All Culture Is Remix: Confluences against Nationalist Narratives
Ambika Athreya, Ph.D. Candidate in German Studies at UC Berkeley, reflects on how Ilija Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskote challenge nationalist narratives and cultural essentialism in their co-authored essayistic monograph, Confluences: Forgotten Stories from East and West (2012). In conversation with Chunjie Zhang at the “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake […]
Loving the Glacier with Ilija Trojanow
Verena Wolf, Ph.D. candidate of German Studies at UC Berkeley, and Valentin Rickert, visiting scholar from the University of Konstanz, reflect on Ilija Trojanow’s book EisTau (2011), situating the novel within the political discourse of German ecocriticism and the literary discourse of romance and dystopia in the age of the Anthropocene. UC Berkeley’s series of […]
Overcoming Static Inertia: Ilija Trojanow’s “Nach der Flucht”
Elise Volkmann, Ph.D. candidate of German Studies at Berkeley, reflects on our event with novelist Ilija Trojanow and his book Nach der Flucht (2017), examining how a person who has fled can turn the loss of language and the struggle with a new language into a source of multi-directional creativity. The event series “Archives of […]
CFP: Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference on “Arrested Mobilities: Stillness, Power and Modernity” (Feb. 25-26, 2022, Online)
As early as the 1920’s, Robert Musil remarked on the enormous effort it takes to stand still in a world that demands constant motion. Reflecting on the zooming street he sees through his window, the protagonist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften comments: “Könnte man die Sprünge der Aufmerksamkeit messen, die Leistungen der Augenmuskeln, die Pendelbewegungen […]
CFP (edited volume): Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation (ed. Qinna Shen, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Qingyang Freya Zhou)
Since the beginning of 2020, anti-Asian violence saw a sharp increase in Europe and North America, as frustrations about the COVID-19 pandemic were taken out on those marked as Asian or “asiatisch gelesen.” In response to the March 2021 shootings in Atlanta, the Berlin-based network for Asian German perspectives korientation posted the open letter “Atlanta – […]
Reflections on a Postmigrant Turn
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, anti-immigrant violence saw a sharp increase in Europe and North America, as frustrations about the public health conditions and the governments’ responses to the state of crisis resulted in a rising tide of xenophobia. In this blog post, guest contributors Rahel Cramer (Macquarie U), Jara Schmidt […]
Überlegungen zu einem Postmigrant Turn
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, anti-immigrant violence saw a sharp increase in Europe and North America, as frustrations about the public health conditions and the governments’ responses to the state of crisis resulted in a rising tide of xenophobia. In this blog post, guest contributors Rahel Cramer (Macquarie U), Jara Schmidt […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part III – How to Politicize Public Health
In an exclusive three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of misinformation and polarization during the coronavirus pandemic, caught between the gravitational pull of Los Angeles, Berlin, and Taipei and heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the concluding […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part II – Polarization and Conspiracy on Social Media
In a new three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of the pandemic and political polarization, caught between the gravitational pull of the United States, Germany, and Taiwan and heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the second installment, […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part I – Instagram as Pandemic Archive
In a new three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of quarantine caught between the gravitational pull of the United States, Germany, and Taiwan, heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the first installment, Jezell thinks through the role […]