CFP: 'Archives and Utopias' – 18th annual German Graduate Symposium, Oxford (26.03.2021)

Call for Papers:

18th annual German Graduate Symposium – Archives and Utopias

We are pleased to announce this year’s theme of the 18th annual German Graduate Symposium: ‘Archives and Utopias’. This symposium provides a space to examine both the field and history of German Studies by reflecting on the effect and interrelatedness of utopian or archival-focused thinking in the discipline and its community of practice. 

‘Archives’ and ‘utopias’ both offer a peculiar relation to spatiality either as a site for engaging with the past or as imagined ‘no-places’ of the future. However, they also bear the potential for critical (re)ordering through their reversed temporal relation to space. 

Archives (ἀρχή as ‘government’ or ‘origin, first place’) form both a site and conceptual framework for ordering material, so records from the past. They range from historical, institutional and national to personal, family or communal collections. Beyond questions of a material practice, the theory of archives concerns their epistemological power to produce and canonise knowledge. Michael Foucault understood them as ‘system of enunciability’ (1969) that shapes and authorises historical knowledge. The archive, nevertheless, also allows approaching questions of cultural memory and historical narratives through the margins, blindspots or gaps of archival formations. Ann Cvetkovich draws attention to archives and cultural texts as repositorium for (collective) emotions and feelings (2003), and Wolfgang Ernst reflects on digital memory, so ‘a different economy of the archive as dynamic agency online’ (2012). 

Utopias (οὐτόπος as ‘no-place’) designate both the topoi of an ideal world and a mode of conceptualizing or designing the future as means of critique. In other words, it not only concerns the imagological aspect of a detached vision but also its subversive possibilities of the contemporary through altering the political, social, aesthetic, ethical or ecological order. In the field of German studies, utopian thought ranges from early modern writers (e.g. Johann Valentin Andreae Christianopolis (1619), Henriette Fröhlich’s Die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820)) to a prominent upheaval of philosophical, technological, political, theological utopianisms around 1900 and the interwar period (e.g. Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), Rosa Luxemburg’s Friedensutopien (1911) or Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918). Simultaneously to the crisis of modernity, discourses on history and cultural memory shift from static memory conceptions of culture and tradition towards a dynamic archival understanding. Post-war writings feature utopian aspects in e.g. GDR literature, feminist, queer and postcolonial imaginations and approaches to rework the historical trauma in cultural memory (e.g. Andreas Eschenbach’s Eine Billion Dollar (2001)). 

Although utopias and archives seemingly follow reversed chronologies, both provide the potential of (re)ordering historical narratives – either the future through reorganizing the past or the past through alternating the future. Following from that, what are the (implicit) utopias or visions in archival agendas and what is the utopian potential of unsettling the archives? To what degree does a utopian imagining firstly create a (no)space for voices and perspectives at the margins of archival formation in the present? And, in turn, what are the discursive, affective, cultural and institutional archives of utopian thought traditions within and of German Studies? Concerning the history of our discipline itself, what are the different visions of German Studies and the archival traces of this community of practice?

For this year’s German Graduate Symposium, which builds on our Graduate Seminar ‘German Studies at Oxford: Archives and Utopias of a Community of Practice’, we are delighted to announce the keynote speakers Emma Huber (Subject Consultant for German Languages and Literatures (including Yiddish), Taylor Institution Library) and Clare Hills-Nova (Librarian in Charge, Sackler Library, Art & Architecture Librarian, Bodleian Libraries). They will explore the geo-culturally and historically conditioned practices and visions of German Studies at Oxford through the Taylorian collections and archives.

Topics exploring the interrelatedness of ‘Archives’ and ‘Utopias’ may include but are not limited to:

Colonial discourse and diversity

• How do colonial and postcolonial discourses underpin and compare in German utopian writing? What mode of archival formation or epistemic order corresponds to (post)colonial utopias? 
• How does a shift in utopias from colonial to postcolonial visions restructure the idea of archives and their function?

Gender, sexuality, identity

• What are feminist, queer utopias in German tradition of thought and writing and how are questions of race and gender represented? 
• How do affective archives, so cultural texts as repositorium of feeling sand emotions shape queer and feminist utopias? 

Memory, History and Trauma

• How does the body as an embodied archive of personal and collective memory relate to utopias of rewriting historical trauma? 
• What is the function of the literary medium and literary studies in re-ordering embodied and cultural memory and archival silencing?

Politics, Philosophy, Resistance

• What is the relation between utopian thought tradition and political reasoning, so between utopianism, revolution and pacifism?
• To what extent might archives contribute to a politically utopian (or dystopian) agenda?

Media and Technology

• How do the different virtual infrastructures of social networks and digital humanities shift practices of archiving memory, voices, material? 
• How does this influence both methods and thematic focus of imagining contemporary (technological or transhumanist) utopias of society, e.g. in Social media and Netzliteratur?

Crisis, Rupture, Tradition, Canonisation

• How do practices of alternating history and alternative historiographies interlink with utopianism and archival practice? To what extent does the process of envisioning of (no)-space depend on revisiting the order of knowledge, canons and tradition?
• When do utopian thought and archives or archival canons come into crisis? How do periods of crisis affect archives and utopias?

Topologies: Exile, Migration, Diaspora

• How do exilic, uprooted or diasporic experience shape utopian thoughts? What are the conditions of such archives from and about the diaspora? What is the utopian potential for revisiting and forming these archives?

History of the discipline and its institutions

• What are the imaginations or utopias as visions of German Studies as a discipline in its different cultural and historical contexts? 
• And in what way can they be understood through an ‘archive’ of a community of practice, so the traces in its institutional frameworks, journals, archives and educational networks?

Graduate Students and scholars from the field of German Studies are invited to submit a 250 word abstract, together with 3-5 keywords and a short-bio until 26th March 2021. Please send your submissions to both Sophia Buck (sophia.buck@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk) and Aoife Ní Chroidheáin (aoife.nichroidheain@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk).

We hope to have this conference in person in the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford on the 8th May 2021. However, if the Covid-19 restrictions do not permit it, we will hold the conference in a virtual format.

Redaktion: Constanze Baum – Lukas Büsse – Mark-Georg Dehrmann – Nils Gelker – Markus Malo – Alexander Nebrig – Johannes Schmidt

Diese Ankündigung wurde von H-GERMANISTIK [Nils Gelker] betreut – editorial-germanistik@mail.h-net.msu.edu