“Nation of Assimilation”
What does it mean to make an investigative documentary on one’s family history? How could the filmmaker and her interviewees represent the joyful and eventful, as well as the painful and awkward episodes of their most intimate past? In this blog post, Berkeley Senior and L.A. native Veronica Jacques reflects on the process of making […]
Behind the Apron: An Investigatory Dive into the Lives of Overlooked “Essential Workers”
Scan products. Put items in bags. Collect payments. The repetitive and monotonous movements of supermarket cashiers often went unnoticed by the average customer — until the pandemic introduced the practice of self-checkout, which reminds us of the indispensable labor of these once “invisible” essential workers, who, it turns out, also live colorful lives outside of […]
Work in Single Takes
Picture source: Harun Farocki GbR Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in spring 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Alina Predescu, discovered possibilities of engagement with the world through documentary cinema old and new. Weekly screenings in the film series Documentary Voices, co-curated in collaboration with Kathy Geritz at […]
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 […]
Border Talk in Dresden: Imagining Cohesion through Difference with Zafer Şenocak
In this thoughtful commentary, UC Berkeley Class of 2021 alumna and MGP contributor Ardo Ali, who participated in our workshop with Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak, grapples with the troubled legacy of German reunification as reflected in the rise of so-called right-wing populism in Germany, which has been disproportionately steep in the formerly socialist East. Ali […]
Traveling in Pandemic Times: Yoko Tawada and Poetic Border-Crossing
Yoko Tawada’s guest appearance in the third installation of “Archives of Migration” sparked a lively and contemporarily relevant conversation on the potential of poetic border-crossing in pandemic times, where physical mobility has been intensely challenged by closed-off national borders and the anxiety over cross-person contamination. A native of Japan, Tawada writes and publishes prolifically in […]
Imagining the Other Side of Things: Zafer Şenocak and Hidden Archives
MGP editor Elizabeth Sun follows up on our recent event with Zafer Şenocak, interrogating the possibilities for resistance that lie in the counter-hegemonic reconstruction of historical narrative. On Friday, April 2, we welcomed the widely published Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak to the second installment of “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of […]
Against Categorization: On Inanimate Objects as Narrators in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s “Adas Raum”
A village woman who just lost her newborn in 1459 pre-colonial Ghana, a British countess who pioneered the invention of the computer with her exceptional mathematical talents in 1848, a Polish inmate forced into prostitution in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, and a pregnant black woman searching for an apartment in Berlin in 2019 […]
Jule Thiemann: Digitale Fluchtnarrative und Postmigrantische Perspektiven
The latest installment in our Mission Possible series of reflections on the future of German Studies comes courtesy of Dr. Jule Thiemann of the University of Hamburg’s Institut für Germanistik, who argues that the field must turn towards expanding the field of canonical literature to include postmigrant engagement with small forms, digital modes of writing […]
Jule Thiemann: Postmigrant Perspectives and Digital Narratives of Flight
The latest installment in our Mission Possible series of reflections on the future of German Studies comes courtesy of Dr. Jule Thiemann of the University of Hamburg’s Institut für Germanistik, who argues that the field must turn towards expanding the field of canonical literature to include postmigrant engagement with small forms, digital modes of writing […]