Suchergebnisse

While the European migrant crisis is omnipresent in political and medial discourses, two of its key causes are only seldom addressed by politicians and journalists: mistakes in Europe's domestic, foreign and development policies; and Eurocentric, clichéd or ill-informed press coverage on migration. What impedes such political and medial self-criticism? What happens if politicians or journalists publicly address their own mistakes? Creative culture, in turn, has a long tradition of public self-reflexivity. In the wake of the crisis, many literary texts and films self-critically reflect on the literary and filmic framing of migrants, and challenge the political and medial 'externalization' of the crisis. Building upon these observations, this contribution suggests a new direction for discursive research: the analysis of self-criticism as an ethical challenge for public communication. It highlights research desiderata, discusses the theoretical foundations for comparing self-reflexivity across discourses, and outlines a transdisciplinary terminology and exemplary methods for future research.

While the European migrant crisis is omnipresent in political and medial discourses, two of its key causes are only seldom addressed by politicians and journalists: mistakes in Europe's domestic, foreign and development policies; and Eurocentric, clichéd or ill-informed press coverage on migration. What impedes such political and medial self-criticism? What happens if politicians or journalists publicly address their own mistakes? Creative culture, in turn, has a long tradition of public self-reflexivity. In the wake of the crisis, many literary texts and films self-critically reflect on the literary and filmic framing of migrants, and challenge the political and medial 'externalization' of the crisis. Building upon these observations, this contribution suggests a new direction for discursive research: the analysis of self-criticism as an ethical challenge for public communication. It highlights research desiderata, discusses the theoretical foundations for comparing self-reflexivity across discourses, and outlines a transdisciplinary terminology and exemplary methods for future research.

This contribution departs from the problematization of the current European "migrant crisis" as an increasingly self-referential, exclusive inner-European discourse which transforms humanitarian emergency into matters of "national security", "identity" and economic hegemony. In order to cut through such self-referential closure, cultural practices and counter-narratives have emerged which remind Europe of the actual migrants behind the "crisis", the individuals forming the "refugee wave", the dead bodies behind the statistics. For a specific set of such practices and narratives which explicitly discuss how the crisis is usually "kept out", and which negotiate the very contrast between inside and outside, I suggest the term cultural self-reflection: By reflecting on the cultural frames in which they themselves have emerged, they aim at questioning and perforating these frames from the inside and enabling new perspectives on the outside. As an exemplary case, I discuss the representation of the outer borders of the European Union in a set of contemporary European documentaries and essay films with a particular focus on ways in which practices of border surveillance and their use in news media are reflected and questioned. The discussion of these "Border Films" provides a transposable model and a proof of concept to showcase cultural self-reflection as a crucial area for future Humanities research in the wake of the European migrant crisis.

In recent political philosophy and sociology, self-reflexivity has been described as an indispensable condition for secularized democratic societies. In epistemology, it has been discussed as a key characteristic of human thinking. In this introduction, we discuss how literature connects both traditions by illustrating, demonstrating, and performing self-reflection in numerous forms. We provide an overview of the most important research on literary "self"-labels since the 1960s, from discourse criticism and deconstruction to narratology and systems theory, and we outline a conceptual and terminological framework for contemporary analyses. In contrast to clichéd ideas of postmodern "playfulness," literary self-reflexivity has a crucial critical potential, as Michel Foucault suggests in his early texts: It can subvert hegemonic "allocritical" discourses and deconstruct dominant narratives and metaphors of exclusion. Providing a kaleidoscopic panorama of different forms, functions and genres of literary self-reflection, and presenting a variety of specific approaches tailored to analyze them, this volume demonstrates how the realms of aesthetic self-reference, cultural self-reflection, and human self-understanding interconnect, and which epistemological, social, and political consequences can be drawn from their analyses.

This introduction addresses the increased levels of social, political and ideological polarization and the socio-political conflicts in contemporary Europe that are often subsumed under notions of 'crisis'. We argue that the humanities and social sciences must react to these scenarios in at least two ways: by critically reflecting on the European project, and by analysing key elements of current 'crisis' discourses, such as post-factual narratives of 'decline', 'survival' and 'emergency', and populist fictions of homogeneous, 'tribal' cultural domains.

This introduction addresses the increased levels of social, political and ideological polarization and the socio-political conflicts in contemporary Europe that are often subsumed under notions of 'crisis'. We argue that the humanities and social sciences must react to these scenarios in at least two ways: by critically reflecting on the European project, and by analysing key elements of current 'crisis' discourses, such as post-factual narratives of 'decline', 'survival' and 'emergency', and populist fictions of homogeneous, 'tribal' cultural domains.