Bettina Brandt - Böcker

For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between "scientific" racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later.From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism. Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called "internal colonization" within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as to seaborn European competition in South Asia. Most strikingly, some of the sites of German race theorization, such as East Prussia and the Baltic states, were themselves long-established colonies with ethnic separations between ruling and laboring populations. Race theory depended not only on the exploration of distant islands in the Pacific, but on the long-term exploitation and breeding of forcefully transported populations across the Atlantic. Without the involuntary migration of Africans, nineteenth century racial scientists would not have been able to engage in arguments about crossbreeding, skull size, and skin color. The chapters in this volume explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, Brandt and Purdy explore how later race thinkers responded to earlier concepts. How did Enlightenment-era debates figure into later forms of racism? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations persisted into the twentieth century? Taking a broad view, the scholars in this volume offer a variety of positions on these and other questions as they take stock of the debates about race and the Enlightenment held over the last 20 years.

Two languages-German and Romanian-inform the novels, essays, and collage poetry of Nobel laureate Herta MÜller. Describing her writing as “autofictional,” MÜller depicts the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror on her characters based on her own experiences in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime.Herta MÜller: Politics and Aesthetics explores MÜller’s writings from different literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. Part 1 features MÜller’s Nobel lecture, five new collage poems, and an interview with Ernest Wichner, a German-Romanian author who has traveled with her and sheds light on her writing. Parts 2 and 3, featuring essays by scholars from across Europe and the United States, address the political and poetical aspects of MÜller’s texts. Contributors discuss life under the Romanian Communist dictatorship while also stressing key elements of MÜller’s poetics, which promises both self-conscious formal experimentation and political intervention.One of the first books in English to thoroughly examine MÜller’s writing, this volume addresses audiences with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power.China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power.China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense—from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites—the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these works reframe migration and temporality, bringing into view antifascist aesthetics, refugee time, postmigrant Heimat, translational poetics, and post-Holocaust affects. With new literary texts by Yoko Tawada and Zafer Şenocak and essays by Gizem Arslan, Brett de Bary, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Deniz Göktürk, John Namjun Kim, Yuliya Komska, Paul Michael Lützeler, B. Venkat Mani, Barbara Mennel, Katrina L. Nousek, Anna Parkinson, Damani J. Partridge, Erik Porath, Jamie Trnka, Ulrike Vedder, and Yasemin Yildiz.

Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense—from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites—the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these works reframe migration and temporality, bringing into view antifascist aesthetics, refugee time, postmigrant Heimat, translational poetics, and post-Holocaust affects. With new literary texts by Yoko Tawada and Zafer Şenocak and essays by Gizem Arslan, Brett de Bary, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Deniz Göktürk, John Namjun Kim, Yuliya Komska, Paul Michael Lützeler, B. Venkat Mani, Barbara Mennel, Katrina L. Nousek, Anna Parkinson, Damani J. Partridge, Erik Porath, Jamie Trnka, Ulrike Vedder, and Yasemin Yildiz.