Research Projects & Collaborations

Prof. Dr. Sabine N. Meyer

Sonic Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance in American and Anglophone Caribbean Literature

The project seeks to shed light on the ways in which sound can be considered a central instrument of empire and colonial governance. Based on Mary Louise Pratt's idea of “seeing-man” “whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess,” it is to reflect on the significance of the “hearing-man” for the colonization of North America and the Anglophone Caribbean. Representations of sound in colonial travel narratives, ethnographic depictions, and colonial histories provide insights into the colonial categorization of ‘New World’ “sounds” into “structured sounds” and “unstructured sounds”; into agreeable, civilized vs. disagreeable, “primitive” sounds. As a second step, the project sets out to explore the mechanisms through which these sonic categorizations became the basis of colonial orders and hierarchies and implemented inequalities between colonizer and colonized. And thirdly, it seeks to investigate the function of sound as a mode of resistance to imperial hegemony. The project thus contributes to the theorization of the inextricable intertwinement of coloniality, constructions of race and ethnicity, and colonial identities with sound and practices of hearing/listening.

Prof. Dr. Sabine N. Meyer

Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Expression

This project engages with the rapidly growing, diverse body of work produced since the turn of the 21st century by writers, artists, activists identifying as African Native American/Black Indigenous. The corpus of materials examined includes: literature across the genres; artwork and museum exhibitions; films/documentaries; various forms of online content. This corpus of materials will be approached with a particular eye to how it negotiates dominant legal discourses that have defined Black and Indigenous as two mutually exclusive categories of classification/identification and have hence written Black Indigenous subjectivities out of existence. However, the project also shows that by creating a wide array of textual, artistic, and online productions, Black Indigenous artists and activists have set out to create alternative forms of subjectivity that challenge, subvert, or even reject the dominant subject positions imposed upon them via law.

The proposed project operates at the intersection of the disciplines of Native and Indigenous Studies, Black Studies/African American Studies, as well as Critical Legal Studies. It critically interrogates the theories developed by scholars in these fields – theories engaging with Blackness, indigeneity, fungibility/(in)alienability of body/land, recognition, sovereignty – and places them into conversation with critical legal understandings of the law as indeterminate, as facilitating structures of domination and oppression, and as a discourse creating sets of subjectivities for marginalized groups that serve the interests of those in power.

Project Funding:

Feodor Lynen Research Fellowhsip for Experienced Researchers (2023-2025), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, host institution: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke

"Memory, Mediation, Seriality: Re-cognizing Literary and Cultural Studies, Re-membering the Subject":

Taking off from three central concepts of cultural analysis – memory, mediation, and seriality – the project interfaces methods and research questions of cultural studies and the cognitive sciences and explores the potential of such transdisciplinary dialogue for our sense of cultural practice. What issues relevant to current cultural studies can be interrogated at the crossroads with the cognitive sciences? And in what ways can cultural analysis and cognition research be mutually instrumental?
Since both constructivism (which relegates the materiality of the body and cognition to the periphery of its perspectives) and current brain research (which cannot adequately account for consciousness and individual experience by way of neurophysiology) position the subject as nodal point and blind spot of their inquiries conceptions of subjectivity are central to my study. After all, both the subject and modes of perception are continuously being redesigned by a complex ever-shifting media ecology. My analyses therefore focus on phenomena such as cinematic adaptations of literary texts, advertisements, and computer tomography which, as transformations of canonized late 19th- and early 20th-century cultural practices, mediate new processes of perception rather than modes of cultural memory. What, however, would it mean for cultural studies to acknowledge and “re-member” the subject as an agent whose main faculty is to transform fragmented experiences into coherence?

The project is funded by the German Research Council.

Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke

"Science into Narrative"

"Science into Narrative" explores how contemporary US-American fiction, including novels by Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Richard Powers, among others, translates science into narrative and thereby foregrounds how some scientific endeavors are continuous with literary discourse while others, clearly resisting narrative, are not. In this way American literature calls for more radically transdisciplinary readings while also exposing the limits of transdisciplinarity.

The North American Studies Program supported the work of the research network “The Futures of (European) American Studies.” The network was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from June 2005 to January 2008. Its fifteen members, young American Studies scholars and cultural historians from various German and international universities, set out to explore the ongoing repositioning of the field as well as the institutional challenges and opportunities that accompany its paradigmatic shifts.

Situating itself within the prominent debate over the futures of American Studies as it had been promoted by scholars in the U.S. and in Europe, the name of the network drew on the title of Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman’s volume The Futures of American Studies (2002). It also adopted the thematic framework of the symposium annually hosted by Pease at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. At the same time, the network sought to recontextualize and critically assess this markedly U.S. American debate from ‘the outside,’ asking how it may be translated into European contexts of research and teaching.

The network organized conferences on “Positioning American Studies” (July 2005), “The New Americanists” (January 2006), “Internationalizing American Studies” (July 2006), and “American Studies as Media Studies” (February 2007), "Inter/Transdisciplinarity" (June 2007), and "American Studies in Germany" (January 2008). Among the guests at these conferences were Winfried Siemerling, Paul Lauter, Walter Benn Michaels, Robyn Wiegman, and Joseph Tabbi.