All posts by Janina Malena Sähn

“My Name” – Vignettes about You

By Maria Moss

Vignettes are won­der­ful! Some­times described as a slice of life, vignettes can be so short that they take away the fear of end­ing up with a white page. Unlike a short sto­ry, there’s no defined begin­ning, mid­dle, or end with a cast of char­ac­ters, mul­ti­ple con­flicts, and the ulti­mate res­o­lu­tion phase. Instead, the vignette’s impres­sion­is­tic scenes focus on one moment or give a par­tic­u­lar insight into one char­ac­ter, idea, or setting.

The Mex­i­can Amer­i­can author San­dra Cis­neros is the unchal­lenged queen of vignette writ­ing, and her col­lec­tion of 44 vignettes,  (1984) is a must read.

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Put On Your Mourning Clothes, it’s Black Friday

By Hannah Quinque

Pho­to Cred­it: Final­ly, an occa­sion to go shop­ping! Pic­ture by Powhusku under cc-by-sa‑2.0.

Set­ting the scene: Gray Novem­ber skies, sea­son­al blues at full vol­ume. This Fri­day: Black. There’s no escap­ing the loud adver­tise­ments in the shop win­dows, at bus sta­tions, in every mail­box and inbox. They all pro­claim that this Fri­day, the one after Thanks­giv­ing, is the time to start shop­ping. Even if your coun­try, like Ger­many, doesn’t cel­e­brate Thanks­giv­ing. Black Fri­day, con­sumer culture’s biggest hol­i­day, is one very suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can export. Yet, how we cur­rent­ly view suc­cess might not be in tune with the suc­cess­ful con­tin­u­ance of human­i­ty or even a hab­it­able plan­et earth.
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America and the Holocaust

By Michael Lederer

Beyond a severe­ly lim­it­ed immi­gra­tion quo­ta kept to a bare min­i­mum, few­er than a thou­sand Jew­ish refugees from Europe were admit­ted into the U.S. dur­ing World War II. In August 1944, they were brought on a sin­gle U.S. Lib­er­ty ship, then interned behind barbed wire on an old U.S. Army camp upstate New York until after the war had end­ed. That small lucky group includ­ed my father Ivo, his sis­ter Mira, and their par­ents Otto and Ruza.

Pho­to Cred­it: Michael Led­er­er: Otto, Mira, Ruza, and Ivo Led­er­er in Oswego, New York, 1945.

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Native American History Month and Hostile Climates

By Hannah Quinque

The peak of progress and democ­ra­cy? Dził Nchaa Si An or Mount Gra­ham (AZ) is an unmov­able reminder that some are more equal than oth­ers. Pic­ture by Jbpar­rish at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_graham_in_2020.jpg under CC-BY-SA‑4.0.

This arti­cle has been start­ed and scrapped time and time again. An Amer­i­can stud­ies blog should run Native Amer­i­can sto­ries reg­u­lar­ly and most def­i­nite­ly for Native Amer­i­can Her­itage Month this Novem­ber. But then I, the author, am just anoth­er white Euro­pean try­ing to share some­body else’s sto­ries. So here’s what I decid­ed to do: I’ll use this plat­form as a reminder to lis­ten else­where, all year around.

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The Big Bang Blog: The Toxic Relationship Comedy

By Veronika M. Heinrich

The Big Bang The­o­ry is pure poi­son in a soci­ety that just got a wake-up call.
Just yes­ter­day, I saw anoth­er post reveal­ing its prob­lem­at­ic themes. What tru­ly shocked me were the com­ments – most of them in defence of their beloved series. “Don’t get your feel­ings hurt. It’s just a fun­ny show!” they claim. But it’s not.
Like many oth­ers, I also enjoyed watch­ing The Big Bang The­o­ry in my teenage years. I was hap­py that there was a show that por­trayed nerd cul­ture and ref­er­enced it. I didn’t ques­tion the harm­ful themes the show relies on. To be hon­est, I didn’t even see them. Now that my eyes are opened, I can’t unsee them. I can bare­ly stand to watch an entire episode. The char­ac­ters’ behav­ior around women and each oth­er is just too painful.
I can’t wrap my head around why this show ran for so many sea­sons and wasn’t can­celled ear­li­er. Sheldon’s quirk­i­ness is so fun­ny after all, isn’t it?
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Special Events You Won’t Want to Miss

By Maria Moss and Sabrina Völz

What do pornog­ra­phy, fake Indi­ans, the cli­mate cri­sis, and fire­fight­ers in New York City have in com­mon? Well, these are all top­ics of this season’s lec­ture series “Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes.”
As usu­al, the lec­ture series starts out with a bang: Award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er and one of Canada’s lead­ing writ­ers, Drew Hay­den Tay­lor, will present his new movie, The Pre­tendi­ans. The film, which cel­e­brates its Ger­man pre­miere at Leuphana Uni­ver­si­ty Lüneb­urg, asks the ques­tion why so many peo­ple in the pub­lic eye claim Native her­itage. Tay­lor, him­self an Anish­naabe and res­i­dent of Curve Lake First Nation reserve, is mak­ing his 5th trip to Lüneburg.
And if that’s not enough, we also fea­ture Anne Nel­son, Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist, author, play­wright, and lec­tur­er at Colum­bia University’s School of Inter­na­tion­al and Pub­lic Affairs. She’ll join us via Zoom to dis­cuss her play, The Guys. Writ­ten short­ly after 9/11, it fea­tures a fire­fight­er who seeks the help of a writer to com­pose eulo­gies for his dead comrades.
Art and pornog­ra­phy are at the heart of Anne Breimaier’s talk, which will crit­i­cal­ly recon­struct a lec­ture of rad­i­cal fem­i­nist Dorchen Lei­d­holdt in 1980. Breimaier will relate Leidholdt’s cri­tique of a com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of vio­lence against women in visu­al media of the 1980 to con­tem­po­rary image cultures.
The lec­ture series wraps up with a talk by Johan Höglund, “An end to Eat­ing? Future Food Imag­i­nar­ies and the Cli­mate Emer­gency.” Höglund will dis­cuss how fic­tion set in a future trans­formed by cli­mate change describes the act of ingest­ing food as “feed­ing” (what babies and ani­mals do) rather than “eat­ing” (what humans are typ­i­cal­ly under­stood to be doing and what counts as a social and cul­tur­al practice).
For the poster as well as the dates and times:

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