Spectacle, Showmanship, Subalternity – Discursive negotiations of identity and alterity in popular knowledge media (1850-1950)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kirsten von Hagen
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463005852

Using methods from literary, cultural and media studies, the project examines the special role of ‘gypsy‘ figures and representations as borderline and negotiating figures of European modernity in popular knowledge media in France between 1850 and 1950. Special attention will be paid to adventure novels, travel literature and press reports, as well as to popular performance and exhibition media that - like opera, popular theatre or world exhibitions - stage the ‘other‘ in a way to attract attention. In addition, early self-representations of Rom*nja in France will be examined in relation to the representations of spectacular knowledge transfer and popular entertainment. The hypothesis will be pursued that spectacular ‘gypsy‘ representations on the one hand contain a potential for exclusion, i.e. a particularly precarious kind of diminished belonging through corresponding processes of representation, as a result of which the subalternity of the persons and groups designated as ‘gypsies' is codified. That, on the other hand, in the spectacular representations of Carmen, Esmeralda, Sangarre and Moréna, different media and semantics overlap in this way, that, in addition to a consolidation of the 'other', subversive counter-movements can also emerge, which later often lead to a rewriting by those described from outside. In this context, the aesthetics of the spectacular will be examined for its function in the discursivisation of identity and alterity, inclusion and exclusion, subalternity and self-empowerment.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5406: Antigypsyism and Ambivalence in Europe (1850-1950)