| Description: | In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 95-116 Reprinted with permission. This article is part of Bernt Ivar Olsen's doctoral thesis. Available in Munin at http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4774 |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/974 |
| Description: | In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 11-26. Reprinted with permission. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/966 |
| Abstract: | Situating itself in the field of cultural memory studies, this article traces the slow emergence in German historical discourse of the narrative of an anonymous German woman who survived the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945. I will, firstly, conceptualize the historical condition of the Anonyma as a precarious liminal sphere of transition between competing sovereignties that dislodged her political status as citizen and reconstituted her as bare life in the sense of Agamben. Secondly, I direct focus to the relationship between the personal story of the Anonyma and a historical Master narrative pertaining to the period. The article argues for a close connection between the woman’s form of resistance that aimed at replacing unchecked rape with a form of coerced prostitution to reassert limited control over the borders of her body, and the negative reception her diary received after a first publication in Germany in 1959. Her story implicitly challenges a hegemonic discourse of war that treats mass rape as mainly an assault on the nation’s male defenders and that silences the victims’ traumatic experiences with reference to collective guilt and individual shame or treason. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4762 |
| Abstract: | This paper deals with the threats posed by persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to Arctic populations. It does not primarily focus on the negative impacts these substances have on ecosystems and human organisms, but rather directs its attention to the potentially disruptive effects the articulation of these threats might have on Arctic communities and systems of meaning. I employ the theoretical framework developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to conceptualise the articulation of threats as different forms of discursive interaction between politico-scientific and local discourses. In providing a close reading of three sets of scientific texts pertaining to POPs in the Arctic, I show that each of these implies a particular form of discursive interaction - overcoding, semiotisation, and interdiscursive translation – which entail widely different effects on local frameworks of meaning. Finally, I apply some of Foucault’s ideas in order to direct attention to the particular form of politics underlying these forms of interaction between discourses. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4760 |
| Abstract: | On the background of a close reading of Ridley Scott’s war film Black Hawk Down (USA 2001; BHD), this paper investigates the formal properties through which a certain strain of war and action movies discursively constitutes the other – the enemy - as less than human. I develop the argument that the emergent relation between friend and foe in these films can be read through the concept of the border as an epistemological barrier that keeps the other incomprehensible, inaccessible, and ultimately ungrievable. Having demonstrated how BHD sets up such epistemological barriers, I widen focus and show that similar formal properties can be found in other audio-visual media, such as video games or news items. I then proceed to investigate how the societal impacts of this audio-visual rhetoric might be conceptualized. Do the mass media constitute a logistics organizing audiences’ perceptions of war, violence, and the other? Does the barring of the face of the enemy from the public sphere of appearance render particular lives ungrievable and therefore unprotectable? The main theoretical frame of the paper consists of an application of the discourse theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to an analysis of audio-visual media, and of the approaches by Judith Butler, James Der Derian, and Paul Virilio to conceptualize impacts of media representations on political discourse and practice in times of war. |
| Description: | This article is part of Holger Pötzsch's doctoral thesis, which is available in Munin at http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4103 |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4116 |
Munin is powered by DSpace 1.8.2
The University Library of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø
Tel: +47 77 64 40 00, E-mail: munin@ub.uit.no