Complementing the installation, Hostile Terrain 94 Münster also hosted "Un/bedingte Zugehörigkeit | Contingent Belonging", a digital lecture series on topics and issues related to Hostile Terrain 94. The lectures were free, open to the public, and took place online.
Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne (Kunstgeschichte, Uni Münster)
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Frohn (Art History, Münster University)
18.01.2021, 18:00 Uhr (s.t.)
"From the Other Side" - Dies ist der Titel einer Arbeit von Chantal Akerman, die als Filmemacherin eine Video-Installation mit Bezug zur US-amerikanischen und mexikanischen Grenzregion auf der Documenta 11 gezeigt hat. Die Grenze wird darin nicht nur von der "eigenen Seite" gezeigt, sondern auch von der "anderen".
Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne stellt als Auftakt der "Contingent Belonging"-Vorlesungsreihe und des Installationsprozesses der Hostile Terrain 94-Kunstwerks in Ihrem Vortrag diese und weitere künstlerische Blickfelder dar, in denen Grenzregimes betrachtet werden.
Ursula Anna Frohne has been Professor for Art History, Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Münster since 2015. She received her PhD in Art History at the Free University Berlin and worked as curator in chief at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and taught as adjunct lecturer at the State Academy of Fine Art in Karlsruhe between 1995 and 2001. Following a Visiting Professorship at the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University (USA) and a Professorship of Art History at International University Bremen, she became Professor for 20th and 21st-Centuries Art at the University of Cologne in 2006, where she was chair of the research project “Cinematographic Aesthetics in Contemporary Art” and was awarded the Leo-Spitzer-Prize for Arts, Humanities, and Human Sciences for excellence in research by the University of Cologne. Since 2017 she has co-chaired with Marianne Wagner the research project „The Sculpture Project Archive Münster. A Research Institute for Science and the Public”, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. She has published on the sociology of the artist, contemporary art practices and technological media (photography, film, video, installation), political dimensions and socio-economic conditions of art and visual culture.
Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Jochen Oltmer (Migrationsforschung, Uni Osnabrück)
20.01.2021 | 18:15 Uhr
Begriff und Konzept Migration hatten zweifelsohne in den vergangenen zwei, drei Jahrzehnten wissenschaftliche Konjunktur: Für die seit den 1970er Jahren intensivierte und seit den 1990er Jahren stark angestiegene wissenschaftliche Produktion von Wissen über räumliche Bewegungen von Menschen lässt sich festhalten, dass die Beschreibungsformel Migration immer häufiger verwendet worden ist und zunehmend mehr Prozesse regionaler Mobilität darunter subsumiert wurden. Diese Expansion der Begriffsverwendung führte zu erheblichen Problemen, den Begriff "Migration" zu fassen und zu verdeutlichen, was eigentlich beobachtet und erklärt werden soll.
Der Vortrag blickt auf Vorstellungen über Hintergründe, Bedingungen und Formen räumlicher Bewegungen von Menschen und diskutiert Ansätze der Konzeptualisierung eines sozialen Phänomens, dessen Erforschung vor dem Hintergrund einer Wechselwirkung mit vielgestaltigen politischen, ökonomischen, sozialen und kulturellen Prozessen als wissenschaftliche Herausforderung gelten kann.
Jochen Oltmer, Dr. phil. habil., ist Apl. Professor für Neueste Geschichte und Migrationsgeschichte sowie Mitglied des Vorstands des Instituts für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) der Universität Osnabrück. Er arbeitet zu deutschen, europäischen und globalen Migrationsverhältnissen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Buchpublikationen zuletzt u.a.:
Weitere Informationen: http://www.imis.uni-osnabrueck.de/oltmer_jochen/zur_person/profil.html
Vortrag von Dr. Ina Batzke (Amerikanistik, Uni Augsburg) in Englisch
Lecture by Dr. Ina Batzke (American Studies, Augsburg University) in English
21.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
In the midst of a humanitarian crisis and explosive criminal violence in several states of Central and South America, one should think that the United States should take particular care to live up to its obligations under international law and make its refugee and asylum procedures fair and consistent. To the contrary, however, instead of a differentiated treatment of migrants from Central and South America as, e.g., potential refugees, the United States government prefers to quench all potential migrants from actually leaving their native countries in the first place by emphasizing a closed border argument. This leaves undocumented migrants in a state of limbo, particularly after their immediate arrival in the United States. This talk will shed light on the “border situation” in 2016 by documenting the work of the Annunciation House, a shelter that has housed undocumented migrants since the 1970s. The talk will firstly explore the legal foundations that “create” border crossings from Mexico to the U.S. as criminal acts; against this background – and by screening a part of “An American House,” a 2016 documentary – the work of the Annunciation House and the life worlds of migrants who have just entered the United States.
Ina Batzke is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She is author of “Undocumented Migrants in the United States. Life Narratives and Self-Representations” (Routledge 2019), and co-editor of "Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture" (transcript, 2018).
Vortrag von Dr. Jesper Reddig (Amerikanistik, Uni Münster) in englischer Sprache.
Lecture by Dr. Jesper Reddig (American Studies, Münster University) in English.
27.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
In this talk, I will consider questions of contingent belonging, border regimes, and resistant agency in a European setting, re-contextualizing the topic of “Hostile Terrain 94” both historically and spatially, and ultimately shifting its focus toward the contemporary Münster environment. In a first, diachronically oriented step, I will outline how, around mid-century and as a result of unprecedented forms of post-war mass displacement, a new global regime of humanitarianism evolved which until today provides a taxonomy of human life and dignity. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work, I will indicate how this regime’s hegemonic politics of labelling was flawed by contradiction from the beginning, as it formally invented the non-citizen identity of the “refugee” – and at the same time redefined human rights as contingently based on citizenship status, thus effectively stripping refugees off the very right to have rights. In a second, synchronically oriented step, I will gradually zoom in on the European, the national-German, and the local-municipal context. I will outline how, over the decades and in particular post-2015, borders have been solidified ever more tightly while asylum laws have become ever more restrictive. Still taxonomized and disenfranchised by the global humanitarian regime, refugees and asylum-seekers are now increasingly being segregated in a-civic twilight zones like camps. One such camp, located in Münster, will finally be presented in conjunction with activist and refugee counter-struggles for the promise of human rights.
Jesper Reddig is a research associate at the University of Münster, where he teaches in the British, American, and Postcolonial Studies Program, as well as a language teacher and activist in several community work and human rights initiatives in the Münsterland area. His theoretical and practical interests include refugee and forced migration studies, the (colonial) history of the SWANA region, as well as cross-cultural Euro-Arab and Euro-Persian encounters.
Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Silke Hensel (Universität Münster, Geschichte)
26.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
Die Grenze zwischen Mexiko und den USA ist in den letzten Jahren verstärkt in die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit gerückt. Sie stellt mittlerweile ein Modell dar für die Versuche von Ländern aus dem Globalen Norden, Menschen aus dem Globalen Süden von der Einwanderung abzuhalten. Seit Jahren wird das Grenzregime verschärft bis hin zum Mauerbau. Solche Maßnahmen machen mittlerweile Schule, etwa an der Grenze der Türkei zum Iran. Die Abwehr von Menschen an der politischen Grenze zwischen zwei Ländern ist nur der Beginn des Umgangs mit Migranten. Diejenigen, denen die Einwanderung trotz widriger Umstände gelingt, stehen häufig extremen sozialen Grenzen gegenüber. Rassismus und ökonomische Ausbeutung spielen dabei eine wichtige Rolle. Der Vortrag behandelt die Geschichte der Grenze zwischen Mexiko und den USA und die Geschichte der mexikanischstämmigen Bevölkerung in den USA.
Silke Hensel ist Professorin für lateinamerikanische Geschichte an der WWU Münster. Ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte liegen u.a. in der Geschichte von Migration, Rassismen und ethnischen Grenzziehungen. Sie ist Mitglied im Exzellenzcluster „Religion und Politik“ an der WWU und Herausgeberin des Jahrbuchs für Geschichte Lateinamerikas.
Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (Amerikanistik, Uni Mainz)
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (American Studies, Mainz University)
29.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
Elif Shafak’s 2019 novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World revolves around a cemetery on the outskirts of Istanbul. The aim of this cemetery, which is called the cemetery of the companionless, is literally a “prevention through deterrence”: The inhumanity of the state manifests itself in punishing those who transgress its mandates even beyond their own death. The absence of a proper burial and hence of the right to recognition is epitomized by the absence of human decency. On this cemetery of the companionless, there are numbers, not names. The feat which Shafak’s novel accomplishes, then, is that it carefully chronicles the lives and the identities of all those who have been buried on the cemetery of the companionless: from transgender men and women to political prisoners and undocumented migrants. Drawing on Katja Sarkowsky’s and Marcus Llanque’s recent work, this paper argues that the politics of burial are at the core of state-sanctioned violence against undocumented migration. Ultimately, I argue that we need a world literature of undocumented migration (Damrosh 2003): a framework which enables us to link Shafak’s novel to Jason de León’s “Hostile Terrain” (De León 2015). In both these instances, nations police their boundaries by tacitly accepting the deaths of those who risk their lives trying to cross national borders. The punishment for such transgression can be said to continue even beyond the migrants’ death. Conversely, literature, art and anthropology can restore to these lives the decency denied to them by the nation-state: the right to both a proper burial and transnational recognition.
Works Cited
Shafak, Elif. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. London: Viking, 2019.
Damrosh, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: U of California P, 2015.
Mita Banerjee is Professor of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (The Chutneyfication of History, 2002), ethnic American literature and culture (Race-ing the Century, 2005), the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth- Century American Literature, 2008), issues of naturalization and citizenship (Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature, 2013), and medical humanities (Medical Humanities in American Studies, 2018). She is co-speaker of the research training group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her book on “Biological Humanities” is forthcoming from Winter University Press.
Read more: www.obama-institute.com/banerjee/
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