Abstract: This is a plea to interlink Resistance Studies and Violence Studies. Instead of invastigating the efficiency of violence alone and declaring violence absolutely and completely in and on its own, it is necessary to look at resistance practices (escape lines, fighting back), body politics and passivations (self-injury, abortion, suicide) at the same time. For their part, resistance practices and passivations can not be measured by success but by the fact that they actually happened. People cannot be completely reduced to bare bodies without resistance. Resistance to violence has to be considered in its inconspicuous, low-threshold and „flat“ forms. In this elementary political sense resistance is understood as a punctually weakening violence and as seperation of powers in statu nascendi.

Keywords: Widerstandsforschung; Gewaltforschung; African American Studies; Holocaustforschung

Abstract: Although visual culture of the 21th century increasingly focuses on representation of death and dying, contemporary discourses still lack a language of death adequate to the event shown by pictures and visual images from an outside point of view. Following this observation, this article suggests a re-reading of 20th century author Elias Canetti. His lifelong notes have been edited and published posthumously for the first time in 2014. Thanks to this edition Canetti’s short texts and aphorisms can be focused as a textual laboratory in which he tries to model a language of death on experimental practices of natural sciences. The miniature series of experiments address the problem of death, not representable in discourses of cultural studies, system theory or history of knowledge, and in doing so, Canetti creates liminal texts at the margins of western concepts of (human) life, science and established textual form.

Keywords: Tod, Thanatologie, Sprache des Todes, Elias Canetti, Experiment und Literatur, Laboratorium, Aphorismus, Aufzeichnung, Kleine Form

Abstract: Much has been written about dreaming, but deep, dreamless sleep still seems to receive little attention within cultural studies and social science. This article analyses Georges Perec’s A Man Who Sleeps and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation in terms of the phantasm of metamorphosis enabled by sleep. These two novels show that the polarity of waking and dreaming can be relativized and shifted to the polarity between waking-dreaming/sleeping: This shift becomes particularly productive when it comes to the question of losing and finding ones identity, but also when we try to shed light on the relationship between (ideological or biographical) subjectification and self-overcoming. At the centre of this article is the notion of the sovereignty of sleep, which could allow both day life and dream life to be lifted out of joint.

Keywords: Schlaf, Dissoziation, Transformation, traumloser Schlaf, Bewusstsein, Verschwinden, Verwandlung, Rückzug, Abwesenheit, Phänomenologie des Schlafs

Abstract: In der deutschsprachigen Forschungslandschaft bildet sich derzeit eine kulturwissenschaftliche Pflanzenforschung (Plant Studies) heraus, die auf den neueren Untersuchungen der Botanik und Philosophie zu Pflanzen fußt und die theoretischen Grundlagen mit denen des Ecocriticism und der Animal Studies teilt. Zentrale Strömungen und aktuelle Tendenzen werden ebenso vorgestellt, wie auch der aktuelle Forschungsstand mit dem Fokus auf der kulturwissenschaftlichen Germanistik.

Keywords: Plant Studies; Pflanzen in Literatur und Kultur; Kulturwissenschaftliche Pflanzenforschung; Ecocriticism; Environmental Humanities

Urban Art: Creating the Urban with Art ist ein englischsprachiger Sammelband, herausgegeben von der Kunsthistorikerin Ilaria Hoppe und dem Kunsthistoriker Ulrich Blanché. Beide sind für ihre Arbeiten zum Thema „Street Art“ bekannt. In ihrem Band haben sie 18 Beiträge aufgenommen, die sich auf die Rubriken Introduction, On Terminology, Digital Media & the Urban (Art), Affect & Performance, Territories, Urban Imaginary & the City verteilen. Zusätzlich stellen Urban Nation¹, Jens Besser und Urban Creativity² ihre Initiativen vor.

The 1950s are regarded as a momentous period of great cultural re-awakening in Yorubaland, Nigeria. This cultural re-awakening continued into the early years of Nigeria’s independence in 1960, when diverse modern artistic productions flourished. Much of what is known about traditional art was discovered and extensively documented by the European writers and colonial officials at the time. The Benin artefacts derived in the aftermath of the Benin Massacre of 1893 and the excavations carried out in parts of ancient Ile-Ife around 1911 and the following years brought knowledge of a once vibrant artistic industry across important centres in colonial Nigeria for the first time. Many of these artworks appeared to have been abandoned by its local inheritors, who had lost interest in them at that time. As interests waned, so did the knowledge, lore and histories of this heritage. With socio-political changes in the 1950s, the new educated African elite warmed themselves to western modernism, while also deriding the local culture. Notwithstanding, few individuals soon channelled their energies into preserving this lost heritage and reviving what had virtually disappeared through tireless dedication and promotion of the local cultures. It is here that the Mbari Club in Ibadan came to have a cultural meaning and expression.

„Wenn man von der Linguistik spricht, muss man sich klar sein, dass man von Politik spricht“, antwortete Bourdieu (1992: 28) einmal darauf, inwiefern die Lösung politischer Probleme eine Frage der Sprache sei. Nun gehört die kritische Beschreibung und Analyse politischen Sprachgebrauchs nicht erst seit Herausbildung der Polito- und Diskurslinguistik zu den etablierten linguistischen Forschungsfeldern. Doch die gesamte Linguistik als Politikum? Ein Postulat, das bis heute nicht nur unter LinguistInnen Skepsis hervorrufen dürfte.

How are European and national identities, among them Germany and Denmark, constructed through language? Which stereotypical attributes, which narratives and which linguistic patterns are evident? How do different constructions of the European, German and respective national identities relate to each other, compete and interact? These and other major questions are addressed by the EurEd-network aiming to develop an innovative interdisciplinary research framework to detect, analyse and compare the interconnectedness of discursive constructions of European and national identities in educational media.