Conference Report on “Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity”

 

Digital Conference of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), organized by the Research Area 6 “Cultural Identities,” 23–25 June 2021, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany

A report by Laura Popa and Clara Verri (laura.popa@gcsc.uni-giessen.de, clara.verri@ggk.uni-giessen.de)

Justus Liebig University Giessen / University of Helsinki

 

The concept of cultural hybridity seems ordinary now due to the daily usages of the term in a global context, but it covers a lengthy scholarly discourse. In the Winter Semester 2020/21, the discussion of Pnina Werbner’s article on the dialectics of hybridity during a Research Area 6 meeting captivated the members’ interest. What novel ideas does hybridity bring to different cultural environments, and how? Possible answers were that cultural shifts between the local and the global are involved, as well as encounters and reformulation of identities. The concept helps reflect on the interaction processes between identities and cultures by considering the emergence of new realities. The interdisciplinary and international conference “Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity,” from 23 to 25 June, aimed to shed light on the dynamics and social practices engaging hybridity as a tool of cultural analysis and formation. The experimental format of the laboratory conference aimed to inspire a reformulation of this concept and to bind everyday reality with academic knowledge during the keynote lecture, the two workshops, the eight panels, and the final laboratory-debate.

The conference started with a digital World Café through the platform Padlet.com. On the page created for the event, four questions were formulated to break the ice and present the participants. The questions respectively asked for a short introduction (name, university, faculty, degree), how hybridity relates to their scholarly work, how it relates to their daily life and, finally, the meaning of hybridity in a short sentence or word. To answer these questions the participants accessed the page and used the function of leaving a comment. This World Café showed the international, interdisciplinary and polyphonic aspects of hybridity in academic knowledge and everyday life among the participants.

The first panels of the first day were Negotiation of Gender in the Digital Era and Digitalisation of Culture. Both were held simultaneously, as both discussed the importance of the digital in rethinking concepts such as gender and culture. NEELLY FAS-SAD (Goethe University Frankfurt) opened the session Negotiation of Gender in the Digital Era chaired by LAURA POPA (Justus Liebig University Giessen), by focusing on the global spread of the image of the child-woman in digital pop-culture across Europe and Asia. In her poster presentation, “The Myth of the Child-Woman in Visual Media Concepts,” Fas-sad analyzed how Lolita’s sexualized aesthetics contribute to the hypersexualization of young girls, child pornography, and sexual violence against children on the Internet and social media platforms. In order to reclaim women’s bodies, the new aesthetic of an asexualized, subversive Gothic Lolita was introduced.

Following the same interest in gender aesthetics, ATHIRA B.K. (Jawaharlal Nehru University) discussed a novel bridehood imaginary emerging in India since the 1990s in her talk “Weddings and Digital Circuits: The Case of an Emergent Bridehood in India.” As opposed to arguing that there is openness to hybrid cultural influences due to globalization, the results of her analysis of a series of Instagram wedding images during the COVID-19 crisis indicate that this newly formed aesthetic is not much negotiated and still bound to social, political, and religious hierarchies according to local contexts.

A stronger negotiation of gender in the digital sphere has been proposed by AIDEN JAMES COSCIENZA (Temple University) in “Gender Hybridity, Cultural Hybridity, and Transcultural Audiences.” He demonstrated how fans of media texts circulated on the Internet can self-discover and self-produce hybrid gender identities as a consequence of perceiving gender in the 21st century as a borderless territory related to global encounters.

The panel Digitalisation of Culture was chaired by CLARA VERRI (University of Helsinki / Justus Liebig University Giessen) and ROBIN PROBST (Justus Liebig University Giessen). The first presenter, SARA DINOTOLA (University of Turin) opened the discussion with the poster “Libraries, Cultural Identity and Digital between Local Dimension and Global Dimension.” The presentation explored the increasing role of libraries in creating a space of socio-cultural communication and information in the last years and during the actual pandemic. Libraries’ widespread usage of digital platforms helps users worldwide to develop a targeted usage of online resources and encounter regional and national realities. The presentation pointed out that the lack of digital access in local and global areas remains a constant problem resulting in the exclusion of individuals from library contents.

The discussion continued with ENRIQUE ULRIBE-JONGBLOED, ALESSANDRA PUCCINI MONTOYA (both Universidad Externado de Colombia), and CESAR MORA-MOREO (Universidad del Norte Barranquilla) with “Local Memes, Global Production: Cultural Transduction in the Netflix Promotion Strategy in Colombia.” The contribution was a transmedia essay, namely a Facebook page with textual analysis and memes from Netflix Colombia. The study analyzed the usage of memes created by Netflix Colombia as a hybrid between internationally acclaimed TV-series and Colombian local and national pop culture. The presentation revealed these memes to be the streaming service’s strategy to integrate TV-series into popular humour and consumerism. These graphic strategies refer to well-known Colombian spaces, events and foods to create an attachment with the public and negotiate identities.

The panel ended with NICOLE BASARABA’s (Maastricht University) “Creative Digital Placemaking for Shared Cultural Heritage.” The format of the presentation elaborated on the panelist’s personal website and an archive of worldwide videos on preserving and creating shared heritage. The presentation explained digitalization as the tool to connect citizens with their history and heritage in the place they inhabit. Digital placemaking pays attention to the historical and present, spatiotemporally coordinated location, highlighting the transcultural dimension of heritage in the past and present perspective. This contribution shed light on the role of hybridity as a consistent tool for the future and not only for the present.

The conference continued with the workshop “To What Extent Can Post-Digitality Be Understood as ‘Life-World Hybridity’?” led by LUISA CONTI, FERGAL LENEHAN (both Friedrich Schiller University of Jena), and ROMAN LIETZ (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz). The three scholars engaged the participants in a discussion about cultural hybridity in the post-digital discourse as part of their research project “ReDICo” (Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively). The workshop occurred on the platform Wonder.me, allowing the participants to move from one virtual table to another every 15 minutes and to answer one question in every round. They questioned, firstly, the incompleteness of life without technology; secondly, bodily existence in times of digital contact such as the pandemic; thirdly, the social, economic and political valence of digital technologies in our lives; finally, the cultural homogenization given by the online world. Different arguments such as digital detox, the exoticism of spending vacations abroad, time importance over space and Netflix algorithms were among the answers. In the last part of the event, the scholars summarized the different issues as tentative answers to the question “To what extent can post-digitality be understood as ‘Life-World Hybridity’”?

The concluding event of the first day was the keynote lecture delivered by ANDREAS LANGENOHL (Justus Liebig University Giessen). The lecture Hybridity and Economy addressed the less studied role of economics in cultural hybridization. By focusing on the concept of transculturation from Latin American Studies to analyze colonial Cuba’s agriculture and marketing, Langenohl then compared it to the concepts of cultural hybridity (for India) and acculturation (for North America). In contrast to acculturation, transculturation refers to the process of transitioning from one culture to another, to the creation of a new culture. Thus, drawing on sociological and anthropological perspectives opposing neoliberalism and Marxism, Langenohl argued that both hybridization and transculturation are not passive or reactive processes. These concepts are rather active, since they are the outcome of decisions, initiatives, and investments. The economical value attached to transcultural and hybrid identities explains why people invest in the cultures they claim are hybrid.

The second day of the conference was opened by the panels Otherness in the Interconnected Global World and The Self in 21st Century Individual and Collective Identities. The session Otherness in the Interconnected Global World was chaired by ROELAND GOORTS (University of Maryland Global Campus). According to SIJIE WANG (Justus Liebig University Giessen), who opened the session with her presentation, “The Self-Foreignization of English Romance Readers: Hybridity in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” cultural hybridity was intentionally experienced by members of colonial powers such as women readers. According to Wang, this novel reveals how eighteenth-century women embraced cultural hybridization within the confines of their own country, in their drawing room, by taking on the adventures of other country’s heroines through reading. In this view, otherness could be a positive quality as it transcends gender stereotypes and physical borders.

FATMA KALPAKLI (Selçuk University) discussed the suffering from otherness experienced by immigrants in contemporary times during the presentation “The Otherness in ‘Home Fire’.” She based her talk on Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017), which featured two painful stories from British Pakistani homes that suggest new ways for immigrants to escape otherness through deliberate choices to embrace new cultural traits while keeping meaningful aspects of their culture. According to Kalpakli, otherness can be re-conceptualized through the lenses of global citizenship. In other words, to be hybrids means to be both global and local.

In the conclusive talk of the panel, NUNO GRANCHO (DINÂMIA'CET-University Institute of Lisbon) addressed otherness in his presentation “The ‘Otherness’ in the Global Worlds of Architecture and Urbanism.” His theoretical excursion within the frameworks of postcolonial studies, orientalism, and poststructuralism aimed at critically analyzing the concept of hybridity in architecture. His preliminary conclusions pointed out the importance of new canons of architecture, which should take into account the global interconnectedness of daily life and cultural hybridity. That is, by using subcategories related to global dimensions in order to highlight the illusive nature of the Western concept of otherness.

MARION RUTZ (Justus Liebig University Giessen) chaired the panel The Self in 21st Century Individual and Collective Identities, and the first of the three presenters was M. RAMAKRISHNAN (Central University of Jharkhand) with “Necessitating a Dialogue between the Marginalized Self and the Dominant Other: A Relook at Social Identity in the Interconnected Global World.” The conflict between the dominant and marginalized ethnic groups in India results in a division of financial resources and public recognition. The presentation aimed to understand folkloristic manifestations as a strategy to find a meeting point between the two poles. Folklore becomes the hybrid space involving new communication dynamics which flatten the power differences.

The second presentation of the panel was VERA BUB’s paper “Adrift in a World where ‘One Could Go Anywhere, but Still Find Nothing’ — Cultural Hybridity and Identity Formation in the Interconnected World of Mohsin Haid’s Exit West” (University of Bonn). In the novel Exit West, the protagonists migrate from the difficult reality of their home country to worldwide destinations through magic doors. The possibility of travelling and exploring the world creates a contrast of uncertainties, aspirations and dreams which reshape the protagonists’ values. The discovery of new identity traits or the affirmation of more conservative ones dissolves the idea of otherness but sheds light on the net of connections and disconnections creating cultural differences. The protagonists become the idea and representation of hybrid culture.

The last presentation of the panel was JANA TIBORRA’s paper “Irritations at a Second Glance. The Pictorial Dimension of Hybridity” (Justus Liebig University Giessen). In this contribution, two artists’ works reflect on South African postcolonial realities. Firstly, Nomusa Makhubu’s photo creates a contrast between the image of the artist on the wall and the artist’s body referencing the opposition between the colonized heritage and her stand to re-empower her ethnic identity. Guy Tillim’s pictures show the decaying housing in Johannesburg in light and dark contrasts, expressing marginalized and private examples of poverty. These photographs use hybridity as a methodological and analytical tool to uncover meanings, access history and indicate multi-layered forms of representation.

The panel Nation-State Preservation and Reformulations chaired by SMADAR LAVIE (University of California Davis) demonstrated how nationalistic propaganda exploits hybridity in the construction of national identities, while denying it in reality through exclusion of minorities or other differences. ELIF SÜSLER (University of Applied Arts Vienna) opened the panel with the presentation “Hybrid Appropriations: Sümerbank Textile Patterns 1950–1980s.” In her analysis, she proved the new Turkish Republic’s instrumentalization of cultural hybridity in textile design. The state’s integration of pre-Ottoman aesthetics in fabrics presented as nationally authentic elements revealed its subjective use of hybridity, as they excluded at the same time non-Muslim religious minorities. This propagandistic use illustrates the ambivalent nature of the state with its inclusion and exclusion patterns, as well as how it gained politically and economically from these policies.

ANNA NOVIKOV (University of Greifswald) also noted that hybridity can be exploited for political purposes both today and in the digital sphere during her talk “Digital Patriots: the New Nationalist Virtual Identity in Post-Communist Eurasia.” Through the synthesis of both the nationalist nineteenth-century imaginary and elements of present global pop-culture and political figures, a new nationalist virtual identity has been constructed in post-communist Eurasia that opposes the European Union. This results in a new sort of hybrid nationalism because the new nationalists transcend the physical borders of the states through a transnational approach to thinking about national identity as inherent in regions rather than states. They re-invent nationalism in globalized and digital spaces.

JUAN BRIGARD (Justus Liebig University Giessen) outlined in “The Voice of the Farian Chasqui: A Sketch of the Poetics of History of the FARC-EP” how the official history of Colombian guerillas was constructed. As the previous papers pointed out the instrumentalization of hybridity for political purposes, Brigard also showed how important figures from a pre-colonial past belonging to the native Inca empire, such as Chasqui, are used as sources of authority and credibility to narrate the official story. Not only Chasqui, but also revolutionary, leftist historical figures are used for the same purpose, thus making narrator Chasqui a hybrid figure between the perceived glorious past and a present struggling with changes and crises.

The interview-based research of ANTONIO JESUS TORTOSA and NAIROBI RODRIGUEZ VALENZUELA (both Universidad Europea), “Postcolonial Identities vs. Transatlantic Slavery: When Skin Colour Defines National Identities,” examined the Dominican popular sentiments towards Haiti in light of both the colonial past and the Trujillo dictatorship. In the 19th century, the Dominican Republic was formed as a nation largely based on color, since the mix of races among Dominicans led to the exclusion of Blackness, which was associated with slavery and their neighbor, Haiti. At that time, this national identity led to a strong xenophobic sentiment toward otherness, the Haitian people, and to political violence in the 20th century, which is still encouraged today not by Dominicans but by the state in forms of rigid immigration laws. In this case, hybridity also meant instrumentalization for exclusion of the other.

PNINA WERBNER (Keele University) was the chair of the panel Cultural Transformations between the Local and the Global. We were delighted to create a space of reformulation of hybridity with her expertise which sparked our interest and motivated the realization of the conference. This panel hosted three presentations starting with FABIO ARAÚJO FERNANDES (University of Santa Catarina): “Cultural Pedagogies in Between. The Process of Cultural Negotiation and its Translation Methods through the Teaching of Capoeira in Germany.” The presentation displayed the practice of Capoeira in Germany, recalling its first arrival in Europe and its integration into German culture. This Brazilian cultural expression adapted and transformed according to its practice in the new context and became a trend. This presentation showed that cultural pedagogy uses hybridity as a tool to negotiate identities in a decolonized perspective.

The second presentation of the panel was AMY ZHANG (George Mason University) with the paper “Hybridity in Form and Hybridity in Fact: Islamic Art Galleries in the Arabian Peninsula and the Euro-American West.” This contribution compared museum exhibitions of non-Western art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and of European heritage in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. This study highlights the Western-style orientation in museum arrangements in the Arabian Peninsula in order to claim the legitimacy of the institution. This shows an incongruity with Euro-American art galleries that confine African and Middle-Eastern art to ‘Islamic.’ The danger of representing a privileged hybrid culture shadows peripheral areas in the world.

The last contributor of the panel was EZGI SEREF (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) with the essay “Legal Technologies In-between the Past and the Present Crises: Signing Of/Off the Istanbul Convention.” This presentation analyzed the historical and present position of the Turkish legal system regarding sexual violence. The attempt to sensitively inform the law reinforcement of gender identities reveals the failure of the legal body dominated by aesthetic narratives. In this presentation, hybridity is used as a tool to reflect on the transformations between past and present in the legal system and its position in international law.

During his workshop in the afternoon, “Creating New Socio-Religious Space: Hybridity and Authentic Identity,” R. DANIEL SHAW (Fuller School of Intercultural Studies) attempted to move beyond the concept of syncretism usually applied negatively to describe religious relations between indigenous people and missionaries. Shaw began by considering hybridity from the perspectives of biology, social science, and cognitive science, then its variations such as translation, transculturation, transplantation, grafting, and overlapping. He focused his attention on the relevance theory from cognitive science, which puts an emphasis on the process of communicating ideas rather than on the results of communication. As a consequence, this could create a new missionary paradigm having as sociolinguistic objectives the translation of the Bible and the focus on the other. This would enhance an authentic understanding of the Bible/God for those being evangelized. Hybridity becomes for Shaw a celebration of culture, since the Bible, in which God’s perspective both affirms and criticizes culture, blends with human understanding of reality. In fact, hybridity may refer to God’s incarnation on Earth in time and space, making the multiple forms of Christianity a celebration of both God and culture.

On the third conference day, the panels Home and Far-Away: Identity in Migration and Heritage-Making in Multiple Temporalities were held contemporaneously in the morning. The panel Home and Far-Away: Identity in Migration chaired by BETTINA SEVERIN-BARBOUTIE (Justus Liebig University Giessen) focused on reframing identity and hybridity within the socio-political dynamics of migration as expressed in migration literature. BRAHIM BENMOH (Mohammed V University) proposed the talk “(Re)framing Identity, Hybridity, Exile & Un/Belonging in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature” about the impact of exile on identities in post-9/11 diasporic American narratives such as Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) and Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2009). According to Benmoh, migration literature offers an alternative narrative to state-produced hegemonic ideologies. Through migrants’ subjectivity, it provides transpositional and transnational literary perspectives on the ‘unhomely’ world literature. In other words, it resists colonialism, racism, and nationalism.

In his presentation, “Look at this Image Growing: Hybrids, Grafting and the Jungle in El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve,” IYARI MARTÍNEZ MÁRQUEZ (Catholic University of Portugal / Justus Liebig University Giessen) delivered a theoretical approach to the concept of hybridity by considering it as an eco-metaphor of invasive species to be used as tools to analyze Latin America literature on Europe. Based on El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve (1976) by Gabriel García Márquez, he showed how, in a two-way street process, European portrayals of Latin America, such as with the dichotomy civilized-savage, are being incorporated into the native self-imaginary, but they become in turn a hybrid-grafting way to look at Europe from the Latin American perspective. In this sense, hybrid-grafting is a defence mechanism and a survival strategy for indigenous cultures.

The panel Heritage-Making in Multiple Temporalities, chaired by DRIES BOSSCHAERT (KU Leuven) started with JENNY HAGEMANN’s paper (Leibniz University Hannover): “Uses and Practices of Hybrid Regional Heritage – Including Minority Rights and Protection in the Heritagisation of Post Mine Landscapes in Lusatia.” The presentation explored mining and post-mining sites in Lusatia, Germany, as the heritage of the different cultural transformations and contact between the Sorb minority and German settlers. The industrial heritage contributes to the study of the Sorb population, their relocation and assimilation into the German community and their request for minority protection. In this study, the concept of hybridity foregrounds the interaction and negotiation dynamics in the valorization of diversity and ethnic belonging.

The second paper was “Forgotten Memories: Muslim and Jewish Hybridization in Spanish Culinary and Cultural Identity” by LILLIAN CESPEDES GONZALEZ (University of Winchester). Modern Spanish cuisine highlights the transformations and assimilations of Jewish and Muslim recipes since the Middle Ages, thus, every national dish could be considered a hybrid. Through Spanish demographic surveys, the presentation explored the Spanish perception of national culinary tradition as representative of collective identities both nationally and regionally. As the study suggests, regional Spanish culinary identity responds to regional heritage unaware of its multi-layered and multicultural history. Heritage becomes an element of exclusion as the idea of an hybrid identity is not well digested.

The last presented essay of the panel was “Settler Colonialism without Settlers? Remaking the Past through Architectural Preservation in Casablanca” by ROBERT FLAHIVE (Virginia Tech). This study analyzes the continuation of French colonial influence in the modern architecture of Casablanca, Morocco. The preservation of early 20th century French-Moroccan structures as the ideal site of shared heritage contrasts with native areas of the city considered less important for the cultural patrimony. More than half-a-century after its independence, the presence of French colonial power in Morocco lives on through the Moroccan modernist movement and the conservation of historical structures. The claim colonial power relations persist without colonizers shows that the process of hybridity should teach the recognition of colonial history and the reformulation of its boundaries.

The conclusive event of the conference was the two-part laboratory-debate “Working with Concepts of Hybridity/Identity — Summary Reflections and Critical Impulses.” The first part was conducted by DORIS BACHMANN-MEDICK (Justus Liebig University Giessen), who offered an analytical overview of the concepts of identity and hybridity in the study of culture. Due to its essentialist claims and its consumerist uses in recent times, Bachmann-Medick views identity as a contested and vague concept. If, however, it is defined as a practice of difference and if it is de-essentialized into smaller units of inquiry, it might enable a practical understanding of difference, of the process of becoming, and of actors’ agency. Referring to identity as a choice and as a decision implies identity as positioning and opens up the possibility of hybridizing identities. Ultimately, a hybrid identity is a result of positioning rather than of mixing. Bachmann-Medick then discussed three different interpretations of cultural hybridity. 1) Cultural hybridity as a travelling concept looks at hybridity as both an epistemological and methodological/translational concept, with a focus on marginal cultures and on the process of translation which, by producing new meanings, makes hybridity more visible and concrete. 2) Hybridity as an economic concept deals with the position of nations in the global market in the context of modernization. The issue of borders raises the concern that foreigners will become marketable. 3) The critique of this neoliberal use of hybridity questions asymmetric power relations and inequalities in the global world encounter. When hybridity becomes commodities and brand symbols, it loses its diversity, yet it still claims it. In conclusion, by proposing to let the unknowable be recognizable, reframe hybridity into transculturation, and accept the limitations of meaning in hybridity (because hybridity is always adding, expanding, etc.), Bachmann-Medick argued for a translational approach to hybridity.

The organizers LAURA POPA and CLARA VERRI led the second part of the laboratory-debate. It opened a discussion among panelists of the conference with the purpose of focusing on the futures of cultural hybridity and highlighting the still important issues of the topic. For this purpose, a page on the platform Padlet.com summarized the most important questions raised for each panel. From this pool of questions, the participants were asked to pick the most compelling issues and try to reach an answer or a solution. As a result, the discussion asserted that hybridity explores the multi-layered process of encounter and transformation. it challenges preconceptions and essentialisms that are still difficult to individuate. Hybridity is unique, complex, and is not easily substituted by adjacent concepts. Its power stays in challenging authority both the invisible and recognizable borders.

 

Program

Wednesday, 23 June, 2021

Negotiation of Gender in the Digital Era

Nelly Fas-sad (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany): “Lolita — The Myth of the Child-Woman in Visual Media Concepts”

Athira B. K (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India): “Weddings and Digital Circuits: The Case of an Emergent Bridehood in India”

Aiden James Kosciesza (Temple University, USA): “Gender Hybridity, Cultural Hybridity, and Transcultural Audiences”

Digitalization of Culture

Sara Dinotola (University of Turin, Italy): “Libraries, Cultural Identity and Digital between Local Dimension and Global Dimension”

Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, Alessandra Puccini Montoya (both Universidad Externado de Colombia), Cesar Mora-Moreo (Universidad del Norte Barranquilla, Colombia): “Local Memes, Global Production: Cultural Transduction in the Netflix Promotion Strategy in Colombia”

Nicole Basaraba (Maastricht University, Netherlands): “Creative Digital Placemaking for Shared Cultural Heritage”

Workshop

Luisa Conti, Fergal Lenehan (both Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany), Roman Lietz (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany): “To What Extent Can Post-Digitality Be Understood as ‘Life-World Hybridity’?”

Keynote Lecture

Andreas Langenohl (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “Hybridity and Economy”

Thursday, June 24, 2021

Otherness in the Interconnected Global World

Sijie Wang (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “The Self-Foreignization of English Romance Readers: Hybridity in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote”

Fatma Kalpaklı (Selçuk University, Turkey): “The Otherness in Home-Fire”

Nuno Grancho (DINÂMIA'CET-University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal): “The ‘Otherness’ in the Global Worlds of Architecture and Urbanism”

The Self in 21st Century Individual and Collective Identities

Dr. M. Ramakrishnan (Central University of Jharkhand, India): “Necessitating a Dialogue between the Marginalized Self and the Dominant Other: A Relook at the Social Identity in the Interconnected Global World”

Vera Bub (University of Bonn, Germany): “‘Adrift in a World Where One Could Go Anywhere, but Still Find Nothing’ — Cultural Hybridity and Identity Formation in the Interconnected World of Mohsin Haid’s Exit West”

Jana Tiborra (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “Irritations at a Second Glance: The Pictorial Dimension of Hybridity”

Nation-State Preservation and Reformulations

Elif Süsler (University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria): “Hybrid Appropriations: Sümerbank Textile Patterns 1950–1980s”

Anna Novikov (University of Greifswald, Germany): “Digital Patriots: The New Nationalist Virtual Identity in the Post-Communist Eurasia”

Juan Brigard (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “The Voice of the Farian Chasqui: A Sketch of the Poetics of History of the FARC-EP”

Antonio Jesús Pinto Tortosa, Nairobi Rodríguez Valenzuela (both Universidad Europea, Spain): “Postcolonial Identities vs. Transatlantic Slavery: When Skin Colour Defines National Identities”

Cultural Transformations between the Local and the Global

Fabio Araújo Fernandes (University of Santa Catarina, Brazil): “Cultural Pedagogies in Between. The Process of Cultural Negotiation and its Translation Methods through the Teaching of Capoeira in Germany”

Amy Zhang (George Mason University, USA): “Hybridity in Form and Hybridity in Fact: Islamic Art Galleries in the Arabian Peninsula and the Euro-American West”

Ezgi Seref (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA): “Legal Technologies In-between the Past and the Present Crises: Signing Of/Off the Istanbul Convention”

Workshop

R. Daniel Shaw (Fuller School of Intercultural Studies, USA): “Creating New Socio-Religious Space: Hybridity and Authentic Identity”

Friday, June 25, 2021

Home and Far-Away: Identity in Migration

Brahim Benmoh (Mohammed V University, Morocco): “(Re)framing Identity, Hybridity, Exile & Un/Belonging in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature”

Iyari Martínez Márquez (Catholic University of Portugal, Portugal / Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “Look at this Image Growing: Hybrids, Grafting and the Jungle in El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve”

Heritage-Making in Multiple Temporalities

Jenny Hagemann (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany): “Uses and Practices of Hybrid Regional Heritage — Including Minority Rights and Protection in the Heritagisation of Post Mine Landscapes in Lusatia”

Lillian Cespedes Gonzalez (University of Winchester, UK): “Forgotten Memories: Muslim and Jewish Hybridization in Spanish Culinary and Cultural Identity”

Robert Flahive (Virginia Tech, USA): “Settler Colonialism without Settlers? Remaking the Past through Architectural Preservation in Casablanca”

Laboratory — Debate

Doris Bachmann-Medick (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “Working with Concepts of Hybridity/Identity — Summary Reflections and Critical Impulses (Part I)”

Laura Popa, Clara Verri (both Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany): “Working with Concepts of Hybridity/Identity — Summary Reflections and Critical Impulses (Part II)”

Copyright 2021, LAURA POPA, CLARA VERRI. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).