Lars Eckstein

Performing Jazz, Defying Essence: Music as a Metaphor of Being in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract The cultural validity of jazz has been evaluated very differently by various critical camps. Some voices try to essentialise jazz by either claiming it as a specifically African American tradition dominated by black, and mostly male musicians, or, alternatively, by explicitly limiting its cultural functionality to the black diaspora. Other voices, in contrast, insist on the hybrid genealogy and dialogic openness of jazz as a form of art that inherently defies boundaries of gender and race. Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet fully subscribes to the latter opinion. Revolving around the jazz musician Joss Moody, Trumpet not only takes up jazz as a core theme but also refers to jazz-aesthetic principles and performative arrangements in its narrative design. Most importantly, however, Trumpet uses jazz as a metaphor of being, as a model of identity formation that privileges a performative approach to the social and biological constraints of gender and race

Maps drawn on the sand: of mimicry and depropriation on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition

In this essay, I explore various politics of mimicry on Ludwig Leichhardts second Australian expedition. Following Michael Taussig, I read mimicry as embedded in a complex economy of gift exchange which disrupts the binary categories of self and other, subject and object, man and nature. Mimetic exchanges, in other words, bear the potential for a non-dualistic dynamics of “depropriation”, a dynamics which may be avowed or disavowed by various actors in the colonial encounter. Focussing on three actors in particular—Ludwig Leichhardt himself, his British botanist Daniel Bunce, and the intriguing figure of “Mr Turner”, an Indigenous Australian—I trace the ways in which mimicry-as-depropriation is dealt with across the colonial archive.

Remembering German-Australian colonial entanglement: an introduction

Remembering German-Australian colonial entanglement: an introduction Lindsay Barrett, Lars Eckstein, Andrew Wright Hurley and Anja Schwarz School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia; English Department, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany; School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia; English Department, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Recollecting bones: the remains of German-Australian colonial entanglements

ABSTRACT This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific ‘disinterest’. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.

Luhmann in da Contact Zone: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Sociological Systems Theory

Thgis chapter reads the works of German sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann in the context of spaces of transcultural encounter where ‘global designs and local histories’ (Mignolo) interact and thus make the question of inclusion into or exclusion from ‘world society’ (Luhmann) particularly pressing. The title of this contribution, ‘Luhmann in da Contact Zone’, is deliberately ambiguous: On the one hand, the authors of course use ‘Luhmann’ metonymically, as representative of a highly complex theoretical design. They cursorily outline this design with a special focus on the notion of a singular, modern ‘world society’, only to confront it with the epistemic challenges of the contact zone. On the other hand, this critique will also involve the close observation of Niklas Luhmann as a human observer (a category which within the logic of systems theory actually does not exist) who increasingly transpires in his later writings on exclusion in the global South. By following this dual strategy, the authors wish to trace an increasing fracture between Luhmann and his theory, between abstract theoretical design and personalized testimony. It is by exploring and measuring this fracture that they hope to eventually be able to map out the potential of a possibly more productive encounter between systems theory and specific strands of postcolonial theory for a pluritopic reading of global modernity.

Sound matters: postcolonial critique for a viral age

ABSTRACT This essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.