Pia Wiegmink | University Bonn (original) (raw)
Books by Pia Wiegmink
This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavor... more This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.
The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and tra... more The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America’s position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field’s vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational trajectories and address issues central to the American Studies agenda such as representation, power, (ethnic and gender) identities, social mobility, and national imaginaries. As an American Studies endeavor, the volume highlights the cultural, political, and (inter)disciplinary implications of performance.
Pia Wiegmink’s timely examination of the transforming transnational spaces of protest in a global... more Pia Wiegmink’s timely examination of the transforming transnational spaces of protest in a globalizing and technologically mediated public sphere in “Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere” offers a well-researched review of contemporary theory surrounding ideas of the political (Chantal Mouffe), the public sphere (Jürgen Habermas), the transnational public sphere (Nancy Fraser), and the reterritorialized transnational public sphere (Markus Schroer) as the basis for her analysis of how the performance of political action in public—virtual or physical—is transformed by the capacity of the local to be played on a global stage, thus turning the citizen-actor into a cosmopolitan, transnational force. Tracing examples from the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999 by the Global Justice Movement to the work of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, from the civil rights movement to the subject matter of her larger study, “The Church of Life After Shopping,” “Billionaires for Bush,” and “The Yes Men,” Wiegmink provides an important analysis of the “alternative aesthetics” of the counterpublics’ formation, dissent, and action in and against hegemony. This selection is taken from her monograph, Protest EnACTed: Activist Performance in the Contemporary United States, a strong, cultural studies– focused contribution to transnational American Studies.
Book Reviews by Pia Wiegmink
Theatre Research International, 2010
Theatre Research International, 2011
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2014
Conference Presentations by Pia Wiegmink
``Skopje 2014 as a Monumental Theatre Project``- Presentation by Ivanka Apostolova
Papers by Pia Wiegmink
BRILL eBooks, Sep 1, 2022
Amerikastudien/American Studies
Jeffrey Ferguson's posthumously published Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is a slim but dense... more Jeffrey Ferguson's posthumously published Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is a slim but dense collection of essays that addresses fundamental discourses, debates, and key terms of African American and American studies. The title for this collection, which is also the title of the opening essay, announces Ferguson's core interest, namely, how African American resistance, manifested in various struggles for freedom, citizenship rights, and equality, represents a vital and recurring, yet also limiting narrative of the African American experience in the United States. Rather than abandoning this narrative of resistance, each essay can be considered a nuanced reflection on different variants of this narrative as well as a careful interrogation of its political and cultural function. Framed by Werner Sollors's foreword and George B. Hutchinson's afterword, Race and Resistance comprises three essays that previously appeared in Raritan, Daedalus, and Amerikastudien / American Studies as well as two unpublished manuscripts. The five pieces can be read as variations on the theme introduced in the first essay: race and resistance. The subsequent essays address diverse topics, including reflections on notions like freedom or escape, and engage in a critical inquiry of the role of the blues and the work and the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. The opening essay thus establishes the intellectual framework within which the other four essays can be located. Why is it, Ferguson asks, that race and resistance are so inextricably entwined in the broad range of writing by and about Black Americans? Ferguson's core argument consists of a double bind: he questions American self-fashioning as a nation dedicated to progress and striving towards "a more perfect union," yet he also expresses discomfort with framing the African American experience as one characterized by resistance within as well as beyond this national narrative. "Like most dominant paradigms or 'master narratives,'" Ferguson observes, "the resistance framework obscures as much as it clarifies" (7). The clout of Ferguson's essay lies in its core aim. Scholars in the humanities are trained to criticize, dissect, critically reflect upon, and point out the shortcomings and gaps of certain ideas and historical narratives. But Ferguson is interested in something else: "Yet, despite all of my complaints about the resistance paradigm," he writes, "I want not so much to argue against it as to explore the intellectual roots of our tremendous respect for it. Why, I wonder, have we come to connect race and resistance so insistently? What ideas do we find at the core of this concern?" (8). Ferguson does not want to deconstruct the grand narrative of African American resistance. Rather, he wants to explore its function, how it attempts to make sense of the past and how it continues to be of significance for present conditions and events. Thus, in a grand tour de force, the topics of the opening essay range from Uncle Tom to The Green Mile, from Democracy in America to Invisible Man, and from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, to name just a few. Although first published in 2008, the essay has lost none of its relevance; Ferguson's thoughts may well be applied to more recent events like the Black Lives Matter protests or the debates triggered by the 1619 Project because what he focuses on are not singular events, people, and stories, but the narratives, structures, and rhetorical patterns designed to represent the African American experience. Continuing his interest in the American master narrative of progress, the second essay "Freedom, Equality, Race" further enquires the relationship between what has been posed as a universal value-freedom-and racial cate
Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2020
In her debut as an author in June 1853, Harriet Jacobs published a letter in the New-York Tribune... more In her debut as an author in June 1853, Harriet Jacobs published a letter in the New-York Tribune in which she responded to a transatlantic epistolary exchange that took place between female antislavery supporters in Britain and former First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. In this letter and via this transatlantic exchange, I argue, Jacobs was able to inscribe her racial and gendered position as an African American woman into the American body politic. Broadly construed, this essay wants to de-emphasize the dominance of the genre of the slave narrative in African American life writing, and to draw attention to the form and function of letter writing in American antislavery literature. In the context of Jacobs's work, I argue, letter writing was not only a form of verification and authentication, but also a means of participating in a particular mode of communication that deliberately blurred the lines of the private and public, the amateur and professional, and the national and transnational. While Jacobs very much adhered to the protocols of sentimental literature in her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we witness in this first published letter how she experiments with and realizes additional literary personae, complementing the figure of the fugitive slave with that of the political commentator and the female activist.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2011
This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavor... more This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.
The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and tra... more The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America’s position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field’s vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational trajectories and address issues central to the American Studies agenda such as representation, power, (ethnic and gender) identities, social mobility, and national imaginaries. As an American Studies endeavor, the volume highlights the cultural, political, and (inter)disciplinary implications of performance.
Pia Wiegmink’s timely examination of the transforming transnational spaces of protest in a global... more Pia Wiegmink’s timely examination of the transforming transnational spaces of protest in a globalizing and technologically mediated public sphere in “Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere” offers a well-researched review of contemporary theory surrounding ideas of the political (Chantal Mouffe), the public sphere (Jürgen Habermas), the transnational public sphere (Nancy Fraser), and the reterritorialized transnational public sphere (Markus Schroer) as the basis for her analysis of how the performance of political action in public—virtual or physical—is transformed by the capacity of the local to be played on a global stage, thus turning the citizen-actor into a cosmopolitan, transnational force. Tracing examples from the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999 by the Global Justice Movement to the work of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, from the civil rights movement to the subject matter of her larger study, “The Church of Life After Shopping,” “Billionaires for Bush,” and “The Yes Men,” Wiegmink provides an important analysis of the “alternative aesthetics” of the counterpublics’ formation, dissent, and action in and against hegemony. This selection is taken from her monograph, Protest EnACTed: Activist Performance in the Contemporary United States, a strong, cultural studies– focused contribution to transnational American Studies.
Theatre Research International, 2010
Theatre Research International, 2011
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2014
``Skopje 2014 as a Monumental Theatre Project``- Presentation by Ivanka Apostolova
BRILL eBooks, Sep 1, 2022
Amerikastudien/American Studies
Jeffrey Ferguson's posthumously published Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is a slim but dense... more Jeffrey Ferguson's posthumously published Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is a slim but dense collection of essays that addresses fundamental discourses, debates, and key terms of African American and American studies. The title for this collection, which is also the title of the opening essay, announces Ferguson's core interest, namely, how African American resistance, manifested in various struggles for freedom, citizenship rights, and equality, represents a vital and recurring, yet also limiting narrative of the African American experience in the United States. Rather than abandoning this narrative of resistance, each essay can be considered a nuanced reflection on different variants of this narrative as well as a careful interrogation of its political and cultural function. Framed by Werner Sollors's foreword and George B. Hutchinson's afterword, Race and Resistance comprises three essays that previously appeared in Raritan, Daedalus, and Amerikastudien / American Studies as well as two unpublished manuscripts. The five pieces can be read as variations on the theme introduced in the first essay: race and resistance. The subsequent essays address diverse topics, including reflections on notions like freedom or escape, and engage in a critical inquiry of the role of the blues and the work and the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. The opening essay thus establishes the intellectual framework within which the other four essays can be located. Why is it, Ferguson asks, that race and resistance are so inextricably entwined in the broad range of writing by and about Black Americans? Ferguson's core argument consists of a double bind: he questions American self-fashioning as a nation dedicated to progress and striving towards "a more perfect union," yet he also expresses discomfort with framing the African American experience as one characterized by resistance within as well as beyond this national narrative. "Like most dominant paradigms or 'master narratives,'" Ferguson observes, "the resistance framework obscures as much as it clarifies" (7). The clout of Ferguson's essay lies in its core aim. Scholars in the humanities are trained to criticize, dissect, critically reflect upon, and point out the shortcomings and gaps of certain ideas and historical narratives. But Ferguson is interested in something else: "Yet, despite all of my complaints about the resistance paradigm," he writes, "I want not so much to argue against it as to explore the intellectual roots of our tremendous respect for it. Why, I wonder, have we come to connect race and resistance so insistently? What ideas do we find at the core of this concern?" (8). Ferguson does not want to deconstruct the grand narrative of African American resistance. Rather, he wants to explore its function, how it attempts to make sense of the past and how it continues to be of significance for present conditions and events. Thus, in a grand tour de force, the topics of the opening essay range from Uncle Tom to The Green Mile, from Democracy in America to Invisible Man, and from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, to name just a few. Although first published in 2008, the essay has lost none of its relevance; Ferguson's thoughts may well be applied to more recent events like the Black Lives Matter protests or the debates triggered by the 1619 Project because what he focuses on are not singular events, people, and stories, but the narratives, structures, and rhetorical patterns designed to represent the African American experience. Continuing his interest in the American master narrative of progress, the second essay "Freedom, Equality, Race" further enquires the relationship between what has been posed as a universal value-freedom-and racial cate
Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2020
In her debut as an author in June 1853, Harriet Jacobs published a letter in the New-York Tribune... more In her debut as an author in June 1853, Harriet Jacobs published a letter in the New-York Tribune in which she responded to a transatlantic epistolary exchange that took place between female antislavery supporters in Britain and former First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. In this letter and via this transatlantic exchange, I argue, Jacobs was able to inscribe her racial and gendered position as an African American woman into the American body politic. Broadly construed, this essay wants to de-emphasize the dominance of the genre of the slave narrative in African American life writing, and to draw attention to the form and function of letter writing in American antislavery literature. In the context of Jacobs's work, I argue, letter writing was not only a form of verification and authentication, but also a means of participating in a particular mode of communication that deliberately blurred the lines of the private and public, the amateur and professional, and the national and transnational. While Jacobs very much adhered to the protocols of sentimental literature in her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we witness in this first published letter how she experiments with and realizes additional literary personae, complementing the figure of the fugitive slave with that of the political commentator and the female activist.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2011
Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s, 2019
This chapter discusses the editorial work of the female abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman and exa... more This chapter discusses the editorial work of the female abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman and examines how Chapman envisions the gift book—a collection of poetry, short fiction, essays, and letters designed to be given away as present to a loved one—as a transatlantic space in which political thinkers, writers, and intellectuals could exchange their ideas. In order to enhance the dialogical endeavor of the gift book The Liberty Bell (1839–1859), Chapman makes strategic use of seriality by employing, for example, repeated iconography and cross-references that link contributions in each volume but also the individual volumes with each other. This chapter thus examines how the serial character of this annual publication reframed the literary and political discourse of anti-slavery within a multifaceted, transnational context in which women occupy a central position as readers, writers, and editors.
The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, 2019
American Cultures as Transnational Performance, 2021
Carsten Junker's Patterns of Positioning is a timely monograph. It is part of a broad range of cu... more Carsten Junker's Patterns of Positioning is a timely monograph. It is part of a broad range of current publications that aim at re-evaluating the political as well as aesthetic forms and functions of abolitionist culture in the U.S. Recent monographs not only indicate an increased scholarly interest in U.S. abolition as both a historical movement and a body of national literature, but also trace the transnational trajectories of abolitionist culture (cf.
Deriving from the question whether performances have the capability of marking forms of public in... more Deriving from the question whether performances have the capability of marking forms of public intervention and socio-political action this paper examines contemporary performance-activism. Thus, my article explores three artist-collectives who perform their social, political and economic critiques in the different realms of public space. All three collectives relate to Augusto Boal's method of an "invisible theater" which transforms public space into a public stage and in which the audience is not aware of being part of a theatrical situation. Regarding the artists presented in this paper, the actual notion of "public space" ranges from the streets of New York to national television and the virtual sphere of the internet. By comparing these three activist groups this paper explores on the one hand the liminal zone in which political protest and performance creatively collaborate, and on the other hand, how - within the scope of this interrelation of performa...
Atlantic Studies, 2017
The essay discusses the transatlantic as well as the gendered perspectives on US American slavery... more The essay discusses the transatlantic as well as the gendered perspectives on US American slavery in the works of two nineteenth-century German immigrant women writers, Therese Robinson (writing under the pseudonym Talvj, 1797-1870) and Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884). I will argue that German immigrant women were not only critical observers of the practice of slavery in the USA but they used antislavery discourses to negotiate German women's efforts to assimilate to American culture. In nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, German immigrant women engaged in and commented upon intersecting discourses on antislavery, Americanization, and womanhood. With regard to discussions of gender, race, and slavery in nineteenthcentury US American fiction, writings of German immigrant women or literary representations of German immigration to the USA have rarely been considered. This essay thus shows how fiction written by German immigrant women expands the scope of US American antislavery literature. Its discussion of two lesser known German immigrant women authors contributes to the research on German American literary culture and transatlantic women's history.
The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and tra... more The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America’s position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field’s vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational trajectories and address issues central to the American Studies agenda such as representation, power, (ethnic and gender) identities, social mobility, and national imaginaries. As an American Studies endeavor, the volume highlights the cultural, political, and (inter)disciplinary implications of performance.
Approaching Transnational America in Performance, 2016
The chapter analyzes how Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s play Alt Heidelberg served as a blueprint for th... more The chapter analyzes how Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s play Alt Heidelberg served as a blueprint for the cultural performances of Germanness in the San Francisco restaurant Heidelberg Inn in the 1910s. It shows how the play’s themes of youthfulness, student life, and drinking and singing informed the transnational interactions in the ethnic restaurant.