The artist Ulrike Ottinger experienced Paris during the 1960s, in times of radical political, social, and cultural upheavals. Her current film Paris Calligrammes (2019) is devoted to this time in her life, looking back at personal encounters and utopias. Literary scholar Aleida Assmann introduces us to Ottinger’s showcase of historical archival material and her own film works from Paris. To article...
Where does tolerance and Laissez-faire end? When do silence and omissions become violence? The writer Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor summarizes positions by writer Taiye Selasi, cultural theorist Theo Goldberg and historian Achille Mbembe and sketches a range of social phenomena against the background of an increased potential for violence. To article...
Men are power, children mean power. Taiye Selasi, celebrated author of Ghana Must Go, opens up glimpses into inescapable gender hierarchies. Through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl The Sex Lives of African Girls tells the story of a fateful day in a village in Accra, on which male dominance unfolds in all its harshness, the more so as it is supported by women. The girl Edem has no mother, her auntie Khadijeh can’t have children of her own, both don’t stand a chance: “In the peculiar hierarchy of African households the only rung lower than a motherless child is a childless mother.” An excerpt from this story accompanying the Violence edition of the Dictionary of Now. To article...
Whether it’s heavy metal or pop, doesn’t really matter: Tore Tvarnø Lind, music anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, researches the methods of “modern” music torture. His work shows how, through structural violence and cruelty, music’s intended purpose is perverted and employed for human torture. An excerpt from his contribution to the newly published book “Krieg singen”. To article...
The First World War was by no means “the war to end all wars” it was conceived to be: Anonymous killing and the total removal of boundaries on a technological and bureaucratic war machine are mortgage debts that remain unpaid to this day. According to Jörn Leonhard in his contribution to the project Tatort Schlachtfeld “The victor wasn’t a nation, a state, or an empire, and the First World War’s result wasn’t a world without war. The real victor was war itself.” To article in German...
From radio propaganda in Rwanda to torture in Guantanamo Bay, bloodshed accompanied by a soundtrack of reggae during the civil war in Sierra Leone to the calls to battle of the Marseillaise: What does music have to do with war? The cultural anthropologist Angela Dreßler explores this question, and in the process discovers how music is supposed to put fears of another military putsch to rest in war-torn Guinea-Bissau. To article in German...
