Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions in German Studies (original) (raw)

Academic disciplines develop, reform, and redefine themselves through critical innovations and interventions. Especially in the case of disciplines based in the humanities and social sciences, the impact of historical forces on the political present and future of the very subjects of inquiry-individuals, societies, cultural practices, institutions, and the plethora of aesthetic expressions, including art, architecture, cinema, literature, performative traditions, and more recently, digital and internet-based media-shapes and informs disciplinary practices and agendas. No unique "-ism," no singular practitioner/scholar, no specific "school of thought," no thematically unified bibliography, no singular "turn" (linguistic, cultural, historical, spatial, ethical, material-the list goes on!) indeed no fashionable "trend" ever gains ultimate, absolute, and therefore impenetrable dominance in the life of an academic discipline. The significance of a particular mode of critical thought within a discipline at a given point in history is in fact a manifestation of that specific discipline's dialogue with the historical and political realities in which it exists, which it in turn attempts to understand, analyze, critique, and influence. The existence of an academic discipline, in other words, is a function of its geo-political inhabitance. And in order to pursue such existence, rather than merely to assure it (for better or worse), it is imperative for the practitioners of a discipline to identify hitherto unexamined, under-represented, or under-discussed themes, issues, and texts, and/or to revisit those that have been frequently examined, well discussed and perhaps even over-represented, in order to revamp and reshape the theoretical underpinnings of the modes of inquiry that have been pursued. To be sure, innovation in academic disciplines cannot be identical to the corporate model of "new, improved, and (therefore) better!" In fact, what distinguishes academic/scholarly inquiry in fields such as the humanities and social sciences from other modes of innovation is not so much the ability to constantly generate a new product, a new theory, or a "new light fixture" that sheds the proverbial "new light" on a problem, but the courage to question and critique the perceived "newness" of a mode of inquiry through a constant engagement with the old, the past, the historical in the process of reshaping, redefining, indeed re-determining the new, the present, the contemporary. The essays collected in this Special Topic, "Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions in German Studies," attest to the truth of these observations in many ways. As editors, we see it as our role to serve as moderators and facilitators of a multidirectional dialogue (a poly-logue if you will), a collaborative thought process that began at the 49 th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (Oakland, October 2010). 1 These essays represent a continuation of this conversation. They offer for consideration a set of theoretical approaches and strategies that position "German-speaking nations" (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), as geo-political units and as cultural-linguistic spaces, on the multidirectional itineraries of migration of human beings and ideas, focused on, but not limited to, the labor migration to Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. However, locating a nation or a set of nations on the criss-crossing itineraries of migration can hardly augment the "transnational" or "cosmopolitical" dimensions-to be explained shortly-of interventions if the linguistic qualifier itself is not subject to reasoned scrutiny. Germanistik as a discipline specific to studies of literature and cultures of German-speaking countries was a widely accepted 1 https://www.thegsa.org/conferences/2010/index.asp (accessed May 27, 2011). The interdisciplinary series of panels "Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions" consisted of six panels with a total of twenty-two presentations. The panels were organized under the following rubrics: