Caroline Rosenthal, Stefanie Schäfer, and Steffen Wöll
This group of projects ("Nature(s) on the Move: Species Migration, Biotic Communities, and Place-making during Colonialism and in Contemporary Ecopoetry"; “Cowgirldom on the Move: The Western Show in Transnational Perspective”; "Rewriting the Margins: Minor Mobilities in the Literary Geographies of Jack London") relates minor mobilities – in the sense of un-marked, marginalized, less recognized – to the production of ‘natural’ spaces in North America. We want to look at how culturally defined mobilities create natural spaces which hold a specific place in the national imaginary, such as the (Wild) West or the North or Wilderness and Nature, and at how minor mobilities challenge those hegemonic understandings of space. Our title postulates “Natures” in the plural to emphasize multiple constructions of the same “natural” space. Nature is never simply given or static but always a cultural construction which rests on hegemonic dichotomies such as human/non-human, male/female, white/racially different etc. The minor transnational, cross-border, and anti-anthropocentric mobilities we analyze and re-semioticize ‘natural’ spaces by challenging and subverting dominant mobilities. The projects analyses the cultural parameters and underpinnings in the production of spaces by focusing on minor mobilities and their ways of investing those spaces with meaning.
Jutta Ernst and Brigitte Glaser
The projects engaged in scenarios of cultural memory explore the transmission and mediation of (archival) knowledge less in terms of content than in terms of practice and performance, thus highlighting time, space, medium, and people’s agency. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, they investigate the ways in which archival memory (that is, texts, documents, material remnants of the past, in general) is culturally enacted: how it is selected, prepared, preserved, and kept; how it is classified and interpreted (under the influence of, for example, evolving institutions, different media ecologies, changing political structures, or heterogeneous individual perspectives); and how it is mediated in diverse ways. The objective of the two projects is furthermore to identify new and possibly intertwining modes of expression and transmission as well as shifts in the degrees of materiality when it comes to scenarios of cultural memory.
Astrid Fellner and Markus Heide
The projects in this cluster engage in comparative border studies, focusing on U.S.-Mexican and U.S-Canadian borderlands. Borders are shaped by mobility regimes and mark forms of inclusion/exclusion, of citizenship and of otherness. Within such regimes, border scenarios symptomatically enact, on the one hand, a history of exclusion and uphold the nation state and, on the other, offer critical interventions in the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian border cultures and societies. These contradictory and ambivalent processes of the scenario reiterate the nation state but also provide the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge. Looking at border literatures, arts, films, performances and other cultural practices, the projects rely on an understanding of borderlands as liminal spaces of intercultural contact, which also entail a conception of identities in terms of hybridity and mestizaje. They also focus on alterna(rra)tives and minor knowledges. Borderlands, as Walter Mignolo has it, also give rise to different logics—border thinking—that is “thinking from another place, imagining an other language, arguing from another logic” (Mignolo 2000: 313). Working on a new “epistemology of and from the border,” this cluster also focuses on representations of subaltern knowledges (particularly in Indigenous cultures), which acknowledge that a border epistemology necessarily entails disorientation, disalignment, and thinking beyond western paradigms.
Alexandra Ganser and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez
In this section we analyze differential or uneven forms of (im)mobility that involve fugitivity and migrancy. What they share are scenarios of encounter and conflict that are characterized by structural imbalances impacted by race, class, and age. While scenarios are "structures that predispose certain outcomes," they "allow for reversal, parody, and change" (Taylor 31). In this axis we investigate representations of fugitives and migrants in texts about black (im)mobilities in Florida in the 19th and early 20th century as well as in contemporary refugee narratives and legal discourses. The "minor" mobilities in these representations serve as correctives to a range of dominant mobility discourses and regimes by focusing on some of the untold and underacknowledged aspects within contemporary studies on refugees, migrants, and fugitives.