The Emplacement of American Lives

Workshop E: seminar room P108 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Susanne Leikam (Regensburg), Sascha Pöhlmann (München)

 

1. Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich (JGU Mainz), "On Place and Selves: Environmental Life Writing Reconsidered"

2. Laura Bieger (FU Berlin), "Exploring the Ontological Narrativity of Emplacement: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega"

3. Birgit Capelle (Düsseldorf), "A Transcultural Consideration of 'Place':Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Kitarô Nishida’s 'basho'"

4. Valerie Bopp (Mainz), "Monstrous Metropolis or Place of Possibilities: Shifting Views of New York City in Southern Fiction"

5. Lena Krian (Ithaca, NY), "Sovereign Mapping: (Post)colonial Resistance in Joy Harjo's A Map to the Next World"

6. Dr. Julia Faisst (Siegen), "Rebuilding the Neighborhood: Race, Property, and Urban Renewal in Tremé"

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Contact:

Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich, M.A.
edlichm@uni-mainz.de

JProf. Dr. Laura Bieger
laura.bieger@fu-berlin.de

Dr. Birgit Capelle
capelle@phil.hhu.de

Valerie Bopp, M.A.
valbopp@students.uni-mainz.de

Lena Krian
lk397@cornell.edu

Dr. Julia Faisst
julia.faisst@gmail.com

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Walden Pond, Plymouth Rock, Aztlán, Sun City, Dearborn, Cook Country Jail, Wounded Knee, Japantown, Brooklyn Ferry, Main Street, Guantanamo Bay, the City upon a Hill, Borderlands, 9th Ward, Yukon, Silicon Valley, Ground Zero, Haymarket Square, Levittown: the diversity of American Lives is intimately tied to a diversity of places that are both real and imagined at the same time. While there are countless places to live in, one cannot not live in a place, and the very concept of living is inextricably tied to an experience of emplacement. If place is “space that is bounded and marked as humanly meaningful,” as Lawrence Buell defines it in The Future of Environmental Criticism (145), then it is dependent on human symbolic inscription for its conceptual existence; vice versa, we can only conceive of lives as lives through emplacement, and places are decisive in inscribing life as humanly meaningful. One could even argue that place as a source of personal identity and attachment is instrumental in making life conceivable as a life in the first place. In the United States, real and imagined places have played an important role in individual and collective constructions of lives: On a cultural level, places have often constituted sites of memory expressing the self-understanding of imagined communities. More often than not, these sites have then also been employed to resist, challenge, and contest the prevailing identity constructions. While the combined imagination of life and place is hence of crucial significance concerning the creation of coherence and belonging as well as the joining of past and present in American lives, it at the same time can work as a means of exclusion and othering, since—especially in regard to public places—participation in and appropriation of spaces are limited. Similarly, these processes also take place on an individual level where private lives are interdependently entangled in place, which plays a constitutive role in the formation of personal identity.

This dynamic interplay of lives and places constitutes the particular productive moment this workshop is focusing on. We invite submissions that address this nexus from a large variety of perspectives and consider life writing in various media. The following questions offer just a few rough guidelines of possible approaches to the issue we would like to discuss in the workshop: 

• In what ways are lives and places imagined together in a particular text, how do they interact, and does one of them take precedence?
• How does it occur in different types of texts, for example in autobiography, historiography, or fiction, and how does this very construction contribute to the definition (or blurring) of these categories? How does the entanglement of “American lives” and place play out in visual representations? What pictorial traditions have developed and which have been the most productive?
• In particular, how much is place defined in national terms, and to what extent are lives inscribed according to nationality so that they become “American lives”—and to what extent is this dominant construction resisted, subverted, or undermined?
• What are the major ways in which places and lives are attached to each other in these representations—narratives of globality, (trans-)nationality, regionalism, family, the body, age, sexual orientation, etc.?
• How are places appropriated through life writing? In which ways are limitations and exclusions imposed on places in life writing?
• Is there life writing that seeks to eradicate place rather than construct it, and conversely, how does the representation of ‘lifeless places’ relate to notions of life writing?
• How does the combined imagination of life and place relate to a variety of issues such as environment(alism), imperialism, or personal and social identity, and what are its political implications?