America and Ownership: Territory, Slavery, Jubilee
DGfA | 69th Annual Meeting | 1-3 June 2023
Program
Please note that this program is preliminary and may still be subject to change. The full detailed program will be uploaded here soon.
Current Events Panel
Friday, June 2. 14:00-16:00
Chair: Katja Sarkowsky (Augsburg)
Speakers:
Cemelli de Aztlan is a community organizer at La Mujer Obrera, a local independent organization in El Paso that is involved in the development of communities defined by women. Over the years, La Mujer Obrera has been one of the leaders in the struggle against an “undeclared war” on marginalized women workers of Mexican heritage. Cemelli is engaged in advocacy, grassroots community organizing and movement building to defend communities' right to exist as we heal our relationships with the earth.
Claus Biegert is a Munich-based journalist, who has worked and published on Indigenous rights and the uranium cycle in the USA and Canada.
Roman Herre is an expert for agriculture at FIAN (FoodFirst Aktions- und Informationsnetzwerk), a human rights organization dedicated to implement everyone's right to food.
Diversity Roundtable
Full details to follow
Friday June 2, 17:30-18:30
Diversity Roundtable
Information Sessions
Full details to follow
Friday, June 3. 13:00-14:00
Teaching American Studies Lunch
Saturday, June 3. 13:00-14:00
Joint Info Session: Amerikastudien / American Studies and Digital American Studies Initiative
Keynotes
Thursday, June 1. 17:30-19:30. AULA (online)
Nicole Maskiell
Nicole Maskiell is an associate professor of history, Peter and Bonnie McCauslan Faculty Fellow, and former Director of Public History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She is the author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Cornell University Press: 2022).
Visit her website here.
Friday, June 2. 09:00-10:30. AULA
Peter Schneck
Peter Schneck is professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at Osnabrück University. He is author of Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture (De Gruyter: 2012), and Bilder der Erfahrung: Kulturelle Wahrnehmung im amerikanischen Realismus (Campus: 2012).
Visit his website here
Saturday, June 3. 11:30-13:00
Jean O'Brien - "Storied Lands, Sovereign Peoples: Indigenous Landscapes of Belonging".
Jean O'Brien is a historian at the University of Minnesota. She has authored numerous books, including Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (University of Minnessota Press: 2010) and Dispossesion by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachussets, 1650-1790 (University of Minnessota Press: 1997).
Visit her website here.
Member's Assembly
Saturday, June 3. 16:00-18.30, Aula
Postgraduate Events
Full details to follow
Thursday, June 1. 15:30-16:30
PG Get-together
Friday, June 2. 12:15-13:45
PG Forum Brown Bag Lunch
Saturday, June 3. 15:00-16:00
PG Forum "Meet the Speakers"
Social Program
The conference will open on Thursday, June 1 at 17:00 at the university's main building at Universitätsplatz 1. After the keynote lecture (17:30-19:30) we will proceed to City Hall to be welcomed by the mayor of Rostock, Eva-Maria Kröger. After our visit, the evening will free to relax and enjoy the city.
On Friday evening at 19:00, please join us for a boat trip to Warnemünde, a beautiful local fishing village. Departing from Rostock harbor and sailing along the Warnow, this scenic excursion takes approximately 45 minutes. Upon arrival, the evening is then free for you to enjoy the promenade, its shops, restaurants, and cafes. And, of course, the beach and the Baltic sea. To return to the city, or if you would prefer an alternative to the boat, there are local trains S1, S2, S3 that run regularly (approx. every 10 minutes) between Warnemünde and Rostock central station.
On Saturday at 19:00 we will meet for the closing ceremony and a buffet dinner at the university's main building. The ceremony starts at 19:00. During the closing ceremony the Franz Steiner Prize in Transatlantic History (Franz Steiner Verlag & German Historical Institute Washington) will be awarded. Dinner will be catered by a local restaurant with vegan and vegetarian options.
Women's Caucus
Full details to follow
Friday, June 2. 16:30-17:30
Women's Caucus
Forms of Belonging: Land, Law, and Citizenship in Indigenous Literature and Film
Friday, June 2. 11:00-13:00
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"
Whiteness as Property: Histories and Practices of Racial Capitalism
Friday, June 2. 11:00-13:00
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”
Stories of Gentrification: Consumerism, Displacement, and Urban Transformations
Friday, June 2. 11:00-13:00
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”
Ownership in Language, Literature, and Culture Education
Friday, June 2. 11:00-13:00
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?"
[En]Closures: Spatial Confinement and Discursive Delineation in Early America
Friday, June 2. 11:00-13:00
Convener: Ilka Brasch (Hannover)
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“
Philip James Grider (Göttingen): “’Pro Pelle Cutem’: Animal Skin and Otherness in Settler Colonial America“
Properties of the (Post)Human
Saturday, June 3. 09:00-11:00
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.”
All That is Solid Melts into Data: Property and Ownership in the Digital Age
Saturday, June 3. 09:00-11:00
Conveners: Alexander Dunst (Paderborn), Regina Schober (Düsseldorf)
Presentations:
Damien B. Schlarb (Mainz): "Videogames, Playboy, and the Futures of Work"
Marlon Lieber (Frankfurt): "The Algorithmic Road to Socialism and Its Discontents, or, Who Own the Data in a Free Association?"
Dennisch Mischke (FU Berlin): “Hyperscaling Scarcity - NFT Art and the Evaporation of Critique in and with Arch Hardes’ Arcadia”
Ownership and Possession I: Haunted Houses, Possessed Selves, and the Gothics of Property
Saturday, June 3. 09:00-11:00
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.“
Spatial Movements and the Refusal of Ownership
Saturday, June 3. 09:00-11:00
Conveners: Alexandra Hartmann (Paderborn), Antonia Purk (Erfurt)
Presentations:
James Deutsch (Smithsonian, Georgetown): "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"
Racial Capitalism as a Concept for Writing U.S.-American History
Saturday, June 3. 09:00-11:00
Conveners: Felix Kramer (Erfurt), Jan Logemann (Göttingen)
Moderator: Nina Mackert (Leipzig)
Discussants:
Jan Logemann (Göttingen)
Harvey Neptune (Temple)
Ronny Regev (Jerusalem)
Axel Schäfer (Mainz)
Class, Property, and the Politics of Literature in 19th-Century US Culture
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
Conveners: Sebastian M. Herrmann (Leipzig), Stefan Schubert (Leipzig)
Presentations:
Pia Wiegmink (Bonn): “Beyond Slavery and Freedom? The Protocols of Dependency in Nineteenth Century American Literature”
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”
Knowing/Refusing ‘Value’: Reclaiming Kinship at the Expense of Capital
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
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”
Robel Afeworki Abay (HU Berlin): “Decolonizing Knowledge: How Can We Unpack Colonial Legacies and Methodological Nationalism in German Academia?"
Yanda Bango (Erfurt): “Blackness as an Accepted but Misunderstood and Devalued Existence"
Walter Quiller (U South Carolina): “Blackness as Irreducible and Hopefully Unusable”
Copyright, Cultural Production, and Objects of Ownership
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
Conveners: Fenja Heisig (FU Berlin), Samira Spatzek (FU Berlin)
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 Razamanantsoa (Münster): “Copyright and the Circulation of Book Designs"
Felix Brinker (LU Hannover): “Unfree Symbolic Commons between Intellectual Property and Mass Appropriation”
Ownership and Possession: Haunted Houses, Possessed Selves, and the Gothics of Property II
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
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.“
Hazardous Territory - Environmental Discourses, Ownership, and Disaster Policies in the United States
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
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"
Ownership, Human Differentiation, and the Politics of Consumption
Saturday, June 3. 14:00-16:00
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"
COVID-19 Precautions
According to current regulations, you are not obliged to wear masks indoors. However, out of consideration for one another, our recommendations are to wear a mask in enclosed spaces, to maintain distance, to ensure thorough handwashing, and to cough or sneeze into a tissue. In seminar rooms, please ventilate regularly or simply leave windows open. Speakers may, of course, take off their masks if they feel comfortable doing so.