Performing New German Realities


Book Description

'One in four people in Germany today have a so-called migration background, however, the relationship between theatre and migration there has only recently begun to take centre stage. Indeed, fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature of Germany’s influential state-funded theatrical landscape. Drawing on extensive archival and field work, this book asks where, when, why, and how plays engaging with the new realities of “postmigrant” Germany have been performed over the past 30 years. Focusing on plays by renowned artists Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel, it asks which new realities have been scripted in the theatrical sphere in the process – in the imaginations of playwrights, readers, audience members; in the enactment and direction of scripts on stage; and in the performance of new institutional approaches and cultural policies. Highlighting the role this theatre has played in a larger, ongoing re-scripting of the German stage, this study presents a critical perspective on contemporary European theatre and opens innovative developments in the conceptualization of theatre and post/migration from the German context to English language readers.




Performing New German Realities


Book Description

'One in four people in Germany today have a so-called migration background, however, the relationship between theatre and migration there has only recently begun to take centre stage. Indeed, fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature of Germany's influential state-funded theatrical landscape. Drawing on extensive archival and field work, this book asks where, when, why, and how plays engaging with the new realities of "postmigrant" Germany have been performed over the past 30 years. Focusing on plays by renowned artists Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel, it asks which new realities have been scripted in the theatrical sphere in the process - in the imaginations of playwrights, readers, audience members; in the enactment and direction of scripts on stage; and in the performance of new institutional approaches and cultural policies. Highlighting the role this theatre has played in a larger, ongoing re-scripting of the German stage, this study presents a critical perspective on contemporary European theatre and opens innovative developments in the conceptualization of theatre and post/migration from the German context to English language readers.




New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature


Book Description

The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.




Violence Elsewhere 2


Book Description

Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of "violence elsewhere" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times. Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001. As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about "violence elsewhere" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, "elsewhere" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye. Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the "war on terror," slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past. Contributors: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.





Book Description




State of the Arts


Book Description

This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.




Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany


Book Description

Essays on and interviews with minoritized writers of contemporary Germany, mostly women or non-binary, whose literary interventions write radical diversity into the dominant culture and challenge fixed frames of identity. In Germany today, an increasing number of minoritized authors - many of them women, nonbinary, or other marginalized genders - are staging literary interventions that foreground the long-standing complexity and radical diversity of German identities. They are reconceiving, redefining, and rewriting understandings of "Germanness" by centering previously marginalized perspectives and challenging fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, and even time and space. In so doing, they open new ways of conceiving of self and other, individual and collective, and thus envision alliances and communities that do justice to the range of lived experiences in Germany. Drawing on frameworks of postmigration, postcolonialism, intersectionality, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist and queer theory, this volume investigates various literary strategies employed by writers representing diverse subject positions to engage creatively with questions of hegemonic culture and belonging, exposing the exclusionary if not violent practices that these entail. The volume showcases cutting-edge scholarship by established and early career researchers, and is innovative in format: essays treating works by authors such as Fatma Aydemir, Shida Bazyar, Asal Dardan, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Antje Rávik Strubel, Noah Sow, Jackie Thomae, and Olivia Wenzel, along with original interviews with Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, Özlem Özgül Dündar, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Mithu Sanyal illustrate the plurality, agency, and increasing resonance of these literary figures and their works. The chapter by Leila Essa, "Seen as Friendly, Seen as Frightening? A Conversation on Visibilities, Kinship, and the Right Words with Mithu Sanyal," is made freely available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.




Interculturalism and Performance Now


Book Description

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. New critical approaches since the late 2000s and early 2010s instead reveal a plethora of localized, grassroots, diasporic and historical approaches to the theory and practice of intercultural performance which make available novel critical and political possibilities for performance practitioners and scholars. This collection consolidates and pushes forward reflection on these recent shifts by offering case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism.




Postmigration, Transculturality and the Transversal Politics of Art


Book Description

This is the first book to develop a postmigrant analytical perspective for the study of art, concentrating on how postmigration reopens the study of contemporary art and migration. The book introduces art historians and other scholars with a methodological interest in cultural analysis to the innovative concept of postmigration, offering a comprehensive introduction to the various meanings and uses of the term as well as translating it methodologically to an art historical context. The book analyses art projects from Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, which address some of the current challenges to European societies of immigration, and by drawing on theory from fields such as migration studies, transcultural studies and feminist, postcolonial and political theory, as well as re-engaging established concepts such as imagination, commemoration, belonging, identity, racialization, community, public space and participation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art and politics, migration studies, and transcultural studies.




Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film


Book Description

This book examines the relationship between narrative film and reality, as seen through the lens of on-screen classical concert performance. By investigating these scenes, wherein the performance of music is foregrounded in the narrative, Winters uncovers how concert performance reflexively articulates music's importance to the ontology of film. The book asserts that narrative film of a variety of aesthetic approaches and traditions is no mere copy of everyday reality, but constitutes its own filmic reality, and that the music heard in a film's underscore plays an important role in distinguishing film reality from the everyday. As a result, concert scenes are examined as sites for provocative interactions between these two realities, in which real-world musicians appear in fictional narratives, and an audience’s suspension of disbelief is problematised. In blurring the musical experiences of onscreen observers and participants, these concert scenes also allegorize music’s role in creating a shared subjectivity between film audience and character, and prompt Winters to propose a radically new vision of music’s role in narrative cinema wherein musical underscore becomes part of a shared audio-visual space that may be just as accessible to the characters as the music they encounter in scenes of concert performance.