Vorlesungsreihe
W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures Wintersemester 2025/2026
28 October 2025
6:15–7:45 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, 1066e
Kylie Crane (Universität Rostock): “‘Domesticated Decomposition’: Fermentation and Other Matters of Culture”
This lecture asks: What does it mean to think about our present moment with fermenting? Shifting scales to the microbial, where humans interact with fungi and bacteria in the most intimate manner—preparing food with them, eating alongside them, and eating them—fermentation means recognizing ourselves as one amongst many. Tracing the ways in which specific food preparation processes are developed and co-opted as political messaging, fermentation can lead us to querying the various meanings of prepping, and perhaps unpacking the performances of the trad-wife. Considering the way some anthropological documents trace the emergence of agriculture to the brewing of alcohol, thinking with fermentation can mean asking what makes us human. This lecture will employ fermentation as a way of thinking about more-than-human entanglements in the present; of thinking about “domesticated decomposition” (Sheldrake) as a lens for cultural studies inquiry; and of working through the affordances of new materialism, the environmental humanities and material practices more broadly.
Kylie Crane is Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock. She is the author of Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives (Palgrave, 2012) and, more recently, Concrete and Plastic: Thinking through Materiality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, available open access). Her current work centers questions of the environment and (material) practices of the everyday.
25 November 2025
6:15–7:45 p.m.
Dorotheenstr. 24, 1.501
Moon Charania (Princeton University): “Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness”
In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother's memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother's tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers' survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother's tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.
Moon Charania is a feminist scholar whose research explores the psychosocial dimensions of the lives of women of color; she investigates social, political, and intimate issues in relation to gender and sexuality, violence and care, racism and the diasporic experience. Dr. Charania is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Spelman College and the 2024–25 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of two books: Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness (Duke University Press, 2023) and Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body (McFarland 2015). Her most recent book, Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness, has been recognized in the 2023 Year in Books in Critical and Cultural Theory, and included in the State of the Field by Meridians journal. Charania is currently working on a third book, Nous Femme Les Dérangées: Essays on Brown Women and Pain.
13 January 2026
6:15–7:45 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, 2249a
Crystal Parikh (New York University): “Bona Fides: Racial Worldmaking in Refugee Literature”
The modern condition of “refugeeness” has been inextricably bound up with global ideas of race and racial difference. The question of race has always been a thorny one when it comes to the procedural definitions and administration of refugees. The twentieth-century formulation of the refugee emerged alongside dramatic but incomplete shifts in ideas about race and the dismantling of imperial worlds, built upon racializing assumptions that cast colonized peoples as beyond the pale of the humanity that international human rights law means to secure. According to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “membership” in a race that finds itself persecuted qualifies one for refugee status, and there is of course nothing about one’s racial identity that would prima facie and categorically disqualify one from petitioning for such status according to the Convention. Nevertheless, the construction of the refugee remains entangled in global racial imaginaries of the human and the sub- or inhuman, and of innocence, criminality, and terror, even as humanitarian law and discourse seeks to distance itself from the history of past racial thinking and its shaping of present-day geopolitical realities. If the law is ill-equipped to face, much less redress these contradictions, in this talk, I consider how refugee literatures have treated racialized refugee regimes. Turning to two recent North American novels, Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) and Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), I argue that this literature heightens the contradictions endemic to a racialized refugee regime as a matter of narrative exigency and racial worldmaking, thereby prompting us to theorize racialized refugeeness otherwise.
Crystal Parikh is Professor of English at New York University, where she specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary transnational American literature and culture. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literature. She is also the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009), which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019), and she co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). She is currently at work on two book projects, Worldly Women, a study of transnational feminist ethics in American literature, and First World Problems, which examines the right to security of person and racial form in Asian American literary production. Professor Parikh also currently serves as the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
10 February 2026
6:15–7:45 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, 2249a
Laura Bieger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): “Archive and Genre as Infrastructure”
This talk builds on the collaborative project “Archive and Genre” (with Florian Sedlmeier) which posits and explores a dialectic between the two: Both archives and genres are social institutions, with their capacity to function as institution depending on ritualized ways of gathering, grouping, storing and circulating cultural memories, and modes of belonging; and with both using their status as institution to implement social hierarchies. Our working hypothesis is that conjoining the two enhances our understanding of both. Definitions of archives as physical sites quickly reach their limits when confronted with the placelessness of genres, as “fields of knowledge” (Dimock 2007) that always undercut their own categorization. This is especially helpful in conceptualizing diasporic archives or counter-archives that have a complicated relation to place. Conversely, grounding genre in archive can help to challenge the still dominant (post)structuralist paradigm of genre theory: Considered with archive, notions of genre as ordering practices and social institutions gain the media-material basis that remains underexplored in theories of genre. But what if archives and genres are not only institutions, but also infrastructures? What changes, and is possibly gained, when viewing them and their dialectical relation this way? In answering these questions, I turn to recent developments in the study of institutions and infrastructures, as well as to my own work on “race as infrastructure” and the entanglement of genre within that infrastructure, both in erecting and in contesting it. And I will especially turn to William Still’s The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes, and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others Or Witnessed by the Author: Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers of the Road to elaborate my case.
Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Reading for Democracy (Metzler 2025), Belonging and Narrative (transcript 2018), and Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007). Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Narrative, Parallax, Studies in American Naturalism, Amerikastudien/American Studies and ZAA. She is a member of the DFG-funded Research Group “Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply,” where she leads the project “‘Race as Infrastructure’ and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance.” Together with Philipp Loeffler, she is currently co-editing two special issues: “After Contemporary Literature” for American Literature, and “What was Contemporary Literature? Or: The End of Periodization as We Know It” for Post45.