Das Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Veranstaltungen

Donnerstag, 04.11.2021, 11:00 Uhr
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität
Fellow Kolloquium

Russ Castronovo (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
»American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability: Some Propositions and Axioms«

Abstract
Security emerges as the original motivation behind human beings’ desire for stable community in the political fairytale that philosophy tells of the social contract. If the concept of security takes shape as a story, it is crucial to examine the narratives that it sets in motion as well as those that it forecloses. While discussions of security are often dominated by social science, an understanding of security—how it makes us feel, how it contours ideas of privacy and property, how it affects our thinking about whiteness and race, how it serves as both the origin and endpoint of political community—requires attention to literary and other aesthetic materials. The topic of cannot be left to policy investigations that fail to take up the full range of emotions from safety to terror that literature displays.
American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability explores the concept of security and investigates the structures of state as well as the structures of feeling that flow from what philosophers posit as the impetus to form a political community in the first place. The question is not whether people need security since risk, as Ulrich Beck contends, represents a defining feature of modernity. Rather, the goal is to examine how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. In the contexts of early America, the violence of settler colonialism and ever-present fears of mass slave rebellion made white vulnerability a constitutive feature, not simply of political life, but of existence itself. Across a multiracial society organized around the frontier and the plantation, the demands for constant readiness, surveillance, and other security measures spawned feelings of unease, fear, terror, in a word, insecurity. Through critical attention to a range of novels, tracts, pamphlets, and newspapers, including the complete run of the first Black newspaper in the US, Freedom’s Journal (1827-29), American Insecurity examines how security’s generative capacity to provide a foundation for art and culture, as Hobbes proposed in Leviathan, is matched only by its capacity to incite fear and promote terror.

Der Referent
Russ Castronovo lehrt und forscht über die amerikanische Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Sein besonderes Interesse gilt den Schnittpunkten von Politik und Schriftkultur. So untersucht er in seinem Buch Propaganda 1776 (Oxford University Press 2014) Handzettel und Pamphlete aus der Zeit der amerikanischen Revolution und in Beautiful Democracy (University of Chicago Press 2007) ästhetische Abhandlungen, Filme und anarchistische Traktate der 1870er-1920er Jahre. In all seinen Schriften, vier Monographien und fünf editierten Bände, stützt er sich auf interdisziplinäre Ansätze aus der politischen Theorie, der Film- und Kunstgeschichte, der Philosophie und der Literaturwissenschaft, um Fragen nach Rasse und Demokratie in den Geisteswissenschaften zu behandeln. Er veröffenlticht u.a. in den Zeitschriften PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, boundary 2, American Literature, American Literary History, und Journal of American Studies.

Im November 2021 ist er auf Einladung von Professor Johannes Völz und dem Forschungsschwerpunkt »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World« Fellow am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.

Teilnahme und Anmeldung
Das wissenschaftliche Kolloquium findet am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften statt. Die Teilnahme (vor Ort oder online) ist nach vorheriger Anmeldung möglich (Kontakt: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de). Zur Eindämmung des Covid-19 Infektionsgeschehens gilt die »2-G-Regel«.