Carsten Junker Livres

The book explores the landscape of African American cultural criticism in the 20th century, highlighting pivotal debates and the voices of marginalized individuals. It examines how the essay served as a platform for both those fighting against racism and those defending societal dominance. By analyzing the intricate interplay of racism, sexism, and homophobia, the author reevaluates the essay's role in cultural critique, showcasing its significance in societal and political discourse.

‘Patterns of Positioning’ examines, in the time span prior to the US abolition of the trade of enslaved Africans in 1808, how the early transatlantic discourse of abolition unfolded in the North American sphere. It starts out from the premise that abolition was a set of formalized practices – a poetics – which gave formal shape to abolitionist discourse. By accessing canonical and non-canonized as well as previously unexamined material, and identifying argumentative patterns, narrative figures, and generic frames, this study provides a newly-informed and complex perspective on early abolition. It considers how the poetics of abolition reconfigured the discursive positioning of the enslaved and the protagonists of the poetics of abolition themselves. ‘Patterns of Positioning’ thus highlights how strategies geared toward overcoming structural inequality potentially reified such inequality and allowed for the personal self-aggrandizement of those who publicly denounced slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. By introducing a vocabulary to American Studies which reads the critique of the apparatus of enslavement as a poetics, ‘Patterns of Positioning’ facilitates an analysis of the fundamental dynamics of Western modern civil society, its practices and discourses.

Zora Neale Hurston und Toni Morrison sind afroamerikanische Vordenkerinnen kritischer Weißseins- und Interdependenzforschung. In ihren autobiographisch-essayistischen Arbeiten schlagen sie einen Perspektivwechsel auf die Orte der Hegemonieproduktion und die Verwobenheit von Rassismus und Sexismus vor. Das Buch fördert die Kenntnisnahme dieser Autorinnen ebenso wie die Kartierung der Möglichkeiten ihrer hegemoniekritischen Perspektiven in deutschsprachigen wissenschaftlichen und kulturpolitischen Debatten.