Konturen: Vol 4 (2013)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24306

Up Against the Wall

This issue co-edited by Jeffrey S. Librett and David M. Luebke

Walls around countries provide an oddly anachronistic kind of protection in the age of digital technologies and global flows of information, goods, and populations. Yet such literal nation-state walls are experiencing a kind of world-wide resurgence, a delayed repetition. Twenty odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have the continuing work on the US-Mexico border barrier, the Israeli-Palestinian security fence, and similar types of walls between South Africa and Zimbabwe, between Saudi Arabia its neighbors, between India and Pakistan, between China and North Korea, and on and on. The understandable impulse to defend oneself against, and to control, mixing and displacements of nation-state identities and goods in the age of globalization leads, however, to mixed and contradictory results. On the one hand, this impulse creates sites of control over cross-border flows. On the other hand, it simply displaces these flows, along with their techniques and technologies: transgression, influence, and effluence reassert themselves on new sites in new ways. In this Special Issue, we examine the phenomenon of nation-state walling along the borders of Germany-France, US-Mexico, Israel-Palestine, and West Germany-East Germany from various disciplinary perspectives.

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Open Access
Introduction: Up Against the Wall
(University of Oregon, 2013) Librett, Jeffrey S.
Open Access
Die Grenzen im Kopf: Imagining walls, borders, frontiers, and national identity in Alsace/Elsaß
(University of Oregon, 2013) Wallace, Peter
Political geographers draw distinctions in English between borders, usually conceived of as lines on a map, and frontiers, which are seen as zones. In German, Grenze, a word borrowed from Slavic, and reflecting ethnic differences is often used for both. In French frontière with its roots in medieval warfare, covers both concepts. Beginning with some considerations of Alsace/Elsaß as a frontier zone between Germany and France, this paper will review ongoing debates among historians of nationalism on the definitions of nations, states, and frontiers. It will then trace the historical development in Europe of these concepts from antiquity into the early modern period. It was during the dynastic power struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concepts of nation and state took on fundamental political significance as rules made claims to sovereignty in the name of historical nations and borders became enshrined in "international" law as the result of the peace treaties sighed in Westphalia in 1648. The essay questions both the historical depth of nations, states, and borders and the teleological assumption of their inevitability and permanence in human political relationships. Nations, states, and borders are mental constructs. They were imagined and can be reimagined. A close examination of Alsatian history shows the bloody historical effects of applying these concepts arbitrarily in a cultural borderland and the potential for a different political future for Europe by reimagining borders.
Open Access
Hemispheric and Transborder Perspectives: Racialization of Mexicans through Time
(University of Oregon, 2013) Stephen, Lynn
This article embeds a discussion of contemporary transborder communities-- communities spread out in multiple locations in the U.S. and Mexico-- in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations as seen through the colonial and contemporary mapping of space, place, people, race, and ethnicitiy both visually through the creation of maps and then metaphorically through U.S. immigration policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. I argue that the concept of "transborder" which can include borders of coloniality, ethnicity, race, nation, and region can help us to illuminate U.S.-Mexico relationships through time and the complexities of the racialization of Mexicans in the U.S.
Open Access
Why Wall? A Kleinian Reading of the Israeli-Palestinian Resistance in Politics
(University of Oregon, 2013) Mukamel, Maya
The present work explores the separation barriers built by the Israeli government and military as products and producers of asymmetries of power between Israelis and Palestinians; and, at the same time, as products and a unique cultural property of the national adversary; violence and aggression on the part of the adversary are perceived as a sign of a primitive morality, detached from political and historical circumstances; and violence of each party is justified as a defensive war on the "evil" other. A return to Melanie Klein allows to trace these dynamics, and to raise fundamental questions on the role of the cultural analyst.
Open Access
"Everything has its Limits!" The Berlin Wall and the Problem of Desire
(University of Oregon, 2013) Urang, John Griffith
By the East German authorities’ account, the “Anti-Fascist Wall of Protection,” or Berlin Wall, was built to thwart hordes of anti-communist commandos poised to invade the socialist republic. If the Party acknowledged the stream of refugees from East to West at all, it was only to decry the efforts of paid agitators luring or coercing skilled East German workers over the border. These paranoid scenarios, I will argue, represented more than just hard-line propaganda and political expediency; they arose from fundamental assumptions about the psyche and society. Through an exploration of East German cultural responses to the construction of the Wall, my paper outlines the ideological fantasies of the individual and social body that precipitated this drastic measure.
Open Access
Walled in Literature. An Architectural Inquiry
(University of Oregon, 2013) Wegmann, Nikolaus
The Berlin Wall is – in spite of its obvious function and its supposedly simple form (Gestalt) – an object that must be read carefully. Countless attempts have been made to analyze the significance of the Berlin Wall. The present analysis does not make use of statistics, mass media representations, or historical moralities in its attempt to arrive at a new understanding of the Wall. Instead, the focus is on the Wall as a complex architectural form and its function for a second German national literature after 1961.
Open Access
The Impossibility of the Wenderoman: History, Retrospective, and Concilation
(University of Oregon, 2013) Donahue, William Collins
“The Impossibility of the Wenderoman” argues against the conventional conception of the Wenderoman (and of thematically related films and plays) that views it essentially as a kind of cultural document of the German “Wende.” Placing the question within the larger problematic of historical fiction and political literature, this paper notes first that the very genre is itself an impossibility insofar as its boundaries are ever-expanding. The quintessential contribution of the genre, this paper argues, is twofold: retrospective and “conciliatory.” It is the first insofar as we are willing to look beyond literature and film that focuses principally on the Wende per se, and instead take Unification as a juncture from which truly to look back (taking advantage of the new temporal perspective given us by “the turn”), and thus reevaluate Cold War conventions, specifically those governing German-German and German-American cultural relations that often went unquestioned in the postwar period. In other words, the Wenderoman dimension I elaborate (drawing especially on Kempowski’s Letzte Gruesse) may contribute to a more profound understanding of the period it “closes” than the one it ostensibly celebrates and inaugurates. Secondly, the Wenderoman functions as a prominent vehicle of cultural memory, preserving various moments of a Marxist-inspired social agenda for future generations. Agamben’s notion of “the contemporary” as well as foundational concepts of “cultural memory” are useful here. The discussion features well-known films (Good Bye, Lenin! and Das Leben der Anderen), theater (Brussig’s Leben bis Maenner), as well as several novels. Whether this process of cultural “sifting” will remain purely elegiac, or serve as a resource for imagining alternative social possibilities in the future is of course impossible to know—both because it is far too general of a hypothesis, and still far too early to tell.

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