Volume 5: Foreword
Welcome to the 2009-2010 issue of TRANSIT. Our first round of publications centers on a panel held at Berkeley last year featuring authors Yoko Tawada and Zafer Şenocak, along with discussant Homi K. Bhabha, organized and moderated by Deniz Göktürk. The panel featured readings by the two authors, as well as a discussion of topics including cosmopolitanism and local specificity, multilingualism and monolingualism, translation and translatability.
In this issue we are pleased to offer not only a video of the panel, but also previously unpublished works by both authors in English translation. In addition to the selections from “Where Europe Begins” that she read at the panel, Yoko Tawada has contributed a dialogue probing the borders of the linguistic negotiation of colonial contact, “Dejima — A European City in Japan,” translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, which is introduced and accompanied by a companion piece, “Hausutembosu (Huis ten Bosch),” by Bettina Brandt. Şenocak has granted us permission to publish the selection from his novel-in-progress Ostwärts that he read at the panel, in an English translation by David Gramling — a translation that thus precedes the original. We also feature here an excerpt from an interview with Zafer Şenocak conducted by Elke Segelcke this past summer in Berlin; the complete interview is forthcoming in Seminar.
In addition, this issue includes a brief survey of the works of internet artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud, who explore the impact of different walls and borders, with the internet becoming simultaneously the medium and the object of exploration. In connection with their visit to Berkeley this fall, TRANSIT is particularly proud to take part in their project picidae, a proxy server that converts HTML websites into images, allowing internet users to bypass censorship in countries where particular sites or types of content are blocked. You can try it out for yourself on our website.
Our second round of publications includes two new articles: “Criss-Crossing in Global Space and Time: Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven (2007),” by Barbara Mennel; and “Encounters on a Street Corner: Sommer vorm Balkon and the Return of the Berlin Film,” by Mila Ganeva. The two articles address recent developments in German cinema, and both take advantage of TRANSIT’s multimedia format to include film clips alongside the articles. Finally, this issue four book reviews: please see the table of contents in the sidebar.
We continue to accept submissions relating to the themes of travel, migration, and multiculturalism in the German-speaking world. Click here for submission guidelines. TRANSIT is a refereed internet journal of German Studies indexed in the MLA International Bibliography. TRANSIT seeks to push boundaries both of traditional scholarship and of print publication. The journal’s online format enables authors to integrate multimedia content (images, film clips, spoken text, and music) into their work. If you have questions, please contact us at transitjournal@berkeley.edu.
Sincerely,
KURT BEALS, Managing Editor