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The essay examines the affective and ethical stakes that interpreting the words of others in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies involves. Featuring a protagonist who interprets for a former state leader accused of crimes against humanity, the novel foregrounds the emotional costs of translation at Court. In so doing, it not only problematizes the uneven division of emotional labor but also raises questions concerning the (in)visibility of those who sustain political life. The engagement with the ethical and affective dimensions of interpretation is complemented by an examination of the novel’s form, which provides a counter-force to the injustices the plot reveals.

This series addresses key contemporary concepts and methods along with substantive issues from the realm of basic research in cultural studies. Its objective is to help shape contemporary discourse about cultural studies and at the same time to enrich this discourse for work in its specific disciplines.

In his study, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), British Caribbean writer David Dabydeen draws attention to the multiplicity of black figures in 18th century English paintings. Paintings by, for instance, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, John Hamilton Mortimer, and William Turner, are virtually populated with black figures. Typically, these paintings reduce the black figure to the status of an exotic detail (Eckstein 2005) and turn it into a fashionable commodity, i.e., a resource for gestures of superiority and related claims to ‘the right to look’ by white spectators. The “right to look”, writes Nikolas Mirzoeff in his Counterhistory of Visuality, is a precondition for “claims of autonomy” and recognition in the political sphere (Mirzoeff 2011, 1). Conversely, the denial of said right amounts to a misrecognition of subjectivity and the denial of political participation. In what follows we will first sketch some of the characteristics of the intermedial poetics in novels and then move on to more concrete configurations, namely verbal-visual configurations in postcolonial and transcultural fiction. We argue that many postcolonial and transcultural fictions use intermedial relations to enter into a critical dialogue with established visual archives and their mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Following Michel Foucault (2002) and Jacques Derrida (1996), we understand the archive first and foremost in a metaphorical sense, i.e., as an epistemic and normative framework, “a historical a priori”, that determines the registers of sayability and the respective truth value of discursive claims. Yet, we also go beyond this understanding by arguing that the archive is not exclusively discursively structured and can therefore not be reduced to “a system […] of enunciability” (Foucault 146). Rather, as research in the field of the visual turn (cf. Benthien/Weingart 2014) indicates, culturally normative archives are also derived from the range of available images, which establish, despite their heterogeneity, a regime of visibility. This regime of visibility perpetuates specific world-views, which are critical in structuring interpretations of reality and in determining forms of social recognition. Thus understood, the regime of visibility, prefigured by visual archives, is akin to Judith Butler’s concept of frames. Frames, according to Butler, mark “[t]he limits of […] what can appear”; they “circumscribe the domain in which […] certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors” (2004, xvii). Like archives, frames are always “politically saturated” (2010, 1), thus regulating forms of inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere. We suggest conceiving of the relation between literary visuality and the visual archive as interdependent and mutually transformative: While literary configurations of the visual are connected to and influenced by the archive, they are never fully determined by it. Rather, due to the liberties afforded by fiction, they can also reflect critically on the visual archive and add new perspectives and novel visibilities to it.

The article sets out to investigate configurations of literary visuality in Derek Walcott’s long poem , illustrating how an engagement with verbal-visual relations might add to our understanding of Walcott’s postcolonial aesthetics. It is argued that the evocation of Eurocentric visual practices constitutes an act of intermedial and transcultural translation, which both acknowledges the influence of imposed models and subjects them to creative processes of exchange.

This article sets out to explore configurations of literary musicality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), showing how intermedial relations between literature and music are linked to the novel’s exploration of transcultural histories of violence. Supporting but also displacing the larger verbal narrative, intermedial references in Open City produce a surplus of meaning, an unruly remainder. They do so by introducing musical frictions that resist and undermine the structural coherence of the text and gesture toward something nonlinear and latent. Modelled on the form of the fugue, the novel’s contrapuntal structure reveals the disjunctions, latencies, and elisions within hegemonic orders of knowledge and destabilize established notions of community, memory, and cosmopolitanism. To afford a fuller understanding of what we call the novel’s “intermedial poetics,” our essay will first provide a brief definition of the concept of intermediality, showing how references to music in the novel are connected to concepts of latency and atmosphere. Following this, we will investigate configurations of literary musicality in Open City. We argue that the contrapuntal structure of the novel clashes with the protagonist-narrator’s contrapuntal reading of urban spaces and histories, asking readers to rethink conventionalized notions of black diasporic subjects.

Die Reihe widmet sich zentralen neueren Konzepten und Methoden im Feld der kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung und inhaltlichen Fragestellungen. Sie zielt darauf, die gegenwrtige Diskussion in den Kulturwissenschaften weiter zu profilieren und sie zugleich fr die Arbeit in den Disziplinen fruchtbar zu machen: durch die Ausarbeitung interdisziplinrer Schlsselkonzepte und die Entwicklung einer transkulturellen study of culture. Die Bnde gehen berwiegend aus den Literatur-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften hervor, aber auch aus der Politikwissenschaft, der Soziologie und den Medienwissenschaften.

My article sets out to explore the complex intersections between mobility, sentimentality and gendered identity in 18th-century sentimental travelogues. Practices of mobility, I argue, are central to the range and the limits of human agency, entailing and, indeed, producing ideologically charged notions of gender, nation and class. The focus of my paper is on the European travelogue. Considering that the 18th century was an age of global exploration, one could in fact argue that these travelogues were quite restricted in their spatial scope. Imperial explorations and the travel literature they spawned were certainly crucial to English people’s concepts of space and concomitant notions of nation and Britishness. European travelogues, by contrast, could hardly offer their readership the thrill of the new; by the middle of the century Europe was well-travelled and the noteworthy places to be visited by every serious Grand tourist have been described all too often. Yet, perhaps exactly because of the limited geographical scope, the predictable itineraries and the repetitive spatial structure, European travelogues offered manifold opportunities for explorations of the self and for self-conscious engagements with mobility. Indeed, while much of 18th-century literature concerned with global exploration was deeply steeped in Enlightenment empiricism, the European travelogue evolved into a site for writers to explore the expressive and personalized potentials of autodiegesis: “In this branch of the genre,” Katherine Turner points out, “narrative ingenuity, even authorial oddity, become crucial components of the text’s interest. “

Die Reihe widmet sich zentralen neueren Konzepten und Methoden im Feld der kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung und inhaltlichen Fragestellungen. Sie zielt darauf, die gegenwrtige Diskussion in den Kulturwissenschaften weiter zu profilieren und sie zugleich fr die Arbeit in den Disziplinen fruchtbar zu machen: durch die Ausarbeitung interdisziplinrer Schlsselkonzepte und die Entwicklung einer transkulturellen study of culture. Die Bnde gehen berwiegend aus den Literatur-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften hervor, aber auch aus der Politikwissenschaft, der Soziologie und den Medienwissenschaften.

The paper explores forms and functions of national images in 18 th -century British literature and other media. To this end it develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. Special emphasis is put on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play in constructing concepts of national self and other. It will become clear that » national character « not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation, but is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on processes of intermedial translation.