Volume 1: Foreword
This issue is presented in conjunction with the international conference “Goodbye Germany? Migration, Culture, and the Nation State” held on 28-30 October 2004. This first issue of TRANSIT grew out of a conference titled “Goodbye, Germany? Migration, Culture, and the Nation-State”, which was held at the University of California, Berkeley, October 28-30, 2004. The conference […]
Goodbye, Germany
Werner Sollors Download PDF Abstract: In recent years the question whether Germany was or was not a country of immigration became the bone of party contention, as the governing Gerhard Schöder/Joschka Fischer coalition of Social Democrats and Greens demanded a recognition of the changing face of Germany, and Chancellor Schröder made a thorough reform of […]
Global Heimat Germany: Migration and the Transnationalization of the Nation-State
Regina Römhild Download PDF Abstract: The article explores the increasing gap between the cultural dynamics of transnationalization in Germany and the national self-perception of the German society. While concepts of “in-migration” (Zuwanderung) and “integration” still stick to notions of the nation-state as being a “container” embracing and controlling a population and a culture of its […]
The Rhetoric of Origin: Language and Exclusion in Historical Perspective
Hinrich C. Seeba Download PDF Abstract: In the following I would like to distinguish more clearly between blood line on the one hand and cultural, especially linguistic tradition on the other and suggest that, while the rhetoric of the first is losing, the rhetoric of the second is gaining momentum. The recent culture wars concerning […]
The Multilingual Experience: Insights from Language Memoirs
Claire Kramsch Download PDF Abstract: In the U.S.: FL education is still very much hostage to a view of language and culture that privileges the nation-state and its national native speakers. There are currently calls for more imagination/creativity/language play, more collaborative learning. But they have not put into question the ultimate goal, which is to […]
Cultural Translation and the Problem of Language: Yiddish in Joseph Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft
Sarah Bailey Download PDF Abstract: In 2000, W.W. Norton and Company released a new English-language edition of Joseph Roth’s 1927 compilation of essays entitled, Juden auf Wanderschaft. The edition’s dustcover proclaims in large, bold typeface: “A masterpiece of Jewish identity emerges in English 70 years after it was first written.” While it can’t be denied […]
Provisional Multiculturalism
David Theo Goldberg Download PDF Abstract: Distinguishing between descriptive and normative conceptions of multiculturalism, I argue that multiculturalisms emerged historically to challenge dominant presumptions of demographic, social, and cultural homogeneity. Focusing on contrasting pictures in the US and South Africa, I map the historical curtailments of heterogeneities in each. I conclude by urging multicultural commitments […]
The Limits of Multiculturalism
Serhat Karakayali Download PDF Abstract: Since the antiracist debates of the 1990s, it has been proper parlance in leftist circles to speak of multiculturalism as a particular kind of racism. But what does the subject of racism have to do with multiculturalism? Even if one were to disregard the unreasonable conception that the subject is […]
Circumventing Openness: Creating New Senses of Dutchness
Isabel Hoving Download PDF Abstract: Time and again, people who come to the Netherlands are struck by the excessive openness of the Dutch landscape and the Dutch people. Migrants and visitors often remark that Dutch people boast of having created this territory themselves – they live in a transparent space they think they know and […]
The Archive, the Activist, and the Audience, or Black European Studies: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Study of Identities, Positionalities, and Differences
Fatima El-Tayeb Download PDF Abstract: My aim in this brief article is the introduction of a new international and interdisciplinary project on Black Europe, which could be of some interest to German Studies for a variety of reasons that will hopefully become evident. In doing so, though, I would like to focus initially on one […]