Becoming TransGerman : Cultural Identity Beyond Geography

This book is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary collection of essays by some of today’s most forward-thinking scholars. The contributors explore the ways in which the prefix «trans» erupts German identity and the identity of Germany itself. The volume calls German identity into question and examines the ways in which the prefix «trans» is deployed to these ends in relation to national borders, historical limits, political institutions, social practices, and forms of cultural and aesthetic expression. The collection reveals the ways in which the transcendence of national, corporeal, disciplinary, and institutional limits is embodied by the use of the prefix «trans»– and has the potential to do so much more.

The volume engages the multifaceted nature of «trans»– and a Germanness that defies geography – to explore how Germans and Germany are increasingly situated «beyond» limits. Collectively, these investigations reveal a radical discourse of Germanness, a discourse with significant implications for historical and contemporary German self-understanding.The book asks the following: What is German identity beyond geography? And what are the promises and perils for Germany, and German identity, in becoming transGerman?

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in both the Visual Studies Program and the Critical Studies Program at California College of the Arts. His books include Representations of German Identity (co-edited with Deborah Ascher Barnstone); Spectacle (co-edited with Jennifer L. Creech), and Jürgen Habermas and the European Economic Crisis: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered (co-edited with Gaspare M. Genna and Ian W. Wilson). He has authored essays for New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945.

Tirza True Latimer is Associate Professor in the undergraduate Visual Studies Program and the graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program at California College of the Arts. Her books include Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (with Whitney Chadwick), and the exhibition companion book Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (with Wanda Corn).

Carol Hager is Professor of Political Science on the Clowes Professorship in Science and Public Policy at Bryn Mawr College. Her books include Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the German Energy Debate as well as NIMBY is Beautiful: Local Activism and Environmental Innovation Around the World (co-edited with Mary Alice Haddad). Hager co-founded Bryn Mawr College’s New Media Project and serves as Director of the Center for the Social Sciences.

Deborah Barton is Assistant Professor of Modern German History at the Université de Montréal. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015. Her research interests focus on journalism, gender, the two World Wars, and representations of violence in the media. She is currently revising her manuscript, titled «Writing for Dictatorship, Refashioning for Democracy: Women Journalists in the Nazis and Post-war Press,» for publication.