Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

PhD Project:

The Privilege of Crisis: Narrative Patterns of Masculinities in English Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography, and Film

Desciption of the Project

Based on the assumption that the often-cited discourse of the »crisis of masculinity« is privileged, this interdisciplinary thesis combines approaches from literary, cultural, and postcolonial studies in order to analyze narrative patterns of masculinities in colonial fiction by H. Rider Haggard,
Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad as well as colonial photography. Juxtaposed to the colonial sources are readings of postcolonial novels by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as of films by Stephen Frears and Neil Jordan. This focus of the study on discursive peak phases of colonial and postcolonial crises of masculinity in modern and postmodern times, respectively, is not based on the assumption that masculinity is, in fact, in crisis. Rather the analysis foregrounds the rise of crises narratives which turn crisis into a privileged narrative pattern of hegemonic masculinity.

Particulars

Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a Focus on Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She studied English and American studies as well as theatre studies/cultural communication in Berlin and London, 2009 PhD in English studies, 2011 Guest Professor of Modern English Literature at HU Berlin, 2012 Substitute for the Junior Professorship British Cultural Studies in Potsdam, 2012-2014 Assistant Professor (Postdoc) at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. From 2014 to 2017 she was Junior Professor of English Literature at the University of Flensburg and in 2013 she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz.

Selected Publications

zus. m. Eveline Kilian u. Beatrice Michaelis (Hg.): Queer Futures. Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, Farnham 2013.

zus. m. Beatrice Michaelis u. Gabriele Dietze (Hg.): The Queerness of Things Not Queer. Entgrenzungen, Materialitäten, Interventionen. Feministische Studien 30/2 (2012).

(M)Other Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures. The Politics of Imagining the British Family. In: Anglistentag 2011 Freiburg. Proceedings, hg. v. Monika Fludernik u. Benjamin Kohlmann, Trier 2012. S. 339 – 351.

The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2011

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