Interdisziplinäre Ringvorlesung im Sommersemester 2013

Eine Kooperation zwischen dem Romanischen und dem Englischen Seminar der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Thies & Prof. Dr. Horst Tonn

Die Amerikas in hemisphärischer Perspektive – Kultur, Politik, Gesellschaft

Mittwoch 18-20 Uhr c.t., Raum 037, Brechtbau

Diese Ringvorlesung führt Tübinger und auswärtige Forscher zu einem Dialog über die transnationalen Verflechtungen der Amerikas zusammen. Vor dem Hintergrund des postnationalen und interamerikanischen Paradigmas, das sich aktuell in der anglo- und lateinamerikanischen Forschungslandschaft abzeichnet, soll die Vorlesungsreihe ein Bild von aktuellen Dynamiken der Hybridisierung, der Globalisierung, der regionalen Integration wie auch regionaler Widerstände dagegen entwerfen. Die Rolle und Funktion der Medien, transnationale Migrationen und sich daraus ergebende neue Vernetzungen sowie Veränderungen in Identitätskonzepten, in urbanen Räumen und vielfältigen Machtverhältnissen sind thematische Schwerpunkte.

Dr. Joachim Michael (Universität Hamburg)

Gewalt und Urbanität im brasilianischen Gegenwartsfilm

Die bekanntesten brasilianischen Gegenwartsfilme stellen einen deutlichen Zusammenhang zwischen Großstadt und Gewalt her. Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002) und Tropa de elite I & II (Elite Squad I & II) (2007 und 2009) sind beredte Beispiele. Um genau zu sein, zeigen sie jedoch nicht, dass die Megalopole (in diesen Fällen Rio de Janeiro) als solche ein Szenario der Gewalt darstellt, bzw. dass der urbane Raum zum Schauplatz der Gewalt mutiert. Vielmehr bringen diese Filme die unerbittliche Aufteilung der brasilianischen Großstadt in Viertel des Wohlstands und in solche der Entbehrung zum Ausdruck. Die Riesenstadt zerfällt in unterschiedliche urbane Räume auf der einen und in suburbane Randbezirke auf der anderen, in die öffentliche Infrastrukturen nicht vordringen. Wenn die Gewalt in den Filmen v.a. in den favelas tobt, heißt dies daher nicht, dass jene aus den Armenvierteln entstünde, sondern dass die Ausgrenzung hier in blanke Gewalt umschlägt.

Gegenstand der Vorlesung ist ein bedeutender Film, der – weniger spektakulär als die genannten – die desaströse Dynamik der Ausgrenzung umso präziser und raffinierter in Szene setzt. Es handelt sich um O invasor (Trespasser) (2002) von Beto Brant. Der Film spielt in São Paulo. O invasor zeigt, dass der Wohlstand nur auf brutaler Ausschaltung rivalisierender Ansprüche gründet. Der Film diskutiert jedoch zugleich, dass sich diese Ansprüche unmöglich vollständig zurückdrängen lassen. So spielt er die Möglichkeit durch, dass es dem Ausgegrenzten unversehens gelingt, sich in der Wohlstandszone festzusetzen. Dass die Mittelschicht in dieser Möglichkeit die große Bedrohung imaginiert und angesichts dieses Alptraums ihr Abwehrpotential mobilisiert, ist der eigentliche Gegenstand des Filmes.

Zur Person:

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Universität Hamburg. Unterrichtet iberoamerikanische Literatur, Kultur und Medien am Institut für Romanistik. 2008 und 2009 bis 2010 Gastdozenturen an der Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexiko. Dissertation in Freiburg i.Br. über lateinamerikanische Telenovelas (Telenovelas in Lateinamerika: intermediale Gattungspassagen und kulturelle Zäsur, 2010). Eine Reihe von Beiträgen zur Medientheorie, zu lateinamerikanischen Medienkulturen, zu Gewalt und Apokalypse in Literatur und Film sowie zur Kolonialliteratur. Habilitation mit dem Titel: „Die steinerne Geschichte. Apokalypse und Literatur in Mexiko“.

Dr. Thomas Fatheuer (ehem. Büroleiter Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Rio de Janeiro)

Brasilien: endlich Großmacht? - Die neue Rolle Brasiliens in der Welt

Als Teil der BRICS Gruppe ist Brasiliens Rolle als neuer globaler Akteur allgemein anerkannt. Wirtschaftliche Stabilität und Erfolge in der Armutspolitik lassen die jüngste Entwicklung als Erfolgsgeschichte erscheinen - zumindest in den Augen der Regierung. Aber das brasilianische Modell beruht zentral auf dem Export von Agrargütern und der Ausbeutung natürlicher Ressourcen. Und die neue Rolle Brasiliens als "global player" birgt Konfliktpotential mit den lateinamerikanischen Nachbarn.

Zur Person:

Thomas Fatheuer hat Sozialwissenschaften und klassische Philologie in Münster studiert. Von 1992 bis 2010 lebte er in Brasilien. Von 2003 bis Juli 2010 leitet er das Büro der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Brasilien. Vorher arbeitete er in Projekten zum Waldschutz im Amazonasgebiet für den DED und die GTZ. Derzeit lebt er als Autor und Berater in Berlin. Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind internationale Wald- und Klimapolitik, das brasilianische Entwicklungsmodell und brasilianischer Fußball.

Prof. em. Andreas Boeckh Ph.D. (Universität Tübingen)

Lateinamerika im Spannungsfeld von Imitation und Eigenständigkeit - Europa und die USA als Vorbild und Trauma

In Lateinamerika war und ist das Verhältnis zu Europa und den USA seit der Unabhängigkeit von einem hohen Maß an Ambivalenz geprägt. Auf der einen Seite sind die traumatischen Erfahrungen der Kolonialzeit und auch postkolonialer Erfahrungen mit dem europäischen und US-amerikani­schen Imperialismus durchaus präsent und entfalten nach wie vor eine identitätsstiftende Wirkung. In der jüngsten Vergangenheit stand vor allem der kürzlich verstorbene venezolanische Präsident Hugo Chávez in dieser Tradition. Auf der anderen Seite waren Europa und seit dem ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert auch die USA die Vorbilder für die eigene Entwicklung: Sie lieferten die Blaupausen von Modernität, sie defi­nierten die Ziele der eigenen Entwicklung. Es scheint jedoch, als sei man gegenwärtig in Lateinamerika dabei, sich aus diesem Zwiespalt zu befreien.

Zur Person:

Prof. em. Andeas Boeckh Ph.D. war von 1989 - 2009 Professor für Politik in Lateinamerika und Entwicklungstheorie an der Universität Tübingen. Zu seinen Forschungsinteressen gehören u.a Entwicklungspolitik- und theorie, sowie die politischen Systeme und Außenbeziehungen Lateinamerikas.

Which Way Home Documentary Film (USA, 2009, OF)

Abstract:

As the USA continues to build a wall between itself and Mexico, Which Way Home shows the personal side of immigration. It takes a look at the issue as seen through the eyes of children facing harrowing dangers with enormous courage and resourcefulness as they endeavor to make it to the United States. The film follows several unaccompanied child migrants as they journey through Mexico en route to the U.S. on a freight train they call "The Beast". Director Rebecca Cammisa (Sister Helen) tracks the stories of children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year-old Hondurans who are desperately trying to reach their families in Minnesota, and talks about Jose, a ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center, and focuses on Kevin, a canny, streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach New York City and send money back to his family. These are stories of hope and courage, disappointment and sorrow. They are the ones you never hear about – the invisible ones.

Prof. Dr. Wilfried Raussert (Universität Bielefeld)

City of Angels: Narrating Urban Complexity in Hollywood Film

Urban Complexity in Film / Los Angeles as 'Ethnicity': Crash and Falling Down

The city as text today is characterized by complexity, simultaneity, and multiplicity; the city as a space is heterotopical, shaping as well as being shaped by transnational, diasporic, and intercultural flows and always in the process of becoming. The presentation will take a look at Los Angeles as prototype of contemporary global cities and at two films in particular, Crash and Falling Down, to analyze the intersection of spatial, racial and ethnic complexity in the selected visual narrations of the City of Angels.

Zur Person:

Wilfried Raussert is Chair and Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of Inter-American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is founder and general editor of the ejournal fiar forum for inter-american research (www.interamerica.de), the online journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. He is currently working on a book project titled (Trans)Cultural Mobility and the New American Studies. He received his MA and PhD at the University of Mississippi, Oxford and completed his 'habilitation' at Humboldt University Berlin. He held visiting professorships at the University of Mississippi, at the Universidad de Guadalajara and at Humboldt University Berlin. From 2004 until 2006 he was Professor of North American Literatures at University College Cork, Ireland.

Prof. Dr. José Carlos Lozano (Texas A&M University)

Media and the Culture of Legality in the Mexican-American Borderlands

 

The presentation analyzes the coverage of organized crime, its related violence and the Mexican government war on drug cartels in Mexico in Mexican and Texan border newspapers, to identify the degree in which the news coverage indirectly promotes or hinders the principles of culture of lawfulness. The presentation discusses the findings of a content analysis of two weeks of coverage by eight daily newspapers with circulation in northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas: El Diario (Nuevo Laredo), El Mañana (Reynosa), Noreste (Matamoros) and El Norte in Mexico’s Northeast and The Laredo Morning Times (Laredo), McAllen Monitor (McAllen), The Brownsville Herald (Brownsville) and The Express-News (San Antonio) in Southeast Texas. The unit of analysis was every news story dealing with insecurity, drug-trafficking, violence, corruption and law enforcement on both sides of the border between Texas and Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon.

I analyze the implications of current coverage and the possible ways to improve it for the promotion, reinforcement and consolidation of a culture of lawfulness in the readers as a way to establish bases for a long-term solution for border crime and violence. In the presentation I discuss specific measures to respect the human rights of victims and detainees in the news coverage and also strategies to avoid the promotion of fear, distrust and powerlessness that encourage authoritarian and violent solutions to societal problems. Based on this diagnosis, I suggest possible public policy-oriented measures newspaper editors and reporters, police authorities and public officials could adopt for reinforcing a culture of lawfulness in border audiences through the news media’s coverage.

Zur Person

José Carlos Lozano is Professor and Director of the Communication Program at Texas A&M International University (Laredo, Texas) since August 2012. He got his M.A. inc Communication Research from Leicester University, England and his Ph.D. in International Communication and Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Regular Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since 2007.

He is also affiliated with the Tecnologico de Monterrey (Monterrey Tech), in Mexico, where he was Director of the Graduate and Undergraduate Programs in Communications, and Director of the Research Center in Communication from 1992-2012. He founded there the Observatory of Media and Culture of Lawfulness, devoted to the monitoring of Mexican news media coverage of organized crime and the War on Drugs, coordinating long-term analyses of many different daily newspapers and television news shows.

He is the author of numerous books and journal articles in the areas of mass and international communication, in particular a textbook in mass communication theories widely used in Mexican and Latin American schools.

Peter Boag

In his lecture “Spatial and Sexual Boundaries on the American Frontier”, Professor Peter Boag focuses on a few key texts (from the time of the U.S.-Mexican War to the 2005 path-breaking film Brokeback Mountain) to explore the tradition in American culture that judges its Southwest borderlands, particularly the Mexican side of the border, to be a deviant space in terms of both sexuality and gender. This tradition has served to reinforce connections Americans have long made between whiteness, masculinity, and patriotism in their own nation.

Personal Information:

Prof. Dr. Peter Boag earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Oregon in 1988. He his professor of history at Washington State University and is a guest this year of the Fulbright program, teaching at Eberhard Karls University. His 2011 book, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past received the 2013 Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. The prize is granted biennially for the best book in American frontier history.

Astrid M. Fellner

Hemispheric Encounters: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Sex/Gender

 

In my lecture, I intend to take a look at the formation of the modern sex/gender system as hemispheric encounter. Proposing a model of analysis that takes into account the interactions between three cultures in contact in early America—European, Native American, and the emerging Anglo-American—I want to show that a triangulated approach exposes hidden narratives and enables us to see that the making of sex/gender in the United States is embedded within a series of hemispheric cultural flows that have characterized American borderlands. I want to argue that the sexual knowledges of the borderlands that were almost erased by European settler colonizers constitute subaltern knowledges, which are deeply buried in the cultural imaginary of the United States and continue to have the power of resisting dominant hierarchies based on taken-for-granted categories of race, sex, gender, and nationality. The Native multiple gender system constituted a threat to the New Republic and continued to be problematic during the period of empire making, a time during which the Anglo-American binary sex/gender system and notions of homo- and heterosexuality were also in the making.

Personal Information:

Astrid M. Fellner is Professor and Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. From 2008-09 she was “Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair” at Stanford University and from 1993-2008 she taught at the University of Vienna. She currently is PI in the DFG-funded interdisciplinary International Graduate Research Training Program “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space” that Saarland University and University of Trier are conducting with the Université de Montréal. She is also Director of CEUS (Collegium Europaeum Universitatis Saraviensis) in which she is the initiator of a project entitled “Border Spaces.”

Prof. Dr. Horst Tonn

Personal Information

Horst Tonn is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen/Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the Free University Berlin with a dissertation on Chicano Literature. Has has previously taught in Germany at the Universities of Mainz/Germersheim, Erlangen and Duisburg and abroad at California State Univ./Fullerton and at Poone Univ. in India. His research areas are Hispanic American literature and culture, documentary (writing, film, photography), cultural globalization and media representations of war. Major publications: Zeitgenössische Chicano-Erzählliteratur in englischer Sprache: Autobiographie und Roman. (Frankfurt/M., 1988); Wahre Geschichten. Die amerikanische Dokumentarliteratur im 20. Jahrhundert. (Essen, 1996); Kriegskorrespondenten: Deutungsinstanzen in der Mediengesellschaft. Ed. with Barbara Korte (Wiesbaden, 2007); Amerikanisierung – Globalisierung. Transnationale Prozesse im europäischen Alltag. Ed. with Ute Bechdolf and Reinhard Johler (Trier, 2007).

Ana Farach

The Mexican Revolution is perhaps the most influential event in the literary imagination of twentieth century female and male Mexican writers. Although to a lesser degree, this same event has yielded important representations in American literature in authors such as Katherine Anne Porter, Josephina Niggli and Sandra Cisneros. In light of current concern regarding the construction of hemispheric perspectives that challenge the value of political borders for defining national literary histories, I consider how representations of the Mexican Revolution on both sides of the border serve as a building block in theorizing a transnational literary space that speaks to differences in language, culture, and even gender as part of an uniquely American phenomenon.

Personal Info:

Ana Farach is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at The University of Maryland who studies American and Latin American literature with a special focus on literature of the Mexican Revolution, Hemispheric American studies, women's literature and gender theory. As a teaching fellow at the University of Tuebingen, she is currently leading a seminar on Latin American cultures in American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her dissertation project focuses on expanding critical discourses on literature of the Mexican Revolution in view of its value as a transnational and Hemispheric phenomenon that may help build closer ties between Mexican and American literature and imagine their combined and dynamic literary history.