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Winter Term 2010/11

Semester Schedule

For more detailed information on the SCM Study Group and the Study Group's sessions see below.

SCM Study Group Winter Term 2010/2011: "Cultural turns: Mapping the Field of Cultural Studies"

Convenors: Anna Lissa, James Thompson, Ralph Buchenhorst, Carsten Wergin

Social and cultural studies declare a resounding ‘cultural turn’, refering to the necessity to respect and analize the variety of different social and symbolic cultures in a globalizing world. After the extremely sucessfull paradigmatic ‘linguistic turn’, a set of new turns contest the field of cultural studies. Next semesters study-group texts aim at an understanding of the most important of those methodological reorientations in the realm of cultural anthropology, social sciences and literary criticism, thus introducing a set of key theoretical frameworks and approaches within which to situate contemporary debates on cultural identity, social changes and transnational symbolic flow. Interpretative turn, iconic turn, performative turn or spatial turn have to be understood in their theoretical determinations, analytical limitations and different approaches to complex constellations of transnational social life. On a wider scope, this will allow us to examine how cultural, scientific and economic competition on a global scale has shaped issues and controversies about symbolic capital, and how these are translated into theoretical approaches and instruments.

Keytopics include, but are not limited to:

• Competition between different symbolic orders.
• Projective colonisation.
• Refiguration through “blurred genres”.
• Culture as a process of transfer which translates social structures into the symbolic sphere.
• How certain knowledge(s) became problem(s) and look for new interpretations in different cultural contexts.
• The specificity of space and place.
• Mobilities within the (post-)colonial situation: culture, society, spatial regimes of segregation.
• How narratives, cognitive and moral elements move, are translated and integrated in other cultures.
• How best to theorize those elements in a transnational age.
• Competitive cultures and the idea of a new master narrative.

Reading for the Study Group`s session

Bibliography

Preliminary Bibliography

• Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Social Performance, Symbolic Action. Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, Cambridge, N.Y. 2006
• Emily Apter, The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature, Princeton, Oxford 2006
• Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2006
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, N.Y. 2004
• Sanford Budick/Wolfgang Iser (eds.), The Translatability of Cultures. Figurations of the Space Between, Stanford 1996
• Dipesh Chacrabarty, Provincializing Europe
• Dipesh Chacrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, Chicago 2002
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Swapan Chakravorty et al. (eds.), N.Y. 2006
• Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn,  Cambridge/Mass. 2004
• Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture. The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, Cambridge/Mass., London 2005
• Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures, Edinburgh 2005
• Ulla Haselstein (ed.), Iconographies of Power. The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation, Heidelberg 2003
• Theo Hermans (ed.), Translating Others, 2 vol., Manchester 2006
• Phil Hubbard et al. (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place, London/Thousand Oaks/New Dehli 2004
• Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins, London, N.Y. 2001
• Gill Jagger/Judith Butler, Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative, London, N.Y. 2005
• Sethama Low/Denise Lawrence-Zúniga (eds.), The Anthropology of Space and Place. Locating Culture, Malden, Oxford 2003
• Doreen Massey, For Space, London/Thousand Oaks/New Dehli 2005
• William J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago, London 2005
• Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies. A Materialist Critique, London 2004
• Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, N.Y. 1993
• Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, N.Y. 1987

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