Doro Wiese | Radboud University Nijmegen (original) (raw)

Books by Doro Wiese

Die Faust als Symbol des Widerstands ist zum Klischee erstarrt. Wie kann und sollte es reaktivier... more Die Faust als Symbol des Widerstands ist zum Klischee erstarrt. Wie kann und sollte es reaktiviert werden? Welcher Umgang mit Geschichte und Gesellschaft ist möglich und wünschenswert? Und was genau steht einer Öffnung zum sozialen Beteiligtsein im Wege? Entlang zweier Kunstwerke von Anna Lena Grau soll diesen Fragen nachgegangen werden. Zentral stehen dabei Affekte, Informationen, zeitliche Dauer, digitale Körperformationen und neoliberale Selbstbilder sowie die Möglichkeit, Kommunikation, Arbeit und Miteinander neu zu gestalten.

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use o... more Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included.

Papers by Doro Wiese

Arcade, Colloquy, 2024

How can Euro-Western scholars like me establish a respectful and informed relationship with Indig... more How can Euro-Western scholars like me establish a respectful and informed relationship with Indigenous intellectual traditions and inventions if they come from a culture in which stereotypical ideas about Indigenous peoples have been pervasive?

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2023

This article seeks to articulate in one image the diverse genocides in German history, an image a... more This article seeks to articulate in one image the diverse genocides in German history, an image able to capture the piling wreckages of history in a flash. The point of departure is a multimedia installation by William Kentridge called Black Box (2005), in which he thematizes the Herero and Namaqua genocide during German colonial rule between 1904 and 1908. This research wants to respond to Kentridge’s demand for grief work, and relies on Walter Benjamin’s (1968) vision of history writing and Rosemarie Buikema’s (2020) concept of revolts to seek out theoretical and conceptual possibilities that allow it to posit simultaneously the singularity of the Holocaust, to articulate its deep connections with colonial crimes, and to demand a working through of Germany’s genocidal history.

American, British and Canadian Studies, 2022

This essay demonstrates how Richard Wagamese employs oral storytelling techniques to make the com... more This essay demonstrates how Richard Wagamese employs oral storytelling techniques to make the complex idea of Indigenous dispossession sensually and intellectually accessible to readers of his novel, Indian Horse. The Wabseemoong First Nation writer depicts the devastating effects of white entitlement when rendering character Saul Indian Horse's experiences in Canada's residential schools and the effect those schools had on his subsequent life. Using narrative analysis, it will be shown how Saul loses his ability to perceive places as being alive and resonant, and is thereby dispossessed on an individual, social, and spiritual level. Furthermore, Wagamese's descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children draw attention to the harrowing histories of Canada's residential schools, thus laying bare the necropolitical potential of settler-colonial dispossession. This essay links Wagamese's narrative to recent arguments brought forward in Indigenous studies. It aims to demonstrate that Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial states is part of modernity, and its overarching political economy, that is capitalism.

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, 2022

Central to this essay is the feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by the Iranian-America... more Central to this essay is the feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by the Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour. The director binds viewers to a vampire’s point of view – one that expresses both female desire and feminist anger – by using film-specific stylistic devices such as the depth of field, framing, lighting, sound, and location. The film embraces feelings of anger and rage when confronted with patriarchal domination and violence, and turns these feelings into liberatory tools that give rise to both feminist analysis and agency. And while gender oppression is rejected violently, the film also establishes a community of care that amends, escapes, reveals, and resists patriarchal and capitalist oppression.

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2020

This article takes Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on art's inventive function as a point of departu... more This article takes Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on art's inventive function as a point of departure to analyse two graphic narratives that undermine ideas about truthfulness: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future. It is argued that these allegedly autobiographical memoirs undermine genre conventions to create an implied readership who co-witnesses Satrapi's and Sattouf's experiences of oppression, racism, and war during their respective childhoods. It is shown how Satrapi and Sattouf undermine the autobiographical pact through graphic narrative's 'figures of thought', a term introduced to capture the formal, thematic, and narrative possibilities of comics and graphic literature to make readers come into contact with unforeseen visions-and to possibly think anew. Specific attention is paid to the narrative voice, which in Satrapi's and Sattouf's works often goes beyond the personal perspective to account for collective experiences, as well as to the use of colour and line work that add critical layers to the stories told. In line with Deleuze and Guattari's arguments, the poetic, which is the productive function of art, is shown to go beyond questions of truthfulness and falseness, allowing for new ways of thinking and for the creation of new worlds.

After Post-Truth., 2019

In the current debates about the contested line between fact and fiction, little attention is pai... more In the current debates about the contested line between fact and fiction, little attention is paid to a genre closely associated with factual narratives: the information. However, information is a specific form of narrative that is historically connected to news about distant places, events, or people. This means that information conveys stories that listeners have, per definition, never experienced through their own senses. Furthermore, information is nowadays, through the internet, nearly instantaneous, and it loses its value once its content is not brand-new anymore.
In this article, I want to investigate how these characteristics of information – speed, instantaneity, newness, impersonality – influence human perception when they impinge upon the senses. I want to contrast the characteristics of information with artworks that slow down understandings and that ask of their audience to take time for getting a grasp on their meaning. If artworks slow down processes of meaning-making, it allows recipients to become aware of their own semiotic activities. I will argue that information is a specific form of message that is far from being objective, because it does not include personal experiences and historical, cultural and geopolitical situatedness in its account. I will ask what is at stake with both kinds of procedures, and develop an alternative vision of connecting to people, histories, and events that are taking place afar.

Wiese, Doro. 2019. “Untranslatable Timescapes in James Welch’s Fools Crow and the Deconstruction of Settler Time”. Transmotion 5 (1), 56-75., 2019

Since the nineteenth century, hegemonic Euro-Western ideas of time have constituted it as being l... more Since the nineteenth century, hegemonic Euro-Western ideas of time have constituted it as being linear, progressive, objectifiable, and measurable. What happens if Euro-Western readers are confronted with indigenous temporalities that do not conform to this dominant temporal understanding? In the globally published novel Fools Crow, by Native American Renaissance writer James Welch, past, present, and future are inseparable. These temporal layers constantly interact with each other and influence the story’s course of events. This essay shows how Welch’s temporalizations constitute a fundamental untranslatability in the novel. Its employment of indigenous forms of time are inimical to Euro-Western notions of it and cannot be integrated into the US American idea of “settler time” as embodying and bringing progress. In Fools Crow, Welch refuses to glorify the westward expansion of the USA, during which the novel is set, through the master narratives of the frontier and Manifest Destiny. Instead, Fools Crow offers a fictional account — narrated exclusively from the point of view of indigenous Pikuni protagonists — that depicts the consequences of settler encroachment, the destruction of livelihood, the near-annihilation of whole tribes from epidemics, the massacres. This essay explores the ways in which Fools Crows’ temporal untranslatability advances insights into the economies and hegemonies of Euro-Western knowledge production. It illustrates how the novel deconstructs Euro-Western assumptions of time as self-evident, naturally-given, and universal, contrasting them with indigenous ideas of time as inimical and untranslatable to Euro-Western temporalization. This untranslatability, it concludes, helps to define and contour the limits of Euro-Western knowledge.

Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction., 2018

This essay addresses forms of time and temporalizations used in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our ... more This essay addresses forms of time and temporalizations used in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing. The novel depicts the fictional story of the mixed-race family Daley-Strom. While The Time of Our Singing embeds its characters in historical events that pertain to the history of “race” and racism in the United States, it underscores that being-in-one’s-time and being-in-time are at odds with each other. While the history of “race” is seemingly unchanging and repetitive, an ontology of time, understood as a dynamic exchange between the past, present, and future, can give rise to a vision in which “race” loses its interpretative grip on history. This essay shows how The Time of Our Singing establishes an aural semiotic model in which the murderous, cruel, and exploitative history of “race” can make itself heard, without canceling out voices that stand in for solidarity and hope for those that are racialized.

This essay discusses the effects of two stylistic devices used in a graphic novel and a film, bot... more This essay discusses the effects of two stylistic devices used in a graphic novel and a film, both entitled Blue is the Warmest Color. In the case of the graphic novel, written by the French comic-book writer Julie Maroh, her use of the colour blue will be focused upon. Since large parts of the graphic novel are drawn in sepia tones, certain blue items are highlighted and stand out. This highlighting will be analysed by connecting it to insights established by the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray links the use of colour in painting – literally and metaphorically understood as a way to create space and temporality – to the establishment of a singular and subjective perspective. Since the graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color is simultaneously a romance, a coming-of-age story, and a coming out story, Irigaray’s call for a unique perspective is connected to Maroh’s aim to make lesbian desire available as a choice. Maroh’s use of colour will subsequently be contrasted with French film-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s prominent use of close-ups in his feature film of the same name. To analyse the use of the close-up, this essay will make use of Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of the disconcerting effects it produces. In her view, the close-up is an image that is severed from its context, from time, from place, and from narrative. This research will show that the viewers’ alignment with the camera will bring embodied social hierarchies back into the viewing process when seeing Kechiche’s film.

In 2005 gewann die Assembly of First Nations die größte Sammelklage in der Geschichte Kanadas: Di... more In 2005 gewann die Assembly of First Nations die größte Sammelklage in der Geschichte Kanadas: Die kanadische Regierung wurde verpflichtet, indigene Opfer des so genannten Internatssystems zu entschädigen sowie eine unabhängige Wahrheits-und Versöhnungskommission einzurichten. Anfang Juni 2015 erschien nun ihr erschreckender Abschlussbericht. von Doro Wiese t »Es ist unwahrscheinlich, dass ein Stamm oder mehrere Stämme der Regierung größere Schwierigkeiten bereiten werden, wenn die Kinder von Stammesmitgliedern vollständig unter der Kontrolle des Staates stehen.« Das schrieb Schulinspektor J.A. Macrae am 18. Dezember 1886 an den damaligen Indianerbeauftragten zu Regina. Die von der kanadischen Regierung einberufene Wahrheitsund Versöhnungskommission untersuchte zahlreiche Indizien wie diese, um das Ausmaß und die Folgen der systematisch begangenen Verbrechen an Kindern der First Nations, wie sich die Nachfahren der indigenen EinwohnerInnen Kanadas heute nennen, in kanadischen Internaten einzuschätzen. Die Truth and Reconcilation Commission (TRC) kam zu dem Schluss, dass die Internate darauf angelegt waren, durch die Kontrolle der »indianischen« Kinder die First Nations auszulöschen.

Rupkatha. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 2014

In Gould’s Book of Fish (2003), author Richard Flanagan manages to invent a format in which conte... more In Gould’s Book of Fish (2003), author Richard Flanagan manages to invent a format in which content and style account for historical events on Sarah Island, Tasmania in the 1820s, yet he does so in a manner that is not in the least objective, disinterested or fact-orientated. The perspective of Gould’s Book of Fish’s (Flanagan, 2003) first-person narrator is highly subjective, usually unreliable and always less than truthful. Flanagan (2003) thereby shows that literature can provide a form of knowledge that differs from historical truth, but without being its dialectical opposite. Literature can construct a non-referential narrative space in which experiences unfold that hardly unimaginable. Literature can show the urge and desire to understand historical events that are terrible to relate to. It can invent a story that can account for the consequences of a violent colonial system. Yet, above all, the novel stresses a desire to render stories of unspeakable horrors through what can be call the “becoming-fish” of its first-person narrator. This desire expresses a hyperbolic love of each and everyone, one which extends so far as to even include all the other wonders of this world in its account too. By depicting convicts and natives as loving and lovable persons, author Richard Flanagan (2003) refrains from reducing them to the colonial conditions in which they were caught up. He thereby offers a point of view that differs from Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) highly influential account of “bare life.” I will take this perspective, in which life and its conditions cannot be lumped together, as a point of departure from which to criticise Agamben’s (1998) transhistorical and transnational account of biopolitical determinations of life.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012

In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese di... more In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese discusses Jonathan Safran Foer's novel. In the text a photograph plays a decisive role: the image of two young people drives the Jewish American Jonathan to visit the Ukraine. The photograph is presumably of Jonathan's grandfather Safran and a woman named Augustine who saved Safran's life during a nazi raid of his village: the photograph becomes an ekphrasis, a description of a visual work of art in another medium which transforms the generic characteristics of written and photographic representations. According to Anselm Haverkamp, photographs are visual citations from history and about history: they show not only people and/or objects at a specific moment in time, but also point towards the irretrievability of that moment. Yet, when photography is transposed into another medium that performs the effects of a confrontation with the given-to-deathness of the people displayed, photography-in-ekphrasis might perform not only mourning over the irretrievability of the life that is lost, but the ethical necessity to resist the devaluation of life in the present

rhizomes: cultural studies in emerging knowledge issn 1555-9998, 2011

Tracey Emin's Top Spot (Emin 2004a) is a feature film that defies clear-cut definitions of genre.... more Tracey Emin's Top Spot (Emin 2004a) is a feature film that defies clear-cut definitions of genre. Interview extracts and other footage in different film formats, edited in a careless style, seem to suggest that it is an unedited collection of images, a "random assemblage" that viewers receive in raw form. In this seemingly unedited format, the film pretends to document a previously filmed reality: an archive that establishes the coming-of-age story of six girls who live in Margate, England, where they roam the beach, the train station, the amusement park, the disco. Wavering between naivety and precociousness, the girls make their first sexual experiences, sometimes eager to explore their own sexuality, sometimes brutally coerced into sexual acts. In a society all too prepared to sexualize and exploit their bodies, the peer group becomes the only place where their own desires and fears may emerge.

Top Spot thus records two crucial moments in the girls' coming-of-age: it shows how their sexuality is captured by society, and it registers their lines of flight from dominant expectations and gender roles, materializing Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the girl's stolen body and its counterparts, becoming-woman and becoming-girl. Considering that anyone acquainted with Tracey Emin's biography may understand Top Spot as a film displaying her own experiences, I will explore how Emin extends common notions of "biography as honest self-depiction"; by employing fictional devices, the telling of life-stories becomes a constructive move to reappropriate one's body and history. In the following, I will link this film interpretation to feminist interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari.

Arcade, Colloquy, 2024

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2023

American, British and Canadian Studies, 2022

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, 2022

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2020

After Post-Truth., 2019

Wiese, Doro. 2019. “Untranslatable Timescapes in James Welch’s Fools Crow and the Deconstruction of Settler Time”. Transmotion 5 (1), 56-75., 2019

Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction., 2018

Rupkatha. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 2014

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012

rhizomes: cultural studies in emerging knowledge issn 1555-9998, 2011

This symposium explores North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions that were... more This symposium explores North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions that were recovered, reclaimed, or (re-)invented in the wake of Red Power movements that emerged in the 1960s in the settler colonial societies of Canada and the USA. It asks: which new perspectives and visions have been developed over the last 50 years within Indigenous studies and related fields when looking at Indigenous land and land rights, Indigenous political and social sovereignty, extractivism and environmental destruction, oppressive sex/gender systems, and for describing the repercussions of settler colonialism in North America, especially in narrative representations?

The symposium is guided by the idea that North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions developed and recovered since the 1960s offer new and reclaimed ways of being, organizing, and thinking in the face of destruction, dispossession, and oppression; Indigenous ways of writing and righting are connected to ongoing social struggles for land rights, access to clean water, and intellectual and socio-political sovereignty; they are, as Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill (2013) have pointed out, "a gift" from which most academic disciplines can benefit greatly.

In the face of ongoing exploitations of Indigenous knowledges and resources, it is paramount that researchers who focus on Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions, especially those who come from settler-colonial backgrounds, carefully examine their implications in settler-colonial ways of dispossession. It is in this context that the symposium encourages self-reflectivity and invites participants from all positionalities to include reflections on how to act, think, and write in a non-appropriative manner about the intellectual achievements of Indigenous academics, activists, artists from North America. What kind of challenges does an engagement with Indigenous intellectual and narrative achievements from North America pose, and how do these achievements enable their audience to think differently and to develop visions that go beyond settler colonial hegemonies that make themselves felt in customs, laws, property-relations, or gender roles?

Possible topics include:
• North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions that emerged or were rediscovered over the last 50 years;
• Indigenous representations of land and water, community-building, the other-than-human world;
• connections and frictions among and within different Indigenous traditions and/or settler societies in North America;
• Indigenous understandings of sex/gender;
• methodologies for reading across ethnic divides, alliance-building tools in academia and activism.

Please send your proposals (max. 300 words) plus a short bio (max. 150 words) to in_the_wake@outlook com by March 15 2020. You will be notified by March 29 2020 if your paper is accepted. For any questions, please refer to the organizer Dr Doro Wiese, IAS, University of Warwick.