Pandemic Automobility. Patterns of Crisis and Opportunity in the American Motor Culture

This article traces the recursive character of automobility from a perspective of cultural crises and traumas that accompany motor culture development in the USA. The American automobility system has been caught in the treadmill of ideological criticism that defined the current role of motor vehicles in forms of political activism and cultural criticism. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is different as it seems to bring restoration to the original character of motor culture with its defining features of individualism, freedom, and opportunity achieved through mobility.

Nietzsche und die Weltanschauungsliteratur

The study aims to demonstrate the significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for ›Weltanschauungsliteratur‹ (ideological literature) in the early 20th century. ›Weltanschauungsliteratur‹ adopts thematic elements of Nietzsche’s cultural criticism. Nietzsche’s habitus of the outmoded academic outsider becomes important for the writers’ self-staging. ›Weltanschauungsliteratur‹ closely observes Nietzsche’s combination of philosophical reasoning and literary writing and develops it further. Finally, the article examines exemplary ›Weltanschauungsliteratur‹ by Salomo Friedländer, Theodor Lessing, Rudolf Pannwitz, and Ernst Bertram.

Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming

The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spectral persistence and evasion. Leaky bodies and selves gathered up in the storm of pain. Genders imposed and genders made. History’s cruel excisions, scars, the spillage of wounds. A landscape in which we are nevertheless called to build home. Here, “storytelling is a kind of suturing.” Combining memoir, lyrical essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski's Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.