Travelling Concepts and Cultural Encounters Workshop of the Graduate School Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship

Rostock, May 31 - June 1, 2013 Workshop Report Andrea Zittlau In the last decades, academic projects have been increasingly interdisciplinary sharing not only subjects of interest but also methodologies and concepts. This approach led to knowledge production outside of academic and geographical boundaries enriching but also complicating disciplinary awareness. When Mieke Bal wrote her fundamental rough guide to travelling concepts in the humanities (2002), she did so out of her observation that scientific discourses share concepts but interpret them differently (p. 5). Her focus was not so much on describing theses differences but more so on how to make interdisciplinary encounters productive for the humanities eventually presenting a manifest for a practice she calls cultural analysis. The recently published volume Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture (2012) edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nnning examines key concepts of humanities such as narratology, translation, memory, materiality and gender and observes their travel "across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts." Those concepts "are not univocal or firmly established terms" and yet they enable a dialogue across and beyond disciplines. Taking both texts as point of departure, the workshop of the graduate school "Cultural Encounters and Scientific Discourses" intended to revisit Mieke Bal's fundamental work of Travelling Concepts in the context of academic scholarship that has become radically interdisciplinary and international. The idea was to bring together renowned experts with the PhD and postdoc candidates of the graduate school to critically discuss travelling concepts and its perspectives as well as its limitations which is inevitably linked to an attempt to grasp prospects of and for the humanities. The opening lecture was presented by Doris Bachmann-Medick, permanent senior research fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gieen, Germany. Her inquiry Travelling Concepts A Matter of Hybridity or Translation? suggested that translation is at the heart of all concepts that travel. The study of culture becomes then a study of dislocation and eventually a study of translation as the travelling concepts become concepts in translation. Here Bachmann-Medick refers to Walter Mignolos suggestion that travelling theories have to go through translation. Bachmann-Medicks case study was the concepts of hybridity that had been born in the racist discourse of the nineteenth century to mark impurity, but eventually transformed to a successful concept in postcolonial theory marking innovation. While following the journey of hybridity, Bachmann-Medick also introduces criticisms of the concept and illustrates vividly how a concept becomes an academic brand comparable to consumerist iconography promoting an image without content. The afternoon proceeded with vivid discussions on a symbolical tram ride. Travel here was perceived as a travel in time as well as in space which inspired individual project presentations as well as general discussions about travelling concepts. The dinner location, a boat berthed permanently in Rostocks harbour, continued the strong symbolism to further connect travel and space as well as travel and time and the limitations of these metaphors, particularly because the boat was not travelling. The first lecture of the second day was presented by Hanneke Stuit, a cultural analysis scholar from Amsterdam who discussed The Affective Mobility of Ubuntu, or How Concepts Travel. Her point of departure was the South African concept of ubuntu, in general perceived to be in line with the proverb a person is a person because of and through other people. In her paper, Hanneke Stuit looked at two particular travels of the concepts: its political use by Desmond Tutu, who chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and its commercialized use in a 2009 commercial for the World Cup to be held in 2010. In both uses the idea of exclusion becomes evident and is used for the political and commercial purpose, while the highly emphasized positive connotation of inclusion is stressed. Stuits inquiry then concerns the affective potential of ubuntu based on Sarah Ahmeds theory of affect as expressed in The Cultural History of Emotions and her

article Affective Emotions. Concepts, Stuit concluded, travel under very particular conditions and while the shifts are interesting to observe, it is the affect and not the content of the concepts that reveals its full potential. Murat Aydemir, associate professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, presented Nomads without Secrets, a paper on the concept of the nomad as articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris 12:1227 Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine. The nomad has become the stock character of essentialism, argued Aydemir, and Deleuze and Guattari do not deconstruct those notions of romantic perceptions but feed them with primitivist ethnography. Their main experiment in the essay is to pose the state against the nomad and to observe their interdependencies. Aydemir offered a close reading of the image of the cart that opens the essay and brings in contemporary art projects as well as scholarly responses to question the nomad who is dismissed from the text in the end of Deleuze and Guattaris nomadology. The afternoon panel was opened by Jennifer Gonzalez, Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her The Face and the Public was based on her essay The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practise that appeared in Camera Obscura 70, 24:1 (2009). The essay investigates the internets notion as a neutral space and ultimate democracy and contrasts two notions of the face as expressed by Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas. While Agambens concept of the face is based on notions of erasure, Levinas explores the notions of difference. Gonzalez tests these two notions on selected digital art works such as the video game Caught Like a Nigger in Cyberspace (1997) by the British artist Keith Piper, Nancy Bursons Human Race Machine (2000) and Keith Obadike Keith Obadikes Blackness (2001). Gonzalez not only concludes that the internet is obviously not a race-neutral space but also that face and race have a complex and interconnected history that continues to haunt perceptions of visual categories. Anne Harley, soprano, director and assistant professor for music at Scribbs College, Clarmont, CA was the final speaker of the workshop. Her paper From Eye to Ear: The Benefits of Training in Oral Vocal Traditions for Western conservatory-Trained Singers explored the practical category of the voice lesson as a travelling concept. In her argument, Harley showed how not the perceptions of voice as a category causes the radical difference between teaching methods, but ideas of privacy, failure and authority. Text as any form of writing was a core to her argument to illustrate the dynamics of music as an academic category that seemingly refuses theorizing approaches. As part of her paper Harley performed two musical pieces: O pulchrae facies (excerpt) by Hildegard of Bingen and Mvt 5b. Of Kollwitz Konnex by Ralf Gawlick. The concluding discussion strengthened the role of the concept as an analytical tool and highlighted issues such as consumerism, globalization, capitalism, affect and secrecy as they were brought up repeatedly throughout the course of the workshop. Travelling concepts turned out to be highly productive after all.