Events-Collection
From 2025 onward, the Columbus Day Lecture - a tradition of the North American Studies Program since its beginning in the early 1990's - will come to an end, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Lecture will take its place. For along with the statues of famous figures in world history, holidays such as Columbus Day are under severe attack - an "iconoclasm" that is by no means a new phenomenon. Yet while some activists promote the quick disposal of monuments and festivities honoring characters whose heroism appears questionable in hindsight, others fear that along with these stones of contention, our sense of history gets disposed, and we become all too forgetful. Presenting different perspectives on these issues, the speakers and panelists mark some of the frontlines of these so-called “culture wars” whose concepts and strategies get adapted from US American debates for incomparable historical contexts on foreign turf, including German memoryscapes.
Dr. Nyerges lecture places the contest of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in a broader historical dialectic of hope and fear, the primary affects animating US politics since Henry Luce announced “the American Century." With attention to the role of legacy and social media in the presentation of this year’s presidential race, he will demonstrate how symbols of fate and futurity converge on the polls in November. Using Lauren Berlant’s frame work of “cruel optimism,” the lecture asks us to consider what the question of who wins, and how they win, means for the sentimental underpinnings of the nation’s self-conception.
Ever since US president Joe Biden passed on the torch and vice president Kamala Harris moved to the center stage of the electoral race, the dynamics of the 2024 US election has shifted and keeps on shifting. If we can trust the current polls, the race remains tight and unpredictable. One week before the decisive date 5 November 2024, we like to debate – with our audience – the possible outcome of the contest between two incomparable candidates and the impact that either contestant will have on the institution of the US-American presidency and on the future politics of the United States.
Join us for our Election Night Special – watch CNN, listen to live music, share the excitement at the bpb:medienzentrum!
In his talk, Alexei Kazakov proposes a new framework for understanding how national identity has taken shape since the late twentieth century. Grounding his argument in theories of postmodernity that account for shifts in the experience of time, notably that of nostalgia, he shows how notions of national identity "fixed in time" have become increasingly incongruent with accelerating change and result in a sense of cultural dissonance. As he engages this perspective to reassess the status of the 1972 Summit Series – the hockey tournament between Canada and the Soviet Union which has loomed large in Canadian national identity –, the speaker evolves a conception of national identity suited to the current historical moment.
Concentrating on the US-American tradition of social photography, Simon Schleusener’s lecture interrogates attempts to visualize dimensions of inequality that are effectively invisible. While academic discourse on the subject has focused on how the socially disadvantaged are depicted, his talk shifts our attention to representations of social structures that produce inequality and poverty in the first place. Accordingly, he engages with images of degradation that go beyond empathy- or recognition-oriented forms of social photography, examining visual strategies in which the photographic image is transformed from a still image into an image of thought.
Engaging a collection of postcards from art museums, Dr. Mendelsohn discusses this mode of communication as a repo-sitory of personal and cultural memory: how do these cards as objects create and curate identities? How do they mediate cultural experience? As images repre-senting museum objects representing a culture—the museum, a city, a country—postcards have both a literal and symbolic status, he argues. They “circulate through personal/collective consciousness,” as Lauren Berlant puts it, and thereby localize national cultures. The talk positions post-cards as they relate to the United States, transnationally, and other countries.
Join us for a lecture with Sarah Becker from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on “Water Corpses in US-American Visual Culture”!
Join us for a lecture with Dr. Imke Lichterfeld from the IAAK, University of Bonn on "‘My consciousness flowing’: Outdoor Swimming and the Immediacy of Water in Roger Deakin’s Waterlog and Victoria Whiteworth’s Swimming with Seals"!
Join us for our Martin Luther King Day Lecture with Dr. Nadja Klopprogge from the University of Tübingen on "Intimate Constellations as Sites of Multidirectional Memory: Relating African American and German History"!
Join us for a lecture with Madita Oeming, an independent writer, on "America’s War on Porn: Anti-Pornography Discourses Across Ideologies"!
In Europe, we have followed the 2024 US presidential and congressional elections with both interest and concern. The transatlantic partnership faces enormous challenges and its survival is everything but certain in view of rising nationalism, populism, and neoisolationist sentiment on the other side of the Atlantic. At the same time, many of the troubling phenomena we have been witnessing in the U.S. such as divisive polarization, acrid rhetoric, and political gridlock have also come to shape European politics. To discuss these and related aspects and to analyze the results of the 2024 US presidential and congressional elections, former members of the US Congress Bob Goodlatte, Republican from Virginia (1993-2019), and Brenda Lawrence, Democrat from Michigan (2015-2023), will join us for a brown-bag-lunch, to which you are cordially invited. Sharing their political insights with us, they will present their take-aways from the election results and look forward to your questions.
Though certainly painful and hard to digest for many voters, commentators, and observers, the outcome of the 2024 US-American presidential election was not an ‘accident’ of history – neither was the decision American citizens made in 2016. This time, though, this vote may not so much result in “chaos,” as some predicted, but set a course that was clearly foreseeable and is rapidly taking shape. Three weeks after the election we like to debate – with our audience – the outcome of the contest and the impact that “commander-in-chief” Donald Trump and his administration can have on the institution of the US-American presidency, on the state of “checks and balances” in the US-American political system, on the future politics of the United States, and on the ongoing shifts in the global geopolitical landscape.