Series Information:
CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard

This collection of new essays explores how Germany's imagined Asia informed its national fantasies at crucial historical junctures. It will influence future scholarly explorations of Asian-German cultural transfer. The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil for fantasies of sexuality, escape, danger, competition, and racial and spiritual purity that were central to foundational ideas of a cohesive German national culture during crucial historical junctures such as fascism or reunification. By exploring the complex and varied phenomenon of German "Orientalism," these essays argue that the relation between an imagined Germany and an imagined Asia defies the idea of a one-way influence, instead conceiving of their cultural transfers and synergies as multidirectional and mutually perpetuating. Examining literary and non-literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays cover a wide rangeof topics and genres in disciplines including philosophy, film and visual culture, theater, literary studies, and the history of science. Ideally positioned to shape further contributions, Imagining Germany Imagining Asiawill attract a wide range of readers interested in German, Asian, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Petra Fachinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Randall Halle, David D. Kim, Hoi-eun Kim, Kamakshi Murti, Perry Myers, Mary Rhiel, Qinna Shen, Quinn Slobodian, Chunjie Zhang Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College. Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.

"Screening Riefenstahl" offers an opportunity to rethink the place of Leni Riefenstahl and her work in contemporary culture and in academic discourse.Leni Riefenstahl is larger than life. From the lure of her persona as it enters our homes via television to our pleasure in the recognition of film images at rock concerts, to her place as part of the history of the Nazi period, Riefenstahl lives on in our imagination and in our cultural productions. Thus, the editors' introduction to this volume examines the manner in which Riefenstahl 'haunts' debates on aesthetics and politics, and how her legacy reverberates in the contemporary cultural scene. The essays that follow explore our highly invested discursive struggles over the meaning of her persona and films in this particular historical moment: post-unification, post-twentieth century, post-Riefenstahl.The editors view the collection as a three-part framework. The essays in the opening section of the book show that Riefenstahl is still very much alive and well - and controversial - in popular culture. Fair game for the contemporary memory work, she is part of productions on the History Channel; her images provide inspiration for bands like Rammstein. Her films continue to determine the way in which we think about the Nazi period, providing instantly recognizable images and messages that often go unquestioned.We cannot separate these phenomena from Riefenstahl's years of avid self-fashioning. With that fact in mind, the second section of the book offers treatments of the shifting, mobile relationship between Riefenstahl's stubborn attempts to create and control her personae and her reactions to others' re-appropriations of the meanings of her life and work. Reading the texts and discourses surrounding 'Riefenstahl', these scholars treat her memories - and her repeated assertions about herself - as a springboard into understanding anew how we might approach her films in a productive way.The closing section of the volume comprises essays that go right to the heart of the matter: Riefenstahl's films and photography. The new contexts, theoretical discussions and emerging discourses that animate these essays include Scarry's treatise on beauty, justice and the global, the problems of history and memory, the place of Riefenstahl's filmmaking technique in contemporary cinema, and her appropriation of German musical traditions, to name only some of the critical trajectories addressed in these contributions.Fueled by the work of a diverse range of scholars, then, It insists upon a critical self-examination that maps a topography of how scholars and teachers avail themselves of Riefenstahl's corpus.