Gallen
Abstract:
#NotYourMule: The 2016 Oscars in Black, White, and Brown
The US left has often assumed that African and Latinx Americans naturally form a political community of resistance. Have not both groups been subject to the same sort of racialized oppression? Do they not share common experiences of political and economic marginalization? A recent conflict over the racial makeup of the Academy Awards (commonly referred to as the Oscars) suggests that interracial relations in the United States are not so simple. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the whiteness of the 2016 Oscars became a hot topic among black critics, although the selection of Chris Rock, a prominent African American comedian, as the ceremony’s host seemed to provide some recompense. Rock’s blistering critique of whiteness during the ceremony drew headlines, but so did the fury that erupted on Twitter when Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented Filipino American and journalist, asked Rock to mention the absence of other, nonblack people of color from the Oscars. The backlash against Vargas clustered around the hastag #notyourmule, as many tweets by African Americans accused Vargas of demanding that black people “carry” other people of color (especially Latinxs, as many took Vargas’s last name to indicate this background). This talk investigates the major points of conflict in the #notyourmule debate, in particular the question of whether one racial minority has the ethical or political responsibility to speak for another. More broadly, the talk seeks to underscore the importance of interracial/interethnic studies in contemporary American studies, and to demonstrate that the black/white binary that many scholars use to examine racialization is inadequate to the study of a nation that is undergoing complex demographic and political change.
Bionote:
J. Jesse Ramirez is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of St Gallen. In addition to his research in interethnic studies, he is currently writing a book about apocalyptic science fiction. Jesse blogs at jjesseramirez.com.
A. Elisabeth Reichel and Philipp Schweighauser
University of Basel
Abstract:
Folk Communities in Translation: Edward Sapir’s Renditions of French-Canadian Folk Songs in Poetry
Today, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) is best remembered for his contributions to Boasian cultural anthropology and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. What is less well-known is that he also wrote and published poetry, a passion that he shared with fellow students of Boas such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. His poetic output is distinguished, however, by experiments in a wide variety of forms: from sonnets to brief quasi-imagist vignettes, from children’s poems to translations of folk songs. In this talk, we focus on four of his renditions of popular French-Canadian folk songs, which were published in the July 1920 issue of Poetry. After being awarded with an honorable mention from the magazine, he published three more folk songs in Queen’s Quarterly (1922) and co-authored, with Marius Barbeau, the anthology Folk Songs of French Canada (Yale UP, 1925). Sapir’s interest in the cultural practices of folk communities–practices that are also popular in a second sense of the term (produced by the people for the people)–links up with his studies of Native American languages, both of which are driven by a desire to preserve for posterity cultures perceived as giving way to the pressures of modernization, and a broader search for authenticity that energized the modernist movement and prompted Poetry magazine to devote its February 1917 issue to ‘aboriginal poetry’, that is, interpretations of Native American songs by Anglo-American writers. Sapir’s “Note on French-Canadian Folk-songs” thus emphasizes that “[t]he great currents of modern civilization have, until recent days, left practically unaffected this colony of old France [Quebec], where the folk still observe customs, use implements, recite tales, and sing songs that take us right back to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” In Sapir’s versatile hands, salvage anthropology and literary primitivism go hand in hand. This talk analyzes Sapir’s versions of French-Canadian folk-songs from the transnational perspective that has reshaped American Studies since the 1990s. In crossing linguistic, national, generic, and medial boundaries, these poems bring into contact a variety of communal sites and practices, including early modern European songs, the popular realm of twentieth-century French-Canadian folk culture, and the literary community of the editors, contributors, and readers of the little magazines where modernism happened. Our talk inquires into the epistemological and political ramifications of the various translations that take place as sounds are converted into texts and one language into another.
Bionotes:
Elisabeth Reichel is Ph.D. candidate in Anglophone literary and cultural studies at the University of Basel. Her thesis is entitled “Sonic and Visual Others in the Poetry of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.” She has published and presented on sound and soundscapes in the poetry of Edward Sapir, the politics of Mead’s poetic and anthropological writing, and the integrative function of music in contemporary literature and film.
Philipp Schweighauser is Associate Professor and Head of American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is the author of The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida, 2006) and Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (U of Virginia P, forthcoming 2016). He is currently serving as the President of SANAS.
Philipp Reisner
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Abstract:
Contemporary Anglo-American Drama of Exile
The dominance of the motif of exile as the human condition in contemporary Anglo-American literature takes on special significance in recent American plays. Many playwrights infuse their characters’ conversations with psychological depth that goes beyond the absurd, which showcases the characters’ failure to make themselves at home in their communities.
The intensity of parallel conversations and the polyphony of voices in rapid exchanges underline the fact that the general condition of exile is an exile from language: after the theater of the absurd, contemporary playwrights return to deep psychology of language exchanges. They show characters who lose their home in language and their communities by a series of verbal misunderstandings and misconceptions. The rapidity of the everyday language employed in dialogue does not forego violent expressiveness. The characters’ desire for community and communion and their sense of being lost in the world become tangible as they interact on stage. This suggests that drama is not exempt from the trend towards sacralization in contemporary Anglo-American literature. Exile in drama refers to the first exile of humankind from the Garden of Eden. This occurs in the context of a turn towards Old Testament texts, with special emphasis on the Book of Genesis and the Book of Psalms. Unobtrusive references in the plays link this renewed emphasis on Old Testament material to New Testament texts, especially the First Letter to the Corinthians. Investigating how a new sense of home emerges from these interactions can contribute to our understanding of contemporary redefinitions of community.
Bionote:
Philipp Reisner teaches as a lecturer at the American Studies Department of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His approach to research is multidisciplinary. His dissertation on the theological role that the New English theologian Cotton Mather (1663–1728) played in the context of early modern society appeared in 2012. He is currently working on his post-doctoral project, which is a structural study of Genesis motifs in contemporary Anglo-American poetry.
SANAS Conference 2016 