Event FinderArt’s Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue
- Starts
- Ends
- Format
- In person
- Location
- 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berkeley, CA, United States
About This Event
In this talk, Claudia Breger presents Art's Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue (Stanford University Press, October 2026). 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 ways, as it grapples with the present, remembers fraught histories and imagines different futures. Art's Assemblies develops this argument by staging dialogues between twenty-first century theory (affect, queer, actor-network studies, and Black radical thought) and the thinking on politics and aesthetics developed by (mostly) German Jewish emigres in response to historical fascism (Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, in exchange with Hannah Arendt and others). Bringing together these—heterogeneous while entwined—traditions, Breger conceptualizes the political power of art through how it "assembles" heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) "concert" and imaginative prefiguration. Individual chapters zoom in on a few of these actions: the ways in which artworks—across media�� "track" and "track" pieces of real-world life (even in fantastic contexts), "archive" and "animate" unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization, "fabulate" other possibilities (while staying clear of the forgeries of fake news) and "dream" (as well as "draft" and "demand") amid nightmares. The talk will introduce this spectrum of actions through the book's readings of Franz Kafka and Else Lasker-Schüler's multi-media avant-garde art—again in conversation with twenty-first-century artists and concerns.To register for this event, please click here. (https://forms.gle/TewNqSzbZTwzfGmC8)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. Earlier book publications include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature and Film in Contemporary Germany (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, Ohio State University Press, 2012), which seeks to reconcile the fields of narratology and performance studies in conceptualizing contemporary worldmaking practices in different media. The smaller German-language volume Nach dem Sex? (Hirschfeld-Lectures; Wallstein, 2014) probes methodological dialogues between queer turn-of-the-twentieth century sexology and twenty-first century affect studies. Her Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2020) reconnects her work on affect to questions of narrative and form through a syncretic concept of cinematic worldmaking. The book champions contemporary cinema's potential in reimagining collectivity for our moment of heightened public affect. If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in these events, please contact Jennifer Lipscomb at jlipscomb@berkeley.edu (mailto:jlipscomb@berkeley.edu?subject=Accommodation%20Needed%20for%20CJS%20Event) with as much advance notice as possible. Thank you.