Konturen
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Konturen ("contours" or "outlines") — an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the analysis of borders, framing determinations, and related figures of delimitation of all kinds.
These include theoretical and historical, practical and speculative, aesthetic, political, and methodological borders, among others. "Konturen" is a German word that derives from the French tour, tourner, terms that bespeak a turning, such as the turning of a French word into a German one (or the reverse). We publish innovative work that takes into account the contributions of recent philosophy and theory to an understanding of problematic discursive places of meeting, overlap, or disjunction. Konturen currently publishes one Special Issue annually, constituted through invited submissions and calls for papers.
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Item Open Access Julia Lesage: “I was never anything less than the person I am.” An Interview with the Author, Editor, and Filmmaker Julia Lesage(University of Oregon, 2022) Boos, SonjaLong recognized as a pioneer of experimental filmmaking and feminist documentary theory, Julia Lesage is the closest we have to a feminist film scholar-practitioner. This interview was conducted by Sonja Boos on 16 January, 2020.Item Open Access From Acting to Action: Delphine Seyrig, Les Insoumuses, and Feminist Video in 1970s France(University of Oregon, 2022) Zapperi, GiovannaMostly known as one of the leading actresses in 1960s-1970s French cinema, Delphine Seyrig was also a media and a feminist activist working collaboratively within the framework of the women’s liberation movement. This article proposes to tackle Seyrig’s involvement in feminist video production the 1970s and explores the continuum she inhabited, from the auteur cinema in which she was actress and muse, to the disobedient practices in which she was video maker, actress and activist. Seyrig’s meditation on her work as an actress, as well as on the patriarchal structures sustaining the film industry, strongly resonates with recent debates prompted by the #metoo movement.Item Open Access Film Spaces, Memory Traces: The Family House in Recha Jungman’s Etwas tut weh (1979)(University of Oregon, 2022) Brauerhoch, AnnetteIn 2016 Recha Jungmann’s film Etwas tut weh (Something Hurts, 1976) was rediscovered and restored. Jungmann, alongside with Ula Stöckl, was one of the few women graduates of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where Edgar Reitz and Alexander Kluge taught. In Etwas tut weh she revisits her family’s former estate which is now a ruin, abandoned and vandalized. This article explores how memory work and camera work unite to create spaces in which her family finds a (new) aesthetic home, and in which the film as a form of remembrance creates solidarity with the audience in the cinema -- a space that can give a home to films and spectators alike.Item Open Access Genevieve Yue, Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality. Fordham University Press, 2020.(University of Oregon, 2022) Pek, Ying SzeReview Essay.Item Open Access Lucy Reynolds, Women Artists, Feminism, and the Moving Image. Bloomsbury, 2019Jillian(University of Oregon, 2022) Vasko, JillianReview Essay.Item Open Access Poetics of Cross-Cultural Relation: Critical Performances by Artists kate-hers RHEE and Patty Chang(University of Oregon, 2022) Lin, JennyThis article explores anti-racist, feminist performance and video art by kate-hers RHEE and Patty Chang. Parodic performances of awkward sexual encounters in works such as RHEE’s The Chocolate Kiss (2013) and Chang’s The Product Love (2009) embody and deconstruct identity formation within transnational German and Asian American contexts. I explore how RHEE and Chang distinctly challenge sexist and racist stereotypes and the objectification of Asian women, while problematizing cultural categorization through (mis)translations and poetic relations. The article illuminates how these artists complicate Asian American identities via variegated explorations of critical race theories and connected histories of cross-cultural representation.Item Open Access The Aesthetic Hyper-Object in Experimental Short Film Practices: Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing’s Art Documentaries(University of Oregon, 2022) Ostmeier, DorotheeShort experimental films by the German female director duo Lina Sieckmann und Miriam Gossing put domestic environments on cinematic display in new and challenging ways. The essay discusses the links between the films’ documentary agendas, surreal visual montages, and poetic feminine voice-overs. Selected films are placed into dialogues with Michael Renov’s concept of aesthetics in documentary film and Timothy Morton’s notion of the “hyperobject.” This theoretical framework highlights the tensions between the films’ powerful aesthetics and feminine queer desire as they decenter socially ingrained dualisms.Item Open Access Brown Eyed Boy: Narrating Internalized Oppression and Misogynoir in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember(University of Oregon, 2020) Meir-Cruz, BenjaminThe rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing extremism in Sweden in the wake of growing migration has affected Sweden’s global reputation as a model progressive welfare state that prioritizes human rights and generously extends citizenship, welfare, and labor rights to migrants and asylum seekers. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Allt jag inte minns [Everything I Don’t Remember] (2015), xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racialized heteronormativity appear in the unlikely form of Vandad, a hypermasculine Muslim immigrant who has secretly fallen in love with another Swedish Arab man. This study involves a narratological analysis of how internalized racism inspires the novel’s narrator of color to produce figurative narrative acts of internal colonialism—that is, violent narrative acts, made possible by the effects of racism, against other non-white characters in the story. The essay additionally explores how the objectification of non-white women’s bodies and acts of misogynoir, the anti-Black misogyny that Black women experience, by queer men of color in the text operate as secondhand technologies of oppression manufactured by the political discourse of the extreme right. The essay concludes with a critique of the far right’s exploitation of collective cultural memory to mass-produce white nationalism in the guise of tradition and the implications this has for non-white Swedes and migrants in Sweden.Item Open Access A Staged Migration to Europe: Özdamar’s Perikızı and Transgenerational Trauma(University of Oregon, 2020) Aksin, JocelynJocelyn Aksin’s research is based in Turkish-German studies with a focus on transnational memory. She has published on the role of Turkish newspapers in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn and Bitteres Wasser by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and received her Ph. D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 with a dissertation on representations of memory in Turkish-German novels by Zafer Şenocak, Aras Ören, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Jocelyn began studying Turkish as a graduate student in the German program at Washington University, and was awarded a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish language study at Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University). After spending nearly eight years in Istanbul where she completed her dissertation and worked as a language teacher, Jocelyn relocated to Greensboro, N.C. and joined the German Program at UNCG as a lecturer in 2018.Item Open Access Migration’s Alienations: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage(University of Oregon, 2020) Ostmeier, Dorothee; Najjar, Michael MalekBrecht’s so-called anti-war drama Mother Courage and her Children (1939) will be read as a migration drama that demystifies rhetorical cynicism as a coping device for the traumatic torments of migration. By placing Brecht’s work in the context of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of cynicism, our reading demonstrates how this work adds further perspectives to Thomas Nail’s recent theory of migration and to the discussion of the play’s theatrical production.Item Open Access Feminism, Theory, Film: Critical Intersections in the Practice and Theorization of Experimental Filmmaking since the 1970s (Introduction)(University of Oregon, 2020) Boos, SonjaIntroduction to Volume 12 of Konturen.Item Open Access Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-91), or: the Anthropological De-struction of “Africa”(University of Oregon, 2020) Ba, Amadou Oury; Translated by Jeffrey S. LibrettIn his work Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-1791), the preacher and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder deals critically with the philosophy of Enlightenment, in which he sees the seed of a racial and cultural classification that considers peoples outside Europe as inferior. This centrally included Africa and its inhabitants as represented by German philosophers. Such a way of imagining Africa, widely shared amongst thinkers of the Enlightenment, echoes still today in various representations in the Western media, and could even serve as an explanation of the current migration drama in the Mediterranean. Herder, who was well informed of these representations in his own day, attempted, in Ideas, to deconstruct the then prevalent image of Africa and its peoples, and thereby entered into an intellectual dispute with his philosophical contemporaries, whose position was to reaffirm the supremacy of European culture and soe justify slavery and colonialism. This paper first focuses on Herder’s context, then explains his positions and his work, and shows how his attempt ended in a de-construction of the «Africa» of the Enlightenment.Item Open Access “More Than a Trip”: Migration as Memory, Mobility and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004)(University of Oregon, 2020) Masterson-Algar, AraceliIn Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific.Item Open Access Manlio Graziano, What is a Border? Stanford Briefs, 2018.(University of Oregon, 2020) Klueppel, JoschaReview EssayItem Open Access “We Can Do It” [Wir schaffen das] – Creative Impulses Through Migration (a Report from September 2017, with an Afterword on the Situation Today)(University of Oregon, 2020) Scholl, Sabine; Translated by Joscha KlueppelGeopolitical changes have always caused human beings to leave their domiciles and seek new homelands. The countries that accept them profit both from their capacity to work and their creative potential. In recent decades, Germany too has come to define itself as a land of immigrants, and in the meantime the effects of the arrival of people from Eastern countries, from Turkey, from the former Yugoslavia after it was destroyed by war, and since 2015 in larger numbers from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, are mirrored in German-language literature. This essay attempts to provide a report on recent authors and new literary publications in connection with current political changes in Germany, e.g. the growth of parties and tendencies hostile to foreigners.Item Open Access The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition(University of Oregon, 2020) Reisoğlu, Mert BahadırThis article examines the role exile plays in the works of the first generation of Turkish German authors by focusing on Güney Dal. The first part of the article deals with Güney Dal’s interviews with other Turkish German authors in 1983. Even though the authors interviewed by Dal do not consider themselves exiles, I show that exilic consciousness is marked not only by the impossibility of returning home, a condition that the authors interviewed deny sharing with exiles, but also by the fact that the exilic subject is already displaced within and is as such unable to be at home. In the second part, I interpret Dal’s novel Eine Kurze Reise nach Gallipoli (1994), which he wrote after moving back to Turkey, as a work that showcases this insurmountable uprootedness and argue that Dal’s modernist novel shows that the disintegration of exilic consciousness can establish a link with political and ethical issues beyond the reach of the isolated and paranoid subject.Item Open Access Borders, Migrants, and Writing(University of Oregon, 2020) Nail, ThomasWe tend to think of migrants as moving between states and borders as fortifications of states. I would like to prove the reverse: that migrants produce and reproduce the state in the first place. I think we have got this story backward, and I think a very different politics would arise by getting this the right way round. I would like to try and rethink political philosophy starting from the figure of the migrant.Item Open Access Writing Migration: Points of Departure and Arrival in History and Reason(University of Oregon, 2020) Librett, Jeffrey S.Introduction to volume XI of Konturen, Writing Migration.Item Open Access Introduction: Against Assimilation(University of Oregon, 2018) Gölz, Sabine I.This special issue of Konturen calls for renewed attention to the study of reading, long neglected in literary studies. It calls for a re-conceptualization of our interactions with writing, texts, and literary language—for a radical reorientation of what we read for. As we wake up to our difference from the text, we rediscover possibilities that we have habitually overlooked. Some central assumptions emerge: Writing is an apparatus that harnesses its readers – us. We may think that we use it, but the reverse is just as true: it uses us. Especially important are figurative, rhetorical, and mostly subliminal dimensions by which literary language interpellates us, lines us up according our identifications, and lures us into mimesis, into mechanically conforming to the constellations it prefigures. Gendered signals are central to this, because they elicit particularly mechanical and predictable responses. Writing promotes its own interests—not ours. But writing is also fundamentally incomplete. It needs the living to reproduce itself. This realization is profoundly liberating: if we read ourselves as not in the text, as the very site of the incompletion of writing, we abandon the failed project of representation and wake up in (and to) the Spielraum (space for play, leeway), in and as the ground of language. Here and now, we can begin to work towards re-configuring the language we have inherited.Item Open Access Apostrophe's Double(University of Oregon, 2018) Gölz, Sabine I.“Apostrophe’s Double” is part of a larger research project studying the (often subliminal) strategies by which literary language writing controls its readership. Part I of the essay argues that the rhetorical trope “apostrophe” functions as one such interpellative apparatus that partitions our world and splits our practices. The trope’s operational distinction between authorized speakers / readers vs. ‘dummy’ addressees / targets sets in motion a hierarchical and divisive logic that empowers some and disqualifies others. Part II argues that there is a second version (or ‘turn’) of the figure of apostrophe that has been neglected altogether, one in which the ‘target’ responds not by turning to the interpellation but by turning away instead. This turn away is key to the poetics of certain strong women poets. Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Anrufung des großen Bären” (“Invocation of the Great Bear”) provides a lucid model of the transition from one to the other. Apostrophe is thus double: one establishes the apparatus, the other deconstructs it. Part III contrasts two radically divergent uses of language corresponding to these turns: Bachmann’s “Frankfurt Lectures” enact the radical change towards which her poem leads us. Jonathan Culler’s seminal article “Apostrophe” exemplifies the relation to language Bachmann frees herself from. Two subject positions emerge in the wake of this double apostrophic, each with its own constraints: one is empowered by the apparatus yet must remain subservient to it. The other reclaims sovereignty as a living being from the apparatus, on the condition of radically unrepresentable.