Pia Wiegmink – författare

Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery, the contributors demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvements from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the collection brings together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa, thereby seeking to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other. The collection demonstrates that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in the German cultural memory and identity to a much larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery, the contributors demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvements from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the collection brings together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa, thereby seeking to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other. The collection demonstrates that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in the German cultural memory and identity to a much larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance.

Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance.

Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of dependency across time and space. Personal testimonies, autobiographies and archival traces serve here as contested sites of self-representation, revealing as much about the structures of dependency – such as slavery, serfdom, indenture, captivity, debt bondage and coerced labour – as about strategies of resistance, agency and relational and communal self-fashioning.

Contributors engage with a wide range of case studies from North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Central Asia, Mughal India and Tibet. Together, they probe archival silences, editorial interventions and the interplay between autonomy and dependency that unsettles simple binaries of slavery and freedom, voice and silence, life and death. Uniting this interdisciplinary inquiry is the shared affiliation of its authors with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), a research hub dedicated to investigating asymmetrical dependencies in global historical perspective.

The book is designed for advanced undergraduate students, graduate researchers, and established academics interested in the intersection of personal narrative and historical analysis. It will prove particularly valuable for scholars examining questions of agency, resistance and self-representation within contexts of structural inequality. Additionally, the volume serves as a crucial resource for historians, literary scholars, and social scientists investigating the global dimensions of dependency relationships and their documentation through personal testimony.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of dependency across time and space. Personal testimonies, autobiographies and archival traces serve here as contested sites of self-representation, revealing as much about the structures of dependency – such as slavery, serfdom, indenture, captivity, debt bondage and coerced labour – as about strategies of resistance, agency and relational and communal self-fashioning.

Contributors engage with a wide range of case studies from North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Central Asia, Mughal India and Tibet. Together, they probe archival silences, editorial interventions and the interplay between autonomy and dependency that unsettles simple binaries of slavery and freedom, voice and silence, life and death. Uniting this interdisciplinary inquiry is the shared affiliation of its authors with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), a research hub dedicated to investigating asymmetrical dependencies in global historical perspective.

The book is designed for advanced undergraduate students, graduate researchers, and established academics interested in the intersection of personal narrative and historical analysis. It will prove particularly valuable for scholars examining questions of agency, resistance and self-representation within contexts of structural inequality. Additionally, the volume serves as a crucial resource for historians, literary scholars, and social scientists investigating the global dimensions of dependency relationships and their documentation through personal testimony.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.