Sonja Schillings
I am an Independent Researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Current research interests include American literature after 1945, discourses on human dignity and interpresonal relations, and the narrative construction of legitimate violence.
Address: GCSC
Alter Steinbacher Weg 38
35394 Giessen
Address: GCSC
Alter Steinbacher Weg 38
35394 Giessen
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Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
http://www.upne.com/1512600155.html
This article suggests that comics are a model for rethinking these categorical issues productively and sustainably. By using visual elements, comics have already been able to reframe and recontextualize categorical premises such as the human-nature divide that otherwise tend to be reproduced in critical theory and the law. To make this point for the potential of a new categorical language that centrally draws on visual elements in text, the article uses two central examples from Japan and Germany: Osamu Tezuka's story "Space Snow Leopard" from the Astro Boy series, and Chlodwig Poth's short comic "Jörg the Limelight Hog."
Introduction to the issue. https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/onculture/issue/view/86
The essay suggests to complement the theoretical sovereign/homo sacer distinction at the threshold of the law with a conceptualization of a second threshold historically marked by pirates and privateers. Through such a theoretical enlargement of Agamben's model, the position of the critic as an exposer of sovereign violence can be discussed with Agambian terminology.
The paper argues that the conceptualization of Somalia as an extralegal no-man's-land is at the heart of the contemporary pirate understanding. Coupled with the conceptualization of Somalia as essentially 'outside', the term'pirate' itself serves as an exclusionary move that renders these actors marginal by definition.
Such narrative characterization of Somali actors and of the space of Somalia serves as strategic form of containment of this phenomenon's political meaning, and affect the ways in which we are able to speak about maritime violence."
The complete special issue can be accessed here:
https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-3/
The essays in this volume examine the impact of cultural change on the evolution of literature, and they investigate how literature – from the early modern period to the present – has been an active agent in motivating, instigating or hindering cultural change, trying to speed it up or slow it down. Ranging from early modern drama to poetry of the First World War and from contemporary ecopoetry to migrant literature of the 1950s, they explore questions of literature and cultural change from theoretical and historical perspectives in literary and cultural studies.
Description:
Does the legal term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), create an extralegal space where the assassination of terrorists can be seen as legitimate? - See more at: http://podacademy.org/interviewee/dr-sonja-schillings/#sthash.2mYMaOPd.dpuf
Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
http://www.upne.com/1512600155.html
This article suggests that comics are a model for rethinking these categorical issues productively and sustainably. By using visual elements, comics have already been able to reframe and recontextualize categorical premises such as the human-nature divide that otherwise tend to be reproduced in critical theory and the law. To make this point for the potential of a new categorical language that centrally draws on visual elements in text, the article uses two central examples from Japan and Germany: Osamu Tezuka's story "Space Snow Leopard" from the Astro Boy series, and Chlodwig Poth's short comic "Jörg the Limelight Hog."
Introduction to the issue. https://journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/onculture/issue/view/86
The essay suggests to complement the theoretical sovereign/homo sacer distinction at the threshold of the law with a conceptualization of a second threshold historically marked by pirates and privateers. Through such a theoretical enlargement of Agamben's model, the position of the critic as an exposer of sovereign violence can be discussed with Agambian terminology.
The paper argues that the conceptualization of Somalia as an extralegal no-man's-land is at the heart of the contemporary pirate understanding. Coupled with the conceptualization of Somalia as essentially 'outside', the term'pirate' itself serves as an exclusionary move that renders these actors marginal by definition.
Such narrative characterization of Somali actors and of the space of Somalia serves as strategic form of containment of this phenomenon's political meaning, and affect the ways in which we are able to speak about maritime violence."
The complete special issue can be accessed here:
https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-3/
The essays in this volume examine the impact of cultural change on the evolution of literature, and they investigate how literature – from the early modern period to the present – has been an active agent in motivating, instigating or hindering cultural change, trying to speed it up or slow it down. Ranging from early modern drama to poetry of the First World War and from contemporary ecopoetry to migrant literature of the 1950s, they explore questions of literature and cultural change from theoretical and historical perspectives in literary and cultural studies.
Description:
Does the legal term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), create an extralegal space where the assassination of terrorists can be seen as legitimate? - See more at: http://podacademy.org/interviewee/dr-sonja-schillings/#sthash.2mYMaOPd.dpuf