FASS Seminar Series – Prof. Claudia Breger (Columbia University)

 Art’s Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue 

In this talk, Claudia Breger presents her forthcoming book, Art’s Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue. In our challenging moment, the book makes a new case for the power of art—and by extension, humanities thought and teaching—to act politically in significant, manifold ways, by engaging with surrounding worlds as well as imagining different futures. The book develops this argument through dialogues between recent scholarship (in affect, queer, and actor-network theory along with radical Black thought) and the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory developed in response to historical fascism, with literature, film, TV, and art installation examples drawn from both historical contexts. The talk will introduce the general idea—of “art’s assemblies” bringing together heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) “political concert”—and present a few examples from different chapters: on “tracking” and “tracing” pieces of real-world life (even in fantastic contexts), “archiving and animating” unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization, “fabulating” (vs. the forgeries of fake news) and “dreaming” (as well as “drafting” and “demanding”) amid nightmares.

 

Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Having received her PhD and Habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin, she taught at the University of Paderborn, Germany, and Indiana University, Bloomington, before joining Columbia in 2017. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary culture, with emphases on film, performance, literature, and literary and cultural theory, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in a transnational framework. Book publications include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature and Film in Contemporary Germany (Ohio State University Press, 2012) and Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2020). Her Art’s Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue is forthcoming from Stanford University Press later this year.