Summer Semester 2024

Here are the classes taught by staff members of the Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies during the summer semester 2024.

Prof. Dr. Mark U. Stein
AR Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Rita Maricocchi
Can Çakır
Dorit Neumann

Prof. Dr. Mark U. Stein

Black and Asian British Short Stories
096761 | Seminar | Tue 10-12

Postcolonial Translocations: Reading Texts Elsewhere
096849 | Seminar | Wed 10-12

Over the last decades, the sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations emerge and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformation. Given the ‘spatial turn’, human transactions and cultural representations no longer can be understood as firmly rooted in or clearly demarcated by a territorial logic. Postcolonial translocation is a diverse phenomenon that refers not only to processes (incl. the transfer of people, cultural products, and ideas) but also designates a new type of location (a translocation) of fractured and variously connected spaces. As a concept, it exceeds a simple change of location or dislocation and significantly both, points of departure and destination, can remain unspecified.

The seminar will first engage with some theorisations of translocation and related phenomena. In the second part of the seminar we will focus on the analysis of selected literary texts which, one way or another, produce, represent, and/or respond to translocation. The seminar explores the ways in which postcolonial translocation allows us to focus on aspects of texts and contexts which are otherwise difficult to formalise and analyse.

Reading: Before the beginning of the summer term, students are required to finish reading the texts listed below. They will be discussed in the following sequence: (1) Kwame Kwei-Armah; (2) Peter Carey; (3) Adania Shibli.

Literature: Peter Carey, A Long Way from Home.
Kwame Kwei-Armah, Elmina's Kitchen.
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail.

Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking. Ed. Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark U. Stein & Silke Stroh. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013.

Postcolonial Translocations
096850 | Lecture | Thu 12-14

Postgraduate Class II (Nation and Migration)
096862 | Colloquium | Tue 12-14

PTTS Colloquium
096878 | Colloquium | Tue 14-16

AR Felipe Espinoza Garrido

Queer Diasporic Graphic Narratives
096858 | Seminar | Tue 08.30-10

The graphic narrative has exhaustively – and convincingly – been theorized as inherently disruptive, not least in the fields of diaspora studies and queer studies. For scholars of diasporas, migration and of the transnational, graphic novels have become sites of ”foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities in their precise contexts” (Mehta and Mukherji 2015, 2), often constructing ”sophisticated counter-geographies and alternative, cross-national imagined communities” (Davies 2019, 127). They have also been asserted as a medium ”well suited both to representing postcolonial issues and to generating provocation” (Knowles, Peacock, and Earle 2016, 379–80). For scholars of queer studies, graphic narratives have been understood as ”a distinctly queer mode of cultural production” (Scott and Fawaz 2018, 199) and as a form embedded with ”queer temporal openings” which ”provide a generative medium for queer worldmaking” (McCullough 2018, 377). Simultaneously, scholarship on queer diasporas has generated interdisciplinary routes of inquiry (e.g. Ellis 2020; Fernandéz Carbajal 2019; Gopinath 2020; 2005; Luibhéid and Cantú 2005; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000) where questions of migrant, diasporic and racialized identity imbricate ”hybridized identificatory positions [that] are always in transit, shuttling between different identity vectors” (Muñoz 1999, 32). . As such queer diasporic graphic narratives expose and disrupt these interdependent tensions of gender, sexuality, nation and belonging. Against this backdrop, this Seminar will draw upon a cast range of graphic novels to help

theorize approaches to studying graphic fiction
understand graphic narratives as interconnected with other (audio)visual genres
read the graphic form as a site of negotiating the intersections between diasporic formation and queerness

Postgraduate Class I (Literary Studies)
096859 | Colloquium | Tue 12-14 (s.t.)

This postgraduate colloquium is the second part of Research Module I and is open to MA NTS students interested in pursuing projects related to literary and cultural studies. Students taking this part of research module I will build on knowledge, experience and skills gained in semester 1. Students will further develop specialised research interests, pursuing independent studies on one or several topics of their choice which may/will lead to (and later complement) their Master theses. The colloquium is specifically designed as a space for presenting ideas on individual MA thesis projects with peers and the course instructor providing feedback. Students also receive guidance on how to plan for and write their MA theses in a timely manner. Information on academic writing, research methodologies and theoretical frameworks, including career advice will also be provided depending on students' needs. If you are enrolled in this course, please email me any (preliminary) ideas on your MA thesis topic at least a week before the first day of class. Make a self-needs assessment and also include in your email research skills that you already possess & research skills which you think you lack. Date of first session will be announced to registed course participants via email. In this second part of Research Module I, you will also be expected to complete and hand in your research portfolio which you started working on in semester 1.

Rita Maricocchi

Museum Interventions
096765 | Seminar | Mon 16-18

On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson broke the glass of and repeatedly slashed the painting “Rokeby Venus” at the National Gallery in London, an act she later explained by saying “I care more for justice than I do for art, and I firmly believe that when the nation shuts its eyes to justice and prefers to have women who are not only denied justice but who are ill treated and tortured, then I say that this action of mine should be understandable.” This intervention into the museum space was part of a larger movement of suffragette action under the Women’s Social and Political Union to demand rights for women in the first decades of the twentieth century. Richardson’s intervention clearly demonstrates how museums have been a site of social and political critique in the modern era. Indeed, in an attempt to welcome, if not in fact mitigate, critiques of the institution, museums are increasingly inviting guest curators and artistic interventions which comment on the politics of power and belonging within their institutions. Interventions, whether curated or uninvited, draw attention to the rules which inform museum spaces and expose the cultural and historical narratives created by museums to be less authoritative than they may appear at first glance. In engaging with this premise, the seminar will broadly orient itself around the following questions: How do museum spaces function? What constitutes a museum intervention? And how are museums used to make social and political critiques through various forms of interventions? We will look in particular at ways the museum itself can be read as an intervention (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), at invited queer feminist interventions in the museum space (“To Be Seen, Queer Lives 1900-1950” special exhibit at the NS Dokumentationszentrum Munich, Sonia Boyce’s “Six Acts” at the Manchester Art Gallery), at curated decolonial interventions (“Wayward Dust” performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, “Das ist kolonial” exhibition at LWL Museum Zeche-Zollern Dortmund, “Collecting and Empire Trail” at the British Museum London), and at the recent series of uninvited climate activist interventions in European museums. Students will familiarize themselves with key concepts and secondary texts within the fields of museum studies and cultural studies, develop the ability to close read and critically evaluate exhibitions/interventions, as well as engage with contemporary debates on the functions of and challenges facing museums as cultural institutions. In examining both museums within anglophone contexts as well as paying particular attention to local museums in North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany more broadly, the course highlights the national and transnational contexts in which museums interventions are embedded.

Theory and Literature (Group IV): Queer Graphic Diasporas
096772 | Practice course | Tue 16-18

The graphic narrative has exhaustively – and convincingly – been theorized as inherently disruptive, not least in the fields of diaspora studies and queer studies. For scholars of diaspora, migration, and of the transnational, graphic novels have become sites of ”foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities” (Mehta and Mukherji 2), often constructing ”sophisticated counter-geographies and alternative, cross-national imagined communities” (Davies 127). For scholars of queer studies, graphic narratives have been understood as ”a distinctly queer mode of cultural production” (Scott and Fawaz 199) and as a form embedded with ”queer temporal openings” which ”provide a generative medium for queer world making” (McCullough 377). Against this backdrop, the following course is designed to critically engage with and apply concepts from diaspora studies and queer theory to the reading of select graphic narratives in order to explore how queer diasporic comics disrupt interdependent tensions of gender, sexuality, nation, and belonging. The first part of the course will allow students to work closely with key texts in diaspora studies and queer theory and to think through these concepts by reading several poems from Logan February’s collection Mental Voodoo and engaging with the author during a public reading and discussion. This will be followed by a two-week workshop on how to read and analyze comics. In the second part of the course, students will conduct close readings of select graphic narratives, including Messy Roots by Laura Gao, excerpts from Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som, and excerpts from Beldan Sezen’s Snapshots of a Girl. Please obtain a copy of Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by Laura Gao (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2022).

Can Çakır

Academic Skills (Group II)
096701 | Practice | 02.-06.04.2024 (Block course) 10-16

Dorit Neumann

Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II (Group VI)
096720 | Basic course | Mon 10-12

Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II (Group VII)
096721 | Basic course | Mon 12-14

The course begins in the first week of lectures, April 8.

Primary Readings

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (The Arden Shakespeare, third series)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage)
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (available on Learnweb)
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116” (available on Learnweb)
Claude McKay, “America” (available on Learnweb)
Get Out (2017), dir. Jordan Peele

Secondary Readings (excerpts will be provided on Learnweb):

Vera and Ansgar Nünning, An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature: Anglistik/Amerikanistik (4th Edition)
Michael Meyer, English and American Literatures (4th Edition)