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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.
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