Volume 1: Foreword
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, […]
Goodbye, Germany / by Werner Sollors
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 […]
Global Heimat Germany: Migration and the Transnationalization of the Nation-State / by Regina Römhild
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” […]
The Rhetoric of Origin: Language and Exclusion in Historical Perspective / by Hinrich C. Seeba
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 Multilingual Experience: Insights from Language Memoirs / by Claire Kramsch
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 […]
Cultural Translation and the Problem of Language: Yiddish in Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft / by Sarah Bailey
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 […]
Provisional Multiculturalism / by David Theo Goldberg
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 […]
The Limits of Multiculturalism / by Serhat Karakayali
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 […]
Circumventing Openness: Creating New Senses of Dutchness / by Isabel Hoving
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 […]
The Archive, the Activist, and the Audience, or Black European Studies: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Study of Identities, Positionalities, and Differences / by Fatima El-Tayeb
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 […]