Wednesday 20 November, 4:30-6pm, FAB4.79

Katherine Stone (Warwick)

'Slaves and Objects of Amusement: West German Women under the Yoke of the American Colonizers': Sexual Violence, Moral Indignation and Propaganda in Cold-War East Germany

By now, it is well established that memories of Soviet violence against women sustained anti-Communist sentiment in the Federal Republic, while the crimes of the western Allies were downplayed. The fact that East German memories were similarly dualistic has received limited attention. Scholars have focused instead on the copious evidence that violence perpetrated by members of the Red Army was politically taboo. In this paper, I argue that there was nonetheless space in public discourse to remember German women as victims of wartime sexualized violence—as long as the perpetrators represented the Western Allies. In fact, I demonstrate that sexual violence was a particularly sticky sign in the affective economy of anti-imperialism. To begin, I will show how the topic of rape by US soldiers was harnessed in journalistic propaganda to induce moral indignation towards the western Allies as embodiments of a cruel, exploitative, and morally inferior political system. I then zoom in on Werner Steinberg’s Deutschland-Zyklus (1957-1965), which is unique in the literature of both Germanies for its extended exploration of conflict-related sexualized violence in all its forms. It remains one of the few works of post-war culture to give voice to the victim-survivor and continue her story beyond the moment of violence. Ultimately, however, I argue that there was no reception framework in which the individual story of sexual violence could accrue emotional and memorial capital. All that mattered in Cold War propaganda was the baseness of the perpetrator and the ideological system that he represented.

Wednesday 20 November: Annabel Kim (Harvard), 'For Sale: The Personal is Political'

This seminar will be a discussion of a pre-circulated journal article, abstract immediately below. Download the article here.

The rise of autofiction in the contemporary French literary landscape coincides with a general evacuation of fiction as the dominant mode of literary creation. Christine Angot and Édouard Louis, who are both associated with autofiction despite their disidentification with the genre, unveil the trauma they have lived through, thus operating, as does self-writing in general, in a confessional mode. Angot and Louis, however, turn confession into complaint, where they assume the position of a plaintiff filing charges against a society put on trial for its hypocrisy and the structural violence that characterizes the authors’ traumatic experiences of class, sexual, and gender violence. This article demonstrates how this transformation of confession into complaint, which is what gives Angot’s and Louis’s texts their political edge, is also what makes them open to being coopted by late capitalism, which has turned the self into a commodity, devoid of political potential.

Annabel L. Kim is Chair and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature. Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics, "Citation, Otherwise," on the politics of citation, and co-editor (with Morgane Cadieu) of a Yale French Studies volume, "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig."

This seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams, 6-7.30pm UK time. Click here to join.