Vorlesungsverzeichnis

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Start > Masterprogramm Cultural Studies: Culture and Organization (M.A.) -> Kulturwissenschaftlicher Integrationsbereich -> Aktuelle Debatten in den Kulturwissenschaften

Lehrveranstaltungen

Language, Digital Media and the African Sexuality Landscape (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Paul Ayodele Onanuga

Termin:
wöchentlich | Dienstag | 10:15 - 11:45 | 16.10.2023 - 02.02.2024 | C 12.015 Seminarraum

Inhalt: This seminar intersects linguistic inquiry with digital practices within the context of queerness on the African continent. As background, we will explore the socio-cultural, religious and legal impediments which continue to constitute cogs in the wheels of queer visibility and livability on the African continent. These will in turn be linked to the manifestations and extent (discriminatory practices, linguistic violence and ostracisation) of queerphobia by both state and non-state agents. From these, the course progresses to the examination of the digital space as a leeway to escape the inhibitions and discriminatory spaces and contexts of the physical space. Through these, we deconstruct heterosexual policing on queer expression, and foreground the place of digital platforms in African queer advocacies and activism. In this course, central to our engagements are the roles that language and text (in its multiple manifestations) play in the documentation and representation of queerness within the African context. Language is theorized from the discourse analytic perspective (mainly critical discourse analysis – van Dijk, Fairclough; multimodal discourse analysis – Sigrid Norris, Deborah Tannen; and corpus linguistic analysis – Kira Hall, Josef Schmied, Tunde Opeibi). While attention will be drawn to the lived realities which make queer visibility challenging within these spaces, the agentic rendition of the victims as well as their appropriation of diverse digital platforms will be asserted. Consequently, language use (written text, images, voice, videos) on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, podcasts, blogs, etc. will constitute the data to be analysed and discussed. Required Texts Adenekan, Shola (2021). African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. Boydell and Brewer. Mpyangu, Christine Mbabazi and Wakana Shiino (2021) (eds.). Contemporary Gender and Sexuality in Africa. Langaa RPCIG. Epprecht, Marc (2013). Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa: Rethinking Homophobia and Forging Resistance. Zed Books. Epprecht, Marc (2009). Sexuality, Africa, History. The American Historical Review, 114 (5): 1258–1272. Tamale, Sylvia (2003). Out of the Closet: Unveiling Sexuality Discourses in Uganda. Feminist Africa, 2: 42-49. Onanuga, Paul Ayodele (2020). Coming Out and Reaching Out: Linguistic Advocacy in Queer Nigerian Twitter. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33 (4): 489 – 504. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2020.1806799 https://www.afritondo.com/afritondo/when-the-flutist-burns-his-pipe-the-rise-of-queer-and-emigration-literature-in-africa https://brittlepaper.com/2018/10/un-silencing-queer-nigeria-the-language-of-emotional-truth-five-writers-in-conversation/ Additional Reading Kperogi, Farooq (2022). Digital Dissidence and Social Media Censorship in Africa. Routledge. Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. MIT Press.

Secrecy, Opacity and Intransparency (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: This course is dedicated to investigating the imaginaries, practices and infrastructures of secrecy. It aims to provide students with modalities of secrecy and the secret as central categories for understanding (not only) contemporary life. The course’s basic premise is that historical and contemporary societies are shaped by forms and episodes of secrecy, opacity and not-knowing. Today’s rise and ubiquity of computational media – its infrastructure, platforms and algorithms – updates and intensifies conditions of invisibility and illegibility, of what can be betrayed, what remains hidden and what is inaccessible and cannot be accounted for. Therefore, the course’s guiding question is: How can (resistance to) organized life be investigated and understood through different registers of secrecy? The course is based on a rethinking of secrecy itself. Secrecy is not merely an unfortunate necessity for exceptional circumstances or a strategy of last resort. It is not merely a state of exception mischievously upheld by state agencies and the tech giants of surveillance capitalism, to be countered by the panacea of making things public and transparent, and holding humans or algorithms responsible. Rather, secrecy is a constitutive and multi-faceted force of social organization. In this sense, we will go beyond the tradition of a hermeneutics of the secret, which demands endless answers to what, why and how. Rather than revealing secrets, the seminar explores, maps and discusses different notions of secrecy as key concepts with which to investigate organized life. The first half of the course will be given over to historical and contemporary approaches to secrecy as key concept of cultural inquiry and social theory. These writings and performances range from Georg Simmel’s sociology of the secret to Reinhard Koselleck’s history of secret societies, from the study of cybernetic »black-box epistemologies« (Peter Galison) to the diagnosis of today’s »Black Box Society« (Frank Pasquale), from present ideas of »postsecrecy« as collective resistance (Clare Birchall) and a »cloud ethics« based on the demand for opacity (Louise Amoore) to the postcolonial »right to opacity« (Edouard Glissant); from modes of secrecy staged in literary texts to contemporary art works that engage with registers of the arcane. In the second half of the course (working towards the concluding research conference), the students will be asked to conduct their own investigations into specific cases, sites, practices or technologies of secrecy.