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introduction
These are all names, I should add, with which the majority of
my students, the majority of whom come from non-European
backgrounds and have enjoyed a postcolonially oriented multi-
cultural education in Toronto, are unfamiliar.14
Like Vegas, then, most of what happens in Vienna, not to
mention Austria and Austrian Studies, tends to stay there and to
take on a heightened local significance out of proportion with
external ramifications. These are thus concentric rather than ec-
centric places, to evoke Lotman’s terminology. Whereas an ec-
centric city “is situated ‘at the edge’ of the cultural space: on the
seashore, at the mouth of the river” and “is interpreted either
as the victory of reason over the elements, or as a perversion of
the natural elements,” the concentric city is “as a rule associated
with the image of the city on the hill (or hills),” in Vienna’s case,
terraces, and in Austria’s, the Alps.15 A concentric city is “the
mediator between heaven and earth” and “the focus for myths of
origins[…], it has a beginning but no end” (Lotman 2000, 192).
That the image of a concentric city may be heavily contested
internally, or may in other ways not conform to its external im-
age, does not register in the outside world because of the vertical
directionality of this mediating quality, which makes it appear
as a powerful center and erases internal divisions, silences and
forgettings.16
presented at the MLA.
14 While demographically very different, the constraints of my undergradu-
ate teaching at York are not too dissimilar from those Jennifer Marston
William describes in teaching German film at Purdue, “a Midwestern,
public land-grant university that is heavily oriented toward engineering
programs,” to students who “have not yet left the state of Indiana in their
lives, let alone traveled outside the country,” who “know precious little
about German culture and history upon starting the course” and “regularly
confuse Socialism with National Socialism” (2006, 91, 92).
15 As one reads in Maderthaner and Musner, “[f]or Vienna’s topography
follows a concentric model in which inner and outer suburbs are grouped
around the center in a social gradient” (2008, 2).
16 I am thinking here in particular of Ruth Beckermann’s comments at the
“Wir sind Wir” [“We Are Us”] session in the Volks
theater’s Rote Bar on
December 2, 2018 that she made Waldheims Walzer [Waldheim’s Walzes]
after realizing in discussions with young people that they had no knowl-
Siting Futurity
The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Titel
- Siting Futurity
- Untertitel
- The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Autor
- Susan Ingram
- Verlag
- punctumbooks
- Ort
- New York
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-953035-48-6
- Abmessungen
- 12.6 x 20.2 cm
- Seiten
- 224
- Schlagwörter
- activism, Austria, contemporary art, contemporary theater, protest culture, radicalism, social protest, Vienna
- Kategorie
- Geographie, Land und Leute
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Preface 11
- Introduction 19
- 1. (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena 39
- 2. Converting Kebab and Currency into Community on Planet #Ottakring 57
- 3. Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volkstheater 81
- 4. Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container 101
- 5. From Grand Hotels to Tiny Treasures: Wes Anderson and the Ruin Porn Worlds of Yesterday 119
- 6. Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and #Vanlife: The Alpine Edukation of Hans Weingarter 143
- 7. #Hallstatt: Welcome to Jurassic World 161
- Bibliography 189
- Filmography 215