Book Publications

Civilization, Democratization, Containment: Strategies of Re-Education in Imperial Settings and Beyond

Special Issue of The International History Review 46.3 (2024)

Guest edited by Jana Aresin and Katharina Gerund

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rinh20/46/3

With contributions by Susan L. Carruthers, Christine de Matos, Holger Droessler, Alisa Freedman, Ji Hee Jung, and Heike Paul

 

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Ladies in Arms

Edited by Teresa Hiergeist and Stefanie Schäfer

Transcript, 2024, 322 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8376-6955-8, Open Access

In contemporary popular culture, armed women take center stage – but how can they be read from a feminist perspective? How do films, comics, and TV series depict the newly fashionable gunwomen between objectification and feminist empowerment? The contributions to this volume ask this question from different vantage points in cultural and literary studies, film and visual culture studies, history, and art history. They examine military and civic gun cultures, the rediscovery of historical armed women and revolutionaries, cultural phenomena such as gangsta rap, narcocultura and US politics, Bollywood and French cinema, and distinct genres such as the graphic novel, the romance novel, or the German police procedural Tatort.

With contributions by Axelle Germanaz, Katharina Gerund, Stefanie Schäfer, and Hana Vrdoljak

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Rethinking Solidarity

Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studie, Volume 68.4 (2023)

Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Katharina Gerund, and Sylvia Mayer

Heidelberg: Winter, e-ISSN: 2625-2155, Open Access

This introduction outlines the current state of research on solidarity as it pertains to transnational American studies. It highlights how solidarity has, once again, become a buzzword in political, cultural, and academic debates in the United States and beyond, and it sketches exemplarily how the concept has been negotiated across disciplines. Solidarity continues to be a contested idea and certainly has its limits. Yet, as the contributions to this special issue show, it can be and has been productively re-thought in literary, political, and cultural discourses as well as in contemporary scholarship, attesting to both its limits and—perhaps more importantly—its moral, social, and political promises.

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To the Last Drop – Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality

Edited by Axelle Germanaz, Daniela Gutiérrez Fuentes, Sarah Marak, and Heike Paul

Transcript, 2023, 300 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8376-6410-2, Open Access

The romance of extraction underlies and partly defines Western modernity and our cultural imaginaries. Combining affect studies and environmental humanities, this volume analyzes societies’ devotion to extraction and fossil resources. This devotion is shaped by a nostalgic view on settler colonialism as well as by contemporary »affective economies« (Sara Ahmed). The contributors examine the links between forms of extractivism and gendered discourses of sentimentality and the ways in which cultural narratives and practices deploy the sentimental mode (in plots of attachment, sacrifice, and suffering) to promote or challenge extractivism.

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Die USA – eine liberale Demokratie und ihre Anachronismen

nomos, 2023, 181 pp. ISBN: 978-3-7560-0606-9

Die amerikanische Demokratie ist vielleicht die älteste und traditionsreichste der Welt, aber sie ist auch reformbedürftig und krisengeschüttelt. Nicht erst der 6. Januar 2021 hat dies gezeigt. Mit Blick auf ihre politischen Institutionen, den amerikanischen Föderalismus, die Partei- und Medienlandschaft sowie Fragen der politischen Kultur und überkommener normativer Ideale von sozialer Gerechtigkeit diskutieren die Beiträge des Heftes unterschiedliche Anachronismen und Widersprüche innerhalb des demokratischen Systems der USA und gehen auf Vorschläge zu Reform und Veränderung ein.

Mit Beiträgen von: Maren Freudenberg, Christoph Haas, Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Laura Kettel, Alexander Keyssar, Christian Lammert, Claus Leggewie, Heike Paul, Astrid Séville, Laura Vorberg, Boris Vormann

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Lexicon of Global Melodrama

Edited by Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, and Marius Henderson

Transcript, 2022, 398 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8394-5973-7, Open Access

This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent ›arthouse‹ productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.

 

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Re-Education Revisited: Conflicting Agendas and Cross-Cultural Agency in the Early Cold War

Special Issue of Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 31.1 (2021)

Edited by Heike Paul

Heike Paul and her colleagues, who have contributed to this issue on re-education, have opted for a triangular constellation which, although obvious in previous research, has nevertheless been largely neglected. They compare the efforts of the US-military and administrators in Japan and Germany to initiate a society freed from fascism and on its way to democracy. But was the American presence only a supportive factor for already existing tendencies towards democratic behaviour and attitude or had the US-army to create something from scratch? How to conceptualize the project of re-education: in terms of a decided diffusion of values or as an impulse for the self-healing of a society ready for democratization after the collapse of the Nazi or the Tenno regimes?
(“The Editorial” by Matthias Middell and Katja Castryck-Naumann, p. 8)

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Paragesellschaften: Imaginationen – Inszenierungen – Interaktionen in den Gegenwartskulturen

Edited by Teresa Hiergeist, Agnes Bidmon, Simone Broders, and Katharina Gerund

De Gruyter, 2021, 281 pp. ISBN 9783110707465, Open Access

In politischen und medialen Debatten werden unter dem häufig stigmatisierend gebrauchten Schlagwort ‚Parallelgesellschaft‘ Fragen sozialer Homogenität und Heterogenität kontrovers diskutiert. Diesem reduktionistischen Gestus setzt der Band das offene Konzept der ‚Paragesellschaft‘ entgegen und ermöglicht dadurch eine differenzierte Annäherung an mediale Reflexionen des soziopolitischen und gesellschaftlichen Umgangs mit Diversität in verschiedenen Dispositiven der Gegenwart.

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Amerikanischer Staatsbürgersentimentalismus: Zur Lage der politischen Kultur in den USA

by Heike Paul

Wallstein Verlag, 2021, 190pp. ISBN 978-3-8353-3923-1, €12

Series: Historische Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurter Vorträge 14

Das Sentimentale in der amerikanischen politischen Kultur mag konjunkturellen Schwankungen unterliegen, ist aber seit der Gründung der USA ein fest etabliertes Muster zur Erzeugung von öffentlichem Gefühl und Gemeinschaft. Dabei war das verstärkte Auftreten des Sentimentalen in der US-amerikanischen Geschichte stets ein Symptom für politische Krisen und damit einhergehende Krisen der politischen Kommunikation. Dennoch hat sich der Staatsbürgersentimentalismus für amerikanische Staatslenker und Protestbewegungen gleichermaßen bewährt. Die Präsidentschaft Donald Trumps stellt eine eklatante Abkehr von den Konventionen des Staatsbürgersentimentalismus dar. Trump hat immer wieder bewiesen, dass ihm Zeichen der Empathie, des Mitleids, der Trauer fremd sind. Zahlreiche Beispiele zeigen jedoch, dass Amerikanerinnen und Amerikaner in ihrem zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagement den Staatsbürgersentimentalismus in öffentlichen Artikulationen von Trauer, Mitleid und Sorge weiterhin bemühen. Nicht erst seit dem letzten Wahlkampf ist allerdings überdeutlich, dass Mitgefühl und affektive Identifikation nicht mehr hinreichend sind, um die tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Polarisierungen im Land zu überbrücken.

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Four Years After: Ethnonationalism, Antisemitism, and Racism in Trump’s America

Edited by Heike Paul, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Mirjam Zadoff, and Noam Zadoff

Heidelberg: Winter, 2020, 200 pp. ISBN 978-3-8253-4782-6, € 38,00

Series: Publikationen der Bayerischen Amerika-Akademie / Publications of the Bavarian American Academy 24

During the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, questions of race, discrimination, and ethnonationalism have been gaining importance in American culture and politics once again. Racism and antisemitism have been tolerated, and at times even encouraged, by the current administration’s policies and actions, ranging from the so-called “Muslim ban” and the constant demands for building a “wall” on the Mexican-American border to openly calling the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people” and to the events following the killing of George Floyd.

All this, alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, has impacted the social and political climate in the USA, even though the roots for current problems and polarizations reach deep into the American past. This volume examines recent developments in comparative perspective, analyzes their histories, and discusses their possible impact on the future.

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Understanding Stewart O’Nan

by Heike Paul

Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P,  2020, 144 pp., ISBN 978-1-64336-149-9, $19,99

This first book-length study of Stewart O’Nan’s work offers a comprehensive introduction to his writings and carefully examines recurring thematic concerns and stylistic characteristics of his novels. The author of eighteen novels, several works of nonfiction, and two short-story collections, O’Nan received the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for best novel for Snow Angels and the Drew Heinz Prize for In the Walled City. In 1996 Granta magazine named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists. In Understanding Stewart O’Nan, Heike Paul appraises O’Nan’s oeuvre to date, including his popular multigenerational trilogy of novels—Wish You Were Here; Emily, Alone; and Henry, Himself—that received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and the Guardian.

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Critical Terms in Futures Studies

Edited by Heike Paul

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 374 pp., ISBN 978-3-030-28987-4, €103,99

This volume provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future in 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields, which examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of “futurology” proper, it comes at future studies ‘sideways’ and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures’ vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects – history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy – and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present. In compiling such a critical vocabulary, this book seeks to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offers a toolbox for discussing them with an adequate degree of complexity.

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The Comeback of Populism: Transatlantic Perspectives

Edited by Heike Paul, Ursula Prutsch, and Jürgen Gebhardt

Heidelberg: Winter, 2019, 286 pp., ISBN 978-3-8253-4635-5, €38,00

Series: Publikationen der Bayerischen Amerika-Akademie / Publications of the Bavarian American Academy 21

“Populism” is a fuzzy term. It neither identifies a specific political program nor does it clearly situate political positions along a left-to-right spectrum. Instead, it refers to a strategy of communication and a style of political performance. This volume sheds light on the resurgence of populism in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Contemporary populisms need to be understood in their cultural and political specificities as well as in their global interrelation and outreach. They often share an authoritarianism along with anti-establishment resentments while posing as expressing the ‘voice of the people.’ Real or imagined scenarios of threat are met with a rhetoric of emancipation from victimization, yet this emancipatory zeal is couched in a rhetoric of exclusion and, even, nativism. Frank Decker, Akwugo Emejulu, D.S. Hillygus, Michael Hochgeschwender, Donatella Izzo, Carlos de la Torre, and Hans Vorländer (et al.) examine populism’s simplifications and mystifications.

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(Extra)Ordinary Presence: Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires

Edited by Markus Gottwald, Kay Kirchmann, and Heike Paul

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017, 204 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-2721-3 , € 39,99

Series:  Präsenz und implizites Wissen

Taking its cue from contemporary western debates on presence in the social sciences and the humanities, this volume focuses on ‘presence’ both as everyday experience and as an experience of intense moments. It raises questions about diverse social configurations of presence as well as about the specific cultural repertoires which encode, articulate, and shape discourses of presence. The contributions take as a premise that phenomena of presence are connected to particular forms of knowledge. Especially tacit knowledge (pre)determines experiences of individual and collective presence and becomes tangible in moments of presence or presentification.

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Critical Regionalism

Edited by Klaus Lösch, Heike Paul, and Meike Zwingenberger

Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016, 216 pp., ISBN 978-3-8253-6679-7, € 32

Series:  Publikationen der Bayerischen Amerika-Akademie / Publications of the Bavarian American Academy 18

This volume presents analyses of cultural practices and literary/visual representations in the larger field of American Studies that apply a critical regionalist approach. Loosely defined as a set of anti-foundational perspectives in the wake of the spatial turn, critical regionalism seeks to investigate apparent regional specificities against the backdrop of local/global trajectories. Taking their cue from urban studies, the essays in this volume inquire about the region as a category of difference (alongside race, gender, class) and as a possibly subversive point of view from which to critique hegemonic spatial (and capitalist) formations.

Topics include an ecocritical analysis of the commodification of bees in the United States (Cheryl Herr), a discussion of multifarious border cultures in the Southwest (Silvia Spitta), an exploration of the role of the regional and the global in the modern women’s movement (Katharina Gerund), a critique of region and class with regard to “rednexploitation” in television culture (Tanja Aho) as well as a critical regionalist account of ruin photography in the United States (Miles Orvell), to name but a few contributions to this volume. All of them seek to re-appraise questions of region(alism) focusing on patterns of affiliation, economic structures, political protest, and/or aesthetic practices.

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 Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart

Edited by Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015, 348 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-1989-8, € 39,99

Series: Film

“Lost”, “The Wire”, “Mad Men”, “Breaking Bad”, “True Blood” usw. – die amerikanischen Fernsehserien der Gegenwart sind thematisch und formal-ästhetisch facettenreich – und haben z.T. geradezu ikonischen Status. Doch was ist wirklich “neu” an den sogenannten “neuen Serien”? Inwiefern sind sie spezifischen kulturellen Schemata (cultural scripts) verpflichtet – und welche kulturelle Arbeit leisten sie bei der Bewältigung von gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen und Krisenerfahrungen?
Dieser Band versammelt deutsch- und englischsprachige Beiträge aus Medienwissenschaft und American Studies, die das Format anhand ausgewählter Beispiele einer medientheoretischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Reflexion unterziehen.

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Rural America

Edited by Antje Kley and Heike Paul

Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015, 510 pp., ISBN 978-3-8253-6383-3, € 70

“The United States was born in the country”, Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “and remained emotionally attached to it long after it had moved away”, David B. Danbom added in his ‘History of Rural America’. Thus it may be argued that the study of American culture and civilization, first and foremost, needs to make sense of the rural. This multidisciplinary volume focuses on rural America, on areas seemingly apart from the political, economic, and cultural centers of the nation. Despite this apparent marginality, the rural often proves to be constitutive not only of regional but also of other subnational and even national American identities. Putting rurality at the center thus problematizes the well-established dichotomous models of city vs. country. The contributors to this volume address the rural as a mythic construction (e.g. as the American “Heartland” and as the centerpiece of a US pastoral tradition), as a (socio-)economic sector, as an imaginary time-space within American culture, and as the site of specific political, social, and cultural practices with, at times, transnational/global implications. The various perspectives on rural America are drawn from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, environmental studies, and journalism.

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Die amerikanische Reeducation-Politik nach 1945: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf “America’s Germany”

Edited by Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015, 306 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-2632-2, € 29,99

Series: Histoire 55

Dieser Band beleuchtet die amerikanischen Pläne zur Zukunft Deutschlands nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Maßnahmen der Reeducation-Politik, u.a. Amerika-Häuser, Dokumentarfilme, CARE und Schulreformen.
Wissenschaftler_innen aus verschiedenen Disziplinen analysieren amerikanische Perspektiven auf die Deutschen und die Strategien der USA zur Positionierung Deutschlands als junge Demokratie am Beginn einer neuen Zeitrechnung (“Stunde Null”), als Teil einer größeren geopolitischen Konstellation (Europa) und als zunehmend eigenständige Nation im transatlantischen Bündnis (“Kalter Krieg”).
Mit einem Nachwort von Winfried Fluck.

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Revealing Tacit Knowledge: Explication and Embodiment

Edited by Frank Adloff, Katharina Gerund, and David Kaldewey

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015, 308 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-2516-5, 39,99 €

Series: Präsenz und implizites Wissen

How does tacit knowledge inscribe itself into cultural and social practices?
As the established distinction between tacit and explicit or discursive forms of knowledge does not explain this question, the contributions in this volume reconstruct, describe, and analyze the manifold processes by which the tacit reveals itself: They focus, for example, on metaphors, feelings, and visualizations as explications of the tacit as well as on processes of embodiment. Taken together, they demonstrate that the tacit does not constitute a single or unified knowledge complex, but has to be understood in its differentiated and fragmented forms. In addition to scholarly essays, the volume features interviews with Mark Johnson, Theodore Schatzki, and Loïc Wacquant.

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Präsenz und implizites Wissen: Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften

Edited by Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul in cooperation with Katharina Gerund and David Kaldewey

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013, 442 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-1939-3, € 38,80

Series: Präsenz und implizites Wissen

Präsenz – definiert als zeitliche und räumliche Gegenwart und Unmittelbarkeit – steht in einem Begründungszusammenhang mit implizitem Wissen. Innerhalb der Forschungsdiskussion um Präsenz etabliert der Band einen neuartigen Ansatz, indem er verschiedene Diskursivierungen von Präsenz in Religion, Kunst, Politik, Medien sowie Populärkultur aus dieser Interdependenz heraus zugänglich macht. Die Beiträge verfolgen dabei eine kulturvergleichende Perspektive, die speziell auf die Klärung der Kulturspezifik von Präsenzkonzepten abzielt und neue Möglichkeiten zur Analyse eines bisher wenig beachteten Themas eröffnet.

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Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany

by Katharina Gerund

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013, 316 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-2273-7, 39,80 €

Series: American Studies

From Josephine Baker’s performances in the 1920s to the 1970s solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis, from Audre Lorde as »mother« of the Afro-German movement in the 1980s to the literary stardom of 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Germans have actively engaged with African American women’s art and activism throughout the 20th century. The discursive strategies that have shaped the (West) German reactions to African American women’s social activism and cultural work are examined in this study, which proposes not only a nuanced understanding of “African Americanizations” as a form of cultural exchange but also sheds new light on the role of African American culture for (West) German society, culture, and national identity.

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Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in the US and Beyond

Figures of mobility appear prominently in US-foundational narratives of ‘discovery,’ the ‘Puritan errand,’ and westward expansion; the protagonists of these hegemonic tales of settlement and nation-building are (mostly) European travellers, pioneers, and colonists. By contrast, figures such as pirates, drifters, and fugitives are for the most part absent from canonical narratives of new world beginnings and may be considered as expressing/representing alternative mobilities. Their stories and their representations raise questions of legitimacy and legality – often from a transnational perspective – and imply a critique of the American empire and its concomitant domestic discourses of marginalization. Yet, pirates, drifters, and fugitives also appear as ambiguous figures with regard to US-exceptionalist rhetoric: they may tap their subversive potential, while they are also bound to and complicit with the ideologies they seek to expose.
In the context of the so-called New American Studies and the emergent field of Mobility Studies, this volume investigates these figures in a variety of cultural productions (pamphlets, song lyrics, autobiographies, novels, memorials, legal texts, video, television, and film) from the 17th century to the present.

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