German Studies is changing rapidly, as new perspectives from the natural, social and information sciences inspire radical collaborations with disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, history, and environmental humanities.
The Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures is embracing this evolution by launching the Collaborative Research and Creativity Fund (CRCF), which expands the scope and breadth of student learning beyond the formal classroom.
The CRCF promotes research initiatives and creative projects that foster interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration among faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students. Participants read texts together, invite speakers and meet in an informal forum to discuss research findings.
The fund has supported, among others, a reading group in Decolonial German Studies, coordinated by Angelica Fenner, a cross-appointed faculty member in German and cinema studies. She hosts monthly meetings to explore recent literature and scholarly writings that reframe German studies through an anti-racist, decolonial lens.
The idea was to create a venue for students around a pool of shared interests that may or may not directly bear on their thesis research, but expose them to literature and publications they might not otherwise encounter in coursework.
“The idea was to create a venue for students around a pool of shared interests that may or may not directly bear on their thesis research, but expose them to literature and publications they might not otherwise encounter in coursework,” explains Fenner.
“The discipline of German studies is changing in critical ways,” she adds. “And the term ‘decolonial’ is invoked extensively both across the University and within post-secondary institutions at an international level. It seemed timely to grapple with this via cultural production emerging within or engaging German society today, as one means for students, in turn, to reflect on how this informs their own thinking, everyday practices and assumptions, including the inheritance of settler colonialism.”
The group is not connected to any curriculum or course and provides a lively, and thus far, online platform to engage, discuss and debate.
“It's a safe environment in which to explore ideas and ask honest questions,” says Fenner. “There's a level of accountability to the group, and pooling our individual perspectives brings about a richer understanding than when working through these texts privately. We each bring our lived experience, socialization, and unique cultural knowledge to bear on the conversations.”
Last summer the reading materials were driven primarily by participants’ interests — inviting them to provide articles and primary texts relating to their own research for discussion in the group.
I found the subject of Germany’s colonial history to be underrepresented in the canon of German critical theory as well as of literary texts. So I joined in hopes of deepening my knowledge and understanding of this important subject and its influences on and meaning for our contemporary world.
One student brought forward an article by philologist Hartmut Kugler examining the medieval Erbstorfer world maps, whose early renderings of the European continent spatialize an occidental worldview. Another shared select chapters from an edited collection, The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy to explore how German colonialism sparked the imperial imagination in literary and serial literature late 19th and early 20th-century.
Two graduate students who joined the group last summer, Elisabeth Lange and Christian Zeitz, found the group extremely enriching.
“I joined this group because I was intrigued by its title and the different ways it could be understood and approached,” says Lange, a student in the German department’s PhD program. She is studying contemporary German literature with a focus on social deviance.
“I found the subject of Germany’s colonial history to be underrepresented in the canon of German critical theory as well as of literary texts. So I joined in hopes of deepening my knowledge and understanding of this important subject and its influences on and meaning for our contemporary world.”
And in a pandemic that robbed us of so many opportunities to talk to our colleagues in both professional and informal settings, the reading group made me feel like I was part of an academic community again.
For Lange, the lively discussions “help to develop a better understanding of important topics such as racism, identity, discrimination and its relation to German culture and society from both contemporary and historical perspectives.”
Zeitz, who is German and completed his undergrad studies in Germany, finds the group meetings fascinating, and enjoys exploring the material from the perspective of an international student.
“I had never given much thought to what it means to practice German studies in a settler colonial context such as Canada,” says Zeitz, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the cinema studies program. His research focuses on orientalist tropes — in this case, stereotypes produced in western cultures as a means to define and contain worlds contrasted as ‘eastern’ — in several recent German television series.
“The best part of this group was the interdisciplinary exchange it fostered,” he says. “The group brought together different approaches to engaging the ‘decolonial’ in a field both as particular yet multidisciplinary as German studies. The sheer variety of topics made the group even more exciting.”
“And in a pandemic that robbed us of so many opportunities to talk to our colleagues in both professional and informal settings, the reading group made me feel like I was part of an academic community again.”
For the second semester of the reading group, which began in November and wraps up this summer, Fenner took a different approach, choosing to organize the discussions around select contemporary literary texts.
“Stories can be very healing. With the pandemic there is so much alienation and anxiety circulating. Immersing oneself in a compelling story can draw the imagination into a parallel world, to contemplate the human condition from a different perspective altogether,” says Fenner.
Stories can be very healing. With the pandemic there is so much alienation and anxiety circulating. Immersing oneself in a compelling story can draw the imagination into a parallel world, to contemplate the human condition from a different perspective altogether.
This winter, the group has read three debut novels by women authors of colour: the 2021 German-language novel Ada’s Raum, by 2016 Bachman Prize winner Sharon Dodua Otoo; Olivia Wenzel’s memories of East Germany in 1000 Serpentinen der Angst (2020), and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions, the first installment of her autobiographical trilogy, released in 1988 shortly before she moved from Zimbabwe to Germany to study film directing.
In 2021 Dangarembge was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for her lifetime achievements as literary author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and producer — roles through which she continues to promote sustainable communities and advance women’s and children’s rights in Zimbabwe.
Fenner believes authors like Dangarembge have the ability to spark student interest in intersectional decolonial perspectives.
“When having conversations about story elements that speak to us, open up a new point of view, or even confound us, we invariably also draw comparisons and contrasts to our own experiences, and to larger conversations about Canadian contexts,” says Fenner, who feels she is benefitting from the discussions as much as are the students.
“It’s wonderful that students have committed to thinking through these timely issues amid ongoing coursework and teaching responsibilities. I’d gladly undertake this again, also as a forum for (re)building community beyond the pandemic.”