Conveners: Stefanie Mueller (Frankfurt), Katja Sarkowsky (Augsburg)

Presentations:

Angela Benkhadda (Bonn): “'A Greater Law': Legal Discourses, Citizenship, and Temporal Sovereignty in Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni”

Stefan Benz (Bonn): “'We gon’ need that land back': Indigenous Hip Hop (Re)Claims Detroit"

Simone Knewitz (Bonn): “'River, River, River': (Video-)Poetic Interventions in Indigenous Environmental Activism"

Kerstin Knopf (Bremen): "Land, Belonging, Stewardship, and Responsibility in Angeline Boulley's Firekeeper's Daughter"

"This workshop focuses on how Indigenous writers and filmmakers explore the intersection of competing concepts of ownership, law, and citizenship as they pertain to historical and contemporary Indigenous lives and communities. The understanding of ‘ownership’ and ‘property’ as well as that of ‘citizenship’ tends to differ significantly between settler and Indigenous societies, and theorists and writers of Native resurgence draw on Indigenous stories, storytelling, and political thought to reconfigure and reimagine the crucial nexus between property, citizenship, and the law in Indigenous lives and Indigenous-settler relations (Lyons 2010; Simpson 2013; Coulthard 2014). Hence, all three terms – ownership, law, and citizenship – can refer to hegemonic concepts as well as Indigenous and tribally specific understandings and models, and speakers reflect upon the ways in which Indigenous literatures and film draw on different models, the topics and aesthetic forms they choose, and to what effect. In this context, ‘belonging’ seeks to capture forms of affiliation and kinship recognition as well as forms of ‘ownership’, and literature and film provide an important arena in which such multi-facetted kinds of belonging are negotiated and tested."

 

Convener: Grit Grigoleit-Richter (Passau)

Presentations:

Andrew Wells (Kiel): “When Slavery Didn’t Pay: Compensation for Slave Rebellion in New York City, 1712-1742”

Moana Jean Packo (Erfurt): “On Time and Redress: ‘40 Acres and a mule’ in Memory and Legacy”

Anthony Obst (FU Berlin): “Slavery … 1939 Style”: Abolitionist Writing on the 'Bronx Slave Market'”

Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich (Kiel): “‘We welcome the proletarian monster’: On Whiteness and Abolition”

Felix Krämer (Erfurt): “Expropriated Freedom: Indebtedness after the Civil War”

"Race and property have had an entangled relationship in the U.S. since English colonialists
established the first permanent settlements. Throughout U.S. history, the creation of property
has depended on racial distinctions and subsequent categorization. Whiteness as a racial
category allowed both the possession of property, albeit only for men in earlier times, and
accrued social and economic values to those who possess it and thus conferred power and
privileges to Whites at the expense of non-White people. Black functions thereby as the
opposing pole in the racial category and is tightly interwoven with various forms of
commodification as the history of hyper-exploitation of Black labor in chattel slavery or debt
peonage demonstrate. Whiteness as property became politicized in notions of individualism, or cultural narratives that propagate White supremacy, and is accordingly firmly inscribed in
social practices, norms, cultural productions, policies, institutions, or legal entitlements. The
supreme court, for example, protected Whiteness in 1896 in its decision Plessy v Ferguson and thus bestowed capital and power to the beholder as Katharina Pistor articulates in the Code of Capital. Whiteness became -as legal scholar Cheryl Harris’s influential work posits- “status v property” that can be successfully converted to conventional forms of property as prevailing property asymmetries and cleaving inequalities for example in wealth, land, or housing amply show. Recurring debates on reparations to compensate for slavery, forced labor, and the exploitation of Black bodies reflect this history of the property order. Yet Whiteness as property has not decreased in value and continues to confer privileges as the bailout of the investment banking sector, or of Donald Trump in 2012 by the Deutsche Bank reveal; examples that seem like a permanent jubilee against the backdrop of an entangled property order.

This workshop seeks to investigate the intricate relationship between race and property in
accordance with class and gender as intersecting categories. Building on “racial capitalism” as a conceptual framework we seek to illuminate the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation for racialized minorities, in distinct historical moments, specific localities, forms of cultural legislation, or their outcomes and social, economic, and psychologic effects on both Whites and racialized minorities."

Conveners: Juliane Borosch (Duisburg-Essen), Maria Sulimma (Freiburg)

Presentations:

James Peacock (Keele): “Bullet Holes and Cocktails: Authenticity, Gentrification, and the Case of Summerhill”

Julia Roth (Bielefeld): “’We built this shit’: Hip Hop as Critique of Gentrification”

Heike Steinhoff (Bochum): “Media and Gentrification Aesthetics”

Hannah V. Warren (Georgia / Freiburg): “Resisting Filiation and Reconfiguring Epic Boundaries: Rhizomatic Origins in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men”

"This panel is interested in gentrification as a spatial and narrative  process in and about US-American cities. It takes up the hint of Thomas  Heise who notes that unlike social science studies of gentrification  “the literary implications of gentrification and the contribution of  literature to an understanding of gentrification is still an emerging  area with much territory to explore and many gaps to fill” (2022:24).  This is equally true for the contributions of other storytelling media  such as film, television, or video games. The contested catchall-term  gentrification describes complex, multifaceted neoliberal processes of  displacement, privatization, and corporatization that cities around the  globe are subjected to. The talks of the panel explore different  stylistic and thematic features that occur in stories of gentrification  across different media. Such stories oscillate between individual levels  (consumer behaviors of specific gentrifier demographics) and larger  systemic dynamics (policy decision, real-estate speculation, and  globalization). They often privilege the perspective of newcomers to a  neighborhood in whose interest gentrification appears to serve, yet who  may be unaware of how they contribute to larger processes or no  homogenous group either. Such gentrifier-focused stories may balance  agency and structure or emphasize either to describe “the interaction  between the social institutions around us and the choices we make”  (Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill, 2017:14). To speak of what gentrification  means therefore ties directly back to questions of the cultural  imaginary."

Conveners: Silke Braselmann (Jena), Uwe Küchler (Tübingen), Ricardo Römhild (Münster)

Presentations:

Nicola Galloway (Glasgow): "Language Attitudes and Global Englishes: A Systematic Overview"

Gunter Süß (Mittweida): "You hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license”: Social Media Practices and Ownership"

Natalie Langensiepen (Wuppertal): “Anti-Indigenous Racism in EFL Textbooks in Germany”

Anja Keil (Jena): “Expanding the Canon: Multimodal Literacies and Anti-Racist Teaching with Graphic Novels”

Laurenz Volkmann (Jena): "Fremdverstehen Meets Cultural Appropriation: Do We Need to Jettison a Well-established German EFL-Tradition?"

"Regarding issues of ownership in North American Culture and Society with a particular focus on (language) education, the following questions could be addressed in this workshop:

• the question of content: texts, images, (symbolic) language features, cultural products or phenomena;
• the changing of perspectives and method variety: with teaching approaches, procedures, or techniques in the classroom to teach English with or through ownership issues;
• interdisciplinarity and dialogue between subjects (e.g., English and Civics Education), between historical periods, between regions and social spaces;
• the interfaces of classroom, school and society: ownership of one’s own learning processes; active participation in discourse, social movements, initiatives.

Papers for this workshop may focus on, but are not restricted to, any ownership issue that lends itself to the English language classroom, such as gender & queer studies, anti-racist education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inclusive education and disability studies, socio-environmental injustices, and decolonisation (of land, minds, societies, languages)."

Conveners: Ilka Brasch (Hannover), Elena Furlanetto (Duisburg-Essen)

Presentations:

Abigail Fagan (Hannover): “The Settler Colonial University and the Perception of Land as Property“

Katerina Steffan (Hannover): “I ‘was so forced … to do that which was contrary to my mind’: Puritans Lost in Possession“

Lukas Etter (Siegen): “Enclosing a Group? Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1618) and Mathematical Word Problems in Plymouth Colony“

Cameron Seglias (Frankfurt): “17th-Century Antislavery and the Crisis of Atlantic Enclosure“

Phillip James Grider (Göttingen): “’Pro Pelle Cutem’: Animal Skin and Otherness in Settler Colonial America“    

"The North American colonies and later the United States were often  conceived of in terms of new beginnings and opportunities. These  imageries were tied to the fiction of openly available land. However,  this history can also be written in the opposite manner: As a history of closure and  enclosure. Colonists claimed land as their own in violent ways, settlers  worked to expand the space to be enclosed, and treaties were written,  unwritten, and rewritten in a ceaseless erosion of Indigenous land that locked Native societies into increasingly  smaller territories. These spatial enclosures were accompanied by  discursive closures: Definitions of what it meant to farm or to be  civilized, to be Puritan, Quaker, or Irish, for instance, consolidated. Similarly, discourses around knowledge, (natural-)  philosophy, education, all the way to what it meant to be American,  settled into at times confined (and often gendered or racialized)  understandings and definitions, which were not necessarily permanent. Overall, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a  number of processes of closure and enclosure – with the eventual  consolidation of the US as a nation constituting one prominent example.  However, the history of [en]closure is not a teleology geared towards consolidation, but it traces a multiplicity of spatial  and discursive movements. These movements foster definition and  delineation, and at times seclusion or isolation, and some of them  disappear whereas others continue to impact North America for centuries. This panel proposes to look at historical practices and  discourses of [en]closure into the early nineteenth century (until ca.  1820)."  

Conveners: Jens Temmen (Düsseldorf), Nicole Waller (Potsdam)

Presentations:

René Dietrich (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): “Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and 21st Century Indigenous Poetry.”

Franziska Wolf (Düsseldorf): “Who owns the cold? Cool Empowerment and Frosty Hubris - (Indigenous) Female Reading and Writing of Snow and Ice.”

Lea Espinoza Garrido (Wuppertal): “Unsettling Art, Land, and Property: (Post)Human Entanglements in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle.”

Julia Gatermann (TU Dresden): “Breaking the Planet: Posthuman Embodiment and Material Agency as a Matter of Resistance in Postcolonial Speculative Fiction.”

"Conceptions of the humanist subject frequently portray an agentic self with the capacities of ownership—both of self and of property. In North America, this notion of property has most crucially been formed through settler colonialism’s positing of land as property and in slavery’s positioning of Black people outside/at the limits of the category of the human and as property of the white subject. Despite important differences between approaches in Black and Indigenous studies, both fields have advanced a thorough critique of the humanist subject thus conceived. The nexus between what is framed as a/the subject, land, and property has likewise been central to feminist, queer, and ecocritical critiques; it is also implied in postcolonialism’s focus on mapping and othering as combined colonial strategies, and it is visible in posthumanism’s frequent use of spatial metaphors in its deconstruction of the human. At the same time, scholars working in the context of posthumanism have struggled to deconstruct the division between the human and non-human in a way that does not merely exchange “one kind of universalism for another” (Batzke, Hess and Espinoza Garrido, “Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene” 6). Tiffany Lethabo King argues that posthumanist discourse needs to address how the histories and the present of colonial modernity have both shaped the humanist subject and continue to linger in its posthuman revision (King and Wilderson, “Staying Ready” 58). This workshop invites a critical examination of the nexus of the (post)human(ist) subject, land, and property from differing positionalities and within various approaches. We hope to set these approaches in conversation, both by tracing incommensurabilities and by pointing to productive overlaps."

Conveners: Alexander Dunst (Paderborn), Regina Schober (Düsseldorf)

Presentations:

Damien B. Schlarb (Mainz): "Videogames, Playbor, and the Futures of Work"

Marlon Lieber (Frankfurt): "The Algorithmic Road to Socialism and Its Discontents, or, Who Owns the Data in a Free Association?"

Dennis Mischke (FU Berlin): “Hyperscaling Scarcity - NFT Art and the Evaporation of Critique in and with Arch Hardes’ Arcadia”

"The ability of digital artifacts to seemingly escape ownership  by fiat of their unlimited replication and distribution evokes two  equally strong but diametrically opposed responses: One is the utopia of  the digital commons, in which the instantaneous availability, lossless  transmission, and sheer ubiquity of information result in a golden age  of equality and transparency. The dystopian vision, in contrast, foresees a technological totalitarianism of global scale, in which every  aspect of human experience becomes fully commodified and humanity is  threatened by its own obsolescence. Countless works of American  literature and culture testify to the salience of these visions, from  novels and non-fiction books, to movies and TV shows, video games and  visual art. In focusing on the intersection of information and  commodification, these works continue earlier debates about copyright in  nineteenth-century print culture and the ownership of one’s  photographic likeness but invent new narrative modes and images to  cognitively map the contours of contemporary capitalism.

Rather than describing a simple progression from commons to commodification as  today’s  software monopolies might suggest, the evolution of digital  networks demonstrates a more complicated simultaneity of subversions  from and reintegrations into global economies. While the former exploit  the reproducibility of digital data in peer-to-peer file sharing  networks like BitTorrent or shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub, software  companies and information brokers have not only grown into some of the  world’s largest corporations but have redefined what may count as  property, from private emotions to the data tracking of every mouse click."

Convener: Aleksandra Boss (HU Berlin), Martin Klepper (HU Berlin)

Presentations:

Bethany Jordan Webster-Parmentier (Flensburg): “‘Possession(s) and Dispossession in Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez.”

Greta Kaisen (HU Berlin): "Southern Gothic Settings in Red Dead Redemption 2.“

Alexandra Hauke (Passau): "Prisoners, Predators, Proprietors: Black Bodies and Ownership in Jordan Peele’s Horror Trilogy.“

Annika Thiem (Tübingen): "Ownership and Possession of the Past: Haunting History, Racism, and White Ignorance in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes.“

"Artefacts of American literature and culture are replete with  representations of hauntings— uncanny and sometimes violent assertions  of the past that defy oblivion and force themselves into the reality of  those inhabiting the present. These hauntings, ethereal and supernatural  though they may appear at first, are rarely without physical  implications and material reasons and consequences often related to past  or present wrongs involving race, class, gender or ability. Ownership  is always at stake, be it a sense of belonging, a sense of home, or the  very sense of self that is in serious danger, while an opaque and  uncontrollable agency asserts its power and disrupts established  material certainties. 

Works such as Louise Erdrich’s  novel The Night Watchman (2020), Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House  (2015), Cormack McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), Harper Lee’s  To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) and  Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2013), TV series such as True  Blood (2008-14) and The Walking Dead (since 2010) as well as a variety  of Toni Morrison’s texts from Beloved (1987) to A Mercy (2008) speak to  such eerie disruptions of ownership: Whether it is a house that embodies  a complex family history and acquires its own voice and will in the  process, sinister forces that try to possess the bodies of unsuspecting  artists, or the self that is in a constant state of threat on account of  direct menaces to its sovereignty and freedom—ownership is under attack  by entities, agents, and institutions that are either difficult to  unmask or impossible to hold accountable. All the while, these texts  hearken back to a rich tradition of Gothic fiction whose subjects and  symbolisms negotiate similar discontinuities of ownership and give  expression to the repressed social and political problems, traumas, and  taboos that condition and escalate those ruptures. Approaches that  reflect these processes include spatial theories (Lipsitz 2011), the  hauntology of everyday life (Rahimi 2021), theories of the archive  (Derrida 2017), and theories of the Southern Gothic (Street and Crow  2013).
The depiction of such complex negotiations of  ownership and possession of property and of the self are at the center  of this workshop. Papers will explore the various Gothic dimensions of  ownership in American literature and culture across all relevant media."

 

Conveners: Alexandra Hartmann (Paderborn), Antonia Purk (Erfurt)

Presentations:

James Deutsch (Smithsonian, George Washington University): "Mobility, Vagrancy, and Poverty in Early 20th-Century Los Angeles"

Stefanie Schäfer (Vienna): "Vanguard Wheel Estate: Property, Grief, and the American Road Myth in Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (2020)"

Bailey Moorhead (JGU Mainz): "Western Dominion and "Homelessness" in Anita Scott Coleman's "The Little Grey House"

Debarchana Baruah (Tübingen): "The House on the Other Side"

"US-American national identity, built upon a history of settler colonialism and the myth of the frontier, is centered around questions of ownership and mobility: Settlement and taking ownership of the land, which results in the absence of movement, is idealized as a key component of the American national project. This workshop examines the nexus of movement in a space defined as the American nation state and the absence of ownership of property, esp. that of housing and lands. The workshop explores this in historical and contemporary manifestations of both involuntary dispossession and the purposeful refusal of ownership. The four papers provide perspectives from the fields of history and literary studies on home- and houselessness in the United States since the late 19th a variety of materials: James Deutsch studies archival records from early 20th century Los Angeles regarding vagrancy, Stefanie Schäfer analyzes Chloe Zhao’s recent drama film Nomadland, Bailey Moorhead turns to Anita Scott Coleman’s 1922 short story “The Little Grey House,” and Debarchana Baruah explores contemporary immigration narratives. All papers share an interest in the conjunctions of race, gender, and class with poverty and (the absence of) homeownership."

Conveners: Felix Kramer (Erfurt), Jan Logemann (Mainz / Göttingen)

Moderator: Nina Mackert (Leipzig)

Discussants:

Jan Logemann (Mainz / Göttingen)

Harvey Neptune (Temple)

Ronny Regev (Jerusalem)

Axel Schäfer (Mainz)

"Over the past few years, a growing number of scholars have invoked the concept of “Racial Capitalism” in (re)writing U.S. American history. On the one hand, this burgeoning body of literature builds on recent interest in new histories of capitalism that have brought questions of markets, economic power and inequality more directly into the purview social and cultural historians, frequently with a transnational or even global perspective. On the other hand, “Racial Capitalism” has served to bring matters of race and intersectionality more directly into the focus of research in American business and economic history. Drawing on Critical Race Theory as well as older traditions such as Black Marxism, this literature questions liberal narratives of “color-blind” markets and seeks to reveal aspects of institutional and structural racism that have informed e.g. U.S.-American financial and real estate markets as well corporate and labor practices since the colonial era. While the debate about slavery’s role in the emergence of modern capitalist economies served as an important starting point for scholarship on racial capitalism, the field has significantly expanded as the recent volume on Histories of Racial Capitalism by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy (Columbia U Press, 2021) has shown. Today, the field includes a diverse literature on Black business and entrepreneurship, mortgage lending and urban development as well as the economic visions of civil rights leaders among other aspects. Scholars of American empire contribute to this literature as well as those researching Asian-American, Native American or Latinx communities. At its core, this literature seeks to understand the factors contributing to the persistence of the so-called “racial wealth gap” in U.S. society as well as the ways in which racial divisions have shaped and continue to shape American capitalism.

Bringing together scholars working on American economic history, the history of slavery, the history of black business, the history of intersectionality, as well as transnational history, this panel will discuss the concept of Racial Capitalism from different thematic and disciplinary vantage points."

Conveners: Sebastian M. Herrmann (Leipzig), Stefan Schubert (Leipzig)

Presentations:

Pia Wiegmink (Bonn): "The Protocols of Dependency in Nineteenth-Century African American Life Writing"

Astrid Haas (Bergen/Norway): “From Property to Proprietors: Free Black Entrepreneurialism in Mid-19th-Century Slave Narratives”

Thomas Dikant (Independent Scholar): “Disowned: Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima and the Drama of Class”

Karin Hoepker (FU Berlin): “Fictitious Commodities and the Spectacle of the Entrepreneurial Individual in Hawthorne’s Seven Gables”

"This workshop approaches the role of property and ownership for literature by focusing on the long nineteenth century as a critical period in the forging of this relationship. Accordingly, it reflects on both the changing, dynamizing negotiation of class, ownership, and property in literature and the changing status of literature. In narratives of ownership and privilege, matters of social class, of course, frequently and importantly intersect with other categories of difference, and this workshop’s interest in property thus serves as an entryway into exploring these intersections as well."

Conveners: Helen Gibson (Erfurt), Nadja Kloprogge (Gießen), Sebastian Jobs (FU Berlin)

Presentations:

Melina Morr de Pérez (Erfurt): “Encounters of Different Ideas - Audre Lorde’s Theory Formations Abroad”

Oluwatomisin Ogungbenle (Saint Louis): “I am Human Too: A Black Womanist’s Cry for Change”

Yanda Bango (Erfurt): “Blackness as an Accepted but Misunderstood and Devalued Existence"

Walter Quiller (U South Carolina): “Blackness as Irreducible and Hopefully Unusable”

"This workshop brings together concepts that have been at the center of enslavement and its legacies in North America: property and reproduction. Centering Black feminist and Womanist theory that goes beyond theorization—such as Marxism—which reproduces economist cosmologies, panelists will highlight the long history of biopolitical expropriation by critically examining notions of ownership and value. Speakers will analyze these themes as addressed by Audre Lorde, by Womanist theorists and practitioners, and via the significance of Ubuntu to Black Consciousness. Addressing questions of metaphysics and nonmetaphysics, this workshop will engage the vibrancy of the line between postcolonial and decolonial methodologies."

Conveners: Fenja Heisig (CRC Law and Literature, University of Münster), Samira Spatzek (FU Berlin EXC 2020 Temporal Communities)

Presentations:

Debora Stanca (Münster): “A U.S. Copyright? Negotiating Authorship and Literary Property between 1834 and 1909”

Carsten Junker (TU Dresden): “The recent upsurge of the Manifesto, or: Who Owns the Means of Disruption?”

Miaïna Razakamanantsoa (Münster): “Copyright and the Circulation of Book Designs"

Felix Brinker (LU Hannover): “Marvel’s The Punisher, the Privilege of Violence, and Unfree Symbolic Commons between Intellectual Property and Mass Appropriation"

"Cultural production is an ongoing process taking place in all branches of society and results in the creation of an array of cultural objects, which change with time, trends, and tastes. These objects can be produced by individuals and by groups, by distinct actors and by indiscernible collectives. Often, cultural objects are created cooperatively by members of a community, frequently with no distinct or singular claim to ownership. Fashion trends and internet memes are only some examples of jointly created cultural objects. Other current examples are collaborative phenomena such as “stitched” audio and video clip content characteristic for the app TikTok or synergetic street art and performances. Relatedly, objects of cultural production are difficult to protect due to their intangible nature. Copyright regimes for the protection of literature, photography, music, and film grew out of social and legal conflicts over ownership; conflicts which continue to be discussed and negotiated within and outside of the legal system. Other forms of cultural production challenge the boundaries of existent copyright regimes and trigger contemporary, lively debates, for example about the appropriateness of fanart and fanfiction. The digital age fuels the rapid production of new multimedia cultural objects whose existence gives rise to the need for new property regimes within the digital economy. Frequently, the lack of legal certainty within the digital space is compensated for by various paralegal solutions. Ownership of cultural objects is often difficult to ascertain and the difference between inspiration, appreciation, and appropriation remains contested. This workshop seeks to explore the multimedial production of cultural objects as well as the contested claims to their ownership—claims that are often grounded in racialized and sexualized regimes of (rights to) private property. We seek to address the historic development as well as the contemporary legal, political, literary, and cultural manifestations of ownership in cultural production."

Conveners: Aleksandra Boss (HU Berlin), Martin Klepper (HU Berlin)

Presentations:

Philipp Kneis (Oregon State): "The State of Nature and the Politics of the Repressed: Traces of Indigenous Civilization in American Literature and Culture.“

Mareike Spychala (Bamberg): “ Haunting Pictures: Negotiating Self-Ownership, Gender, and Class in Sarah Piatt’s Poetry.“

Lee A. Flamand (Bochum): "Accursed Dis/possessions & Propertied Lamentations: William Faulkner’s Gothic Indians.“

Simon Schleusener (FU Berlin): "Slavery, (Self-)Ownership, and the Gothic Imagination: A Reading of Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative.“

"Artefacts of American literature and culture are replete with  representations of hauntings— uncanny and sometimes violent assertions  of the past that defy oblivion and force themselves into the reality of  those inhabiting the present. These hauntings, ethereal and supernatural  though they may appear at first, are rarely without physical  implications and material reasons and consequences often related to past  or present wrongs involving race, class, gender or ability. Ownership  is always at stake, be it a sense of belonging, a sense of home, or the  very sense of self that is in serious danger, while an opaque and  uncontrollable agency asserts its power and disrupts established  material certainties. 

Works such as Louise Erdrich’s  novel The Night Watchman (2020), Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House  (2015), Cormack McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), Harper Lee’s  To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) and  Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2013), TV series such as True  Blood (2008-14) and The Walking Dead (since 2010) as well as a variety of Toni Morrison’s texts from Beloved (1987) to A Mercy (2008) speak to  such eerie disruptions of ownership: Whether it is a house that embodies  a complex family history and acquires its own voice and will in the  process, sinister forces that try to possess the bodies of unsuspecting  artists, or the self that is in a constant state of threat on account of  direct menaces to its sovereignty and freedom—ownership is under attack  by entities, agents, and institutions that are either difficult to  unmask or impossible to hold accountable. All the while, these texts  hearken back to a rich tradition of Gothic fiction whose subjects and  symbolisms negotiate similar discontinuities of ownership and give  expression to the repressed social and political problems, traumas, and  taboos that condition and escalate those ruptures. Approaches that  reflect these processes include spatial theories (Lipsitz 2011), the  hauntology of everyday life (Rahimi 2021), theories of the archive  (Derrida 2017), and theories of the Southern Gothic (Street and Crow  2013).
The depiction of such complex negotiations of  ownership and possession of property and of the self are at the center  of this workshop. Papers will explore the various Gothic dimensions of  ownership in American literature and culture across all relevant media."

 

Conveners: Natalie Rauscher (Heidelberg), Kirsten Twelbeck (Augsburg), Welf Werner (Heidelberg)

Presentations:

Eli Jelly-Shapiro (U South Carolina): "Two Histories of Extraction"

Uwe Lübken (LMU, Munich): "Vanport: A City Lost, a City Rediscovered"

Mélanie Meunier (Science Po, Strasbourg): "The Dakota Access Pipeline controversy: A standoff between the fossil fuel industry and anti-pipeline activists"

Verena Wurth (University of Cologne): "Time, Territory, and Eco-TV: Extracting the Pasture in Outer Range"

In the United States, the natural environment has not only been a place of identification, socio-economic development and change, but it has also been marked by large-scale environmental hazards that cause a risk to human health, agriculture, and the natural environment. Some regions, and some communities within those regions, have been affected more often, and more seriously, by environmental hazards such as storms, droughts, or flooding, but also by “slow” forms of disaster such as the decline of biodiversity, and have experienced massive economic and social conflict. While climate change, the search for new energy resources, infrastructural measures, and the expansion of agriculture, have led to an increase of such problems in both number and intensity, government institutions seem ill prepared to monitor and manage environmental disaster and its social, economic, mental consequences for communities and to introduce legal prerequisites to avoid and mitigate environmental disaster caused by human behavior.

"One of the major obstacles they encounter are issues of ownership: in the United States, private property and long-term safety issues tend to be legally incommensurable, and the fact that impoverished and ethnically distinguished minority communities are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards, have turned natural and human-induced ecological disasters into an environmental justice issue that is now at the heart of environmentalist and social justice movements throughout the nation. American culture, including film and literature, have crucially contributed to the discourse on environmental disaster, property and class issues, and government responsibilities, thereby increasing the prominence and visibility of these issues but also perpetuating problematic perceptions of environmental hazards and responsibility. 

This workshop seeks to examine, from an interdisciplinary perspective, how U.S. policies and culture have engaged with and reacted to the threats of environmental disaster. Ownership as well as ideas of property of the natural environment have significantly changed over time, from the colonial period to today and among various groups in society (indigenous societies, settler societies, enslaved population, rural and urban dwellers, mobile communities, etc.). They have all been affected, albeit very differently, by the disaster policies implemented by state and national governments. Today, Indigenous and Black Americans, but also Latino immigrants, the materially poorest groups in society on average, are disproportionally affected by the consequences of natural hazards and the warming climate. This can be traced back, in part, to American ideas of property and land use and their legal implementation. Past failures to coherently address the long-term consequences that emerge from the transformation of natural environmental processes, the warming climate, and the disruption caused by natural hazards, continue to increase socio-environmental problems. In addition to this, and along with the overwhelming, scientific evidence of human-induced natural disasters, climate change denial and conspiracy theories have taken center stage among Republicans in particular, and also in parts of the American media landscape that identifies necessary environmental measures as an attack on U.S. property rights, individualism, and democracy."

Convener: Torsten Kathke (Mainz)

Presentations:

Julia Sattler (TU Dortmund): “'Beauty is only the raw material of conquest': Capitalism, Consumption and Categorization in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)"

Ylva Kreye (Mainz): "Ow(n)ing Freedom from the Fear of Want: Isaac M. Rubinow and the Measuring of Need in American Consumer Society"

Anja-Maria Bassimir (Mainz): "Owning One’s Health: Measuring Up to State-Sponsored Nutrition Advice"

"The politics of consumption and its human-differentiating categories emerged in the transition to a consumption-oriented economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. The possibilities of abundance and the vision of freedom from want, i.e., the safeguarding of people’s material needs through industrial methods and technical production processes, are among the central experiences of modernity. Linked to this was the expectation that material security, including, amongst others, private pensions schemes, public welfare programs, and scientifically based nutrition advice, could lead to new forms of social solidarity and to the reduction of social tensions, class conflicts, inequalities, discriminations and hierarchizations that were inherent in the societies of the past based on the finiteness of resources. While consumption promised material riches to individuals, imagining society as capitalized investment also promised riches to owners of corporations and allowed nations to calculate their potential economic growth. According to the new, quantifying logic, people became human capital to be employed in productive or intellectual work or refigured as an abstract “man unit” in the context of nutrition, or standardized average in the form of body mass index or risk factor in the context of the insurance business. In this workshop, the focus will be on the reconfiguration of ownership in relation to categories of human differentiation (to own and to be owned) in the context of twentieth century consumption-oriented American society."