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Based on a recently accomplished American Studies research project in the University Alliance Ruhr and a close reading of the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Amanda Gorman, the seminar aims at the Atlantic study of "scripts" by cities and activists. Scripts are here understood as the self-descriptions employed by cities and activists in their branding efforts and in their protest. Postindustrial scripts, whether they are the official narrative handed out by an administration or the subversive stories told by inhabitants, seek to explicate and authorize the history, development, and future trajectories of US American, German and African cities that lost their lifeline industries in the second half of the twentieth century. The loss of industries and the ruination of so-called rust belt cities has notoriously been dramatized, fetishized, and powerfully fictionalized in political campaigns, most prominently in the 2016 US presidential election campaign of Donald Trump. We will examine these postindustrial urban scripts from the explicit vantage point of the Greater Ruhr Region - a region and an academic environment deeply rooted in comparable struggles against deindustrialization and shrinking but diversifying populations - and will assess and critique the narrative, figurative, and medial strategies employed by municipalities, urban developers, and the creative and sustainable industries in efforts to bring about change and craft a better future in the US and in German cities that seek to learn from or avoid American examples (cf. the slogan "We are not Detroit" used in Bochum at the time of the closing of the Opel plant). In these projected and prescribed futures, the city is almost invariably imagined as "creative", "sustainable", and "socially inclusive". This course will host a student conference, in which discuss our criticakl approaches and preliminary findings with a history Masterclass from Johns Hopkins University on June 7-9.
A reader containing an initial selection of texts and materials will be available before the first session. Participants are expected to have read Adichie's Americanah before the sessions start. |
