General, News
As members of the Obama Institute at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and personally, we are terribly saddened to see the developments in the United States of America. We, therefore, express our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and those who are protesting for justice and equal rights for all.
The past years have shown that against common belief we are still facing deeply rooted systemic racism in society and public institutions in the United States of America and across the globe in general. There is still a long way to go until we create a society, free of racial bigotry and injustices and we specifically want to acknowledge that it is the responsibility of privileged institutions like us to take it upon themselves to educate, to be educated and no longer to remain silent.
The current unrest in the United States of America and manifestations of systemic racist violence have caused worldwide reactions and concerns about the peaceful co-existence of all groups in democratic societies. As members of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, we stand with the African American community and all other groups who are institutionally oppressed and will offer support to their cause.
We condemn all forms of racism, violence and police brutality and therefore join our exchange partners in the United States in finding peaceful solutions to create a world in which nobody “will […] be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” These common endeavors are part of our teaching and research activities.
It remains an ongoing challenge of academia not only in American Studies to try to contribute towards changing the structures of white supremacy. As members of an institution, it is essential that we reflect on our own biases and the systemic injustices that we, too, may be complicit in perpetuating. Such reflection is all the more important since in our research, we often study the role of white privilege, of implicit or explicit bias, and the mechanisms of hegemony. Yet, such academic knowledge will ultimately be void unless it is translated into the concrete lives we lead, and the decisions we make in both our institutional and our individual lives. For this reason, we believe that our work needs to be comparative; it needs to investigate racial prejudice not only in the US, but in Germany as well.
Our research about the challenges to democracy both in the US and in other parts of the world is dedicated to the pursuit of precisely the pressing needs and questions about the function of democracy in societies undergoing rapid changes in the 21st century whilst combatting inequalities such as health conditions, violence and racial injustice.
We invite our students, colleagues, and friends to join us in believing in the true potentials of multi-ethnic democracies on a transnational scale. Let us honor the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others before them; and let us constantly remind ourselves that we need to resist injustice in whatever shape it may take.
#blacklivesmatter
– Team American Studies II
General, News
Periodicals and Indigenous Modernity
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has announced to fund the research project “Periodicals and Indigenous Modernity: Building a Text Corpus of American Indian Magazines,1890–1930” (SCHE 1616/12-1) conducted by Professor Scheiding and Frank Newton, M.A. during a three-year funding period (2020–2023). This research project examines Native American periodicals and how they function as particular media formats to shape society and culture in a transitional period. The project seeks to find out more about what makes Native American periodicals a powerful middle ground to affect the wider culture and mediate various types of indigenous modernity. The project is part of the Mainz-based research initiative Transnational Periodical Cultures.
General, News, Summer School
Aug 10-14, 2020
The University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma, USA
In August 2020, the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies offers a Summer School to Norman, Oklahoma. Join us for workshop sessions on Indigenous filmmaking with directors and faculty from the University of Oklahoma’s American Indian Law and Film Studies Institutes, on field trips to tribal communities, law courts, schools, and indigenous cultural heritage centers, and experience on-campus life in a student residence hall.
For further information and registration, please contact Dr. Sonja Georgi.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Cristina Stanciu (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA)
Feb 6, 2020
16:15-17:45, P 203 (Philosophicum)
This presentation, part of a new research project on Indigenous writing in the aftermath of residential schools in four settler states, has two interrelated goals: first, to think about the possibilities and limitations of writing/literature about traumatic experiences by residential school survivors and their children in North America in both theoretical and pedagogical terms;  second, to interrogate the politics of settler-colonial uses of images of indigenous children in boarding and residential schools in the US and Canada. Part of a larger settler-colonial project of elimination through education, boarding and residential schools aimed to “kill the Indian and save the man” (US) and to “kill the Indian in the child” (Canada). Of the 150,000 Aboriginal children who attended residential schools in Canada between 1876 and 1996, 6,000 are documented to have died of malnutrition, disease, physical abuse, and suicide. Many others lived to tell their stories, surviving the imprint of what Patrick Wolf has called “total institutions,” and giving voice to that painful history. As early as the 1880s, Native children in US boarding schools were writing for the student papers; twentieth and twenty-first century survivors continued to write about residential schools in genres from autobiography and poetry to drama and the novel. Despite the saturation of “Indian”-inflected images in settler colonial representations, Indigenous and First Nations people in North America are still, for the most part, invisible. As Maori scholar Linda T. Smith has argued, Indigenous communities have struggled for centuries to exercise a fundamental right: “to represent ourselves.” In the last three decades, indigenous artists have engaged in what Michelle Raheja calls visual sovereignty, the creative self-representation of Native artists, turning the archival absence into presence. I end with a case study– The exhibit “the Legacy of Hope,” which traveled to major TRC events, displayed photographic and documentary evidence along with transcribed testimony to raise awareness about the legacy of residential schools nationally. The coherent pictorial and textual narrative of the exhibit—supplementing recorded survivor testimonies, some broadcasted live—tells a story of survival and resilience Besides pointing to a traumatic past—rooted in the loss of family, language, culture, and often hope—they gesture towards re-visioning a national narrative by imagining a resilient future.
Cristina Stanciu is Associate Professor in the Departement of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA and Fulbright Scholar 2019-20. Her research interests include Ethnic and immigrant American literatures, American Indian studies, visual culture (esp. silent film), and critical theory.
Â
You can download the poster for the event here.
