Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift

While the prevalence of White supremacist groups in the US seems to be on the rise during the 21st century, popular cultural productions of this period suggest an increase in awareness concerning the social construction of Whiteness and its dependence on the degradation of non-Whiteness. As a test case for this hypothesis, the fantastic ghost story Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is examined in terms of its engagement with the discursive practice Toni Morrison termed American Africanism, a specific form of White supremacist discourse that targets African Americans in particular. Morrison’s analytical categories are applied to the contemporary novel to verify whether its anti-supremacist program at the story level matches its own discursive practice.

The African-American sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) travels to Germany in 1936 for a five-month research stay. In his weekly column in the "Pittsburgh Courier," he reports on the Olympic Games in Berlin, the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and vocational training at Siemens. In the last articles, which appeared after he had left the country, he presents his analysis of National Socialist society. He observes life in the totalitarian dictatorship "along the color line," from a postcolonial perspective. To his own surprise, he finds that he himself experienced no discrimination, while the persecution of the Jews, which cannot be grasped with the category of "skin color," surpasses in popular cruelty and government policy the racism he himself experienced and criticized in the United States. The essay discusses Du Bois's reports from the German dictatorship on the basis of their first German-language edition and in the context of the debate about anti-Semitism versus colonial racism and "multidirectional memory."

This article explores cultural narratives and imaginations on domestic abuse, and how they are contested in the present moment. With regard to popular discourse and recent memoirs, the aim is to analyze affective structures at play in cultural perceptions on abuse and the role of storytelling for shifting cultural perspectives of violence and intimacy, especially with regard to the cultural omnipresence of victim-blaming narratives. Drawing on the recent wave of autobiographical literature on intimate forms of abuse, such as Carmen Machado’s cross-genre memoir In the Dream House (2019) and Natasha Tretheway’s re-telling of her mother’s life and murder in Memorial Drive. A Daughter’s Memoir (2020), as well as on research in affect studies and feminist thought (Ahmed 2017), the article explores theories of dissent and defiance in the context of portrayals of abuse.

Dem Beitrag liegt der Befund zugrunde, dass poetologisch und zugleich geschichtsphilosophisch ausgerichtete Texte des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts ein unterbestimmtes Konzept in sich implementieren, mithilfe dessen sie sowohl ihre Gegenstände als auch ihre Verfahrensweisen plausibilisieren wollen: Es handelt sich um das Konzept der Männlichkeit. Indem Georg Lukács’ Theorie des Romans (1916) mit essayistischen Beiträgen Walter Benjamins konstelliert wird, soll gezeigt werden, wie eine je unterschiedliche Auffassung dieses Konzepts auch das Design der Perspektiven maßgeblich beeinflusst. Lukács’ Verständnis einer „gereiften Männlichkeit“, so die These, durchstreicht sein Romanprojekt recht eigentlich und stabilisiert zugleich das Geschlechterprojekt; bei Benjamin hingegen kündigt sich mit Blick auf sein bucklicht Männlein ein – so der Hilfsbegriff – Schwund phallozentristischer Ordnungen von Geschichte und Geschichten an, was sich letztlich als grundlegend für sein Philosophiemodell erweist. Auf diese Weise leuchtet der Beitrag etwas aus, das – in aller Mehrdeutigkeit – die Haltung der Literatur genannt werden kann.