Austria in Transit : Displacement and the Nation-State
- Submitting institution
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King's College London
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 147617392
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Modern Humanities Research Association
- ISBN
- 9781781886021
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This issue intervenes in current debates on mass displacement within and beyond the European continent. It makes an original case for Austria as a transit state with a pivotal role in the history and politics of mass displacement since the early 2010s. The issue comprises my extensive introduction, two artist interviews and fifteen edited articles. After coordinating the original conference and accompanying special events (photographic exhibition; three film screenings; five public talks) at King’s and the ICA, I devised a publication format that retains their dialogic character. The articles are framed by two specially commissioned conversations with contemporary artists; and the issue’s seventeen case studies in music, literature and theatre, photography and other media are examined from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, social and cultural theory, literary and critical theory, and political science. I conceived the issue as a companion piece to Germany in Transit, 1955-2005 (Göktürk 2007), and the contributions take an interventionist stance in developing new thinking and paradigms in relation to human displacement in the twenty-first century. My own article interprets a play by Kathrin Röggla, die unvermeidlichen (2011), as a ‘text in transit.’ Drawing on the sociology of Maurizio Lazaratto on the production of subjectivity under capitalism, as well as writings by Deleuze, I show how Röggla develops a literary intervention that evades prevailing victimologies of capitalist subjectivity, opting instead to stage the evanescence of the subject under contemporary crisis capitalism. Whilst the issue focuses on cultural responses to displacement and artistic attempts to document those excluded from the historical record, it offers further perspectives on the limits of humanitarian intervention; on contemporary populisms; on the politics of immigration; and on the possibilities and limitations of the arts in communicating geopolitical experiences of transit.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
