African American Studies

In the multidisciplinary field of African American Studies, we contribute to preserving and enhancing knowledge about the literature and culture of black people in North America. We examine the continuing legacies of slavery and colonialism, including the cultural negotiation of racial categories and racist structures. A special focus of our work at Konstanz is on the transnational dimensions of African American culture: on exchange, confrontation, and intermingling across North America and around the Black Atlantic. Our current research projects include:

­The African American Sonnet: A Literary History

Based on extensive archival research, Timo Müller's new book traces the rich tradition of the sonnet in African American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Using sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on literary history, the book examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry.

Comparative Race Studies

This project takes a comparative look at national self-conceptualizations with regard to race in the United States and Canada. It traces historical and contemporary differences, such as a greater reliance on slave labor in the U.S. vs. Canada as an endpoint of the Underground Railroad, or also Canada’s more explicit commitment to multiculturalism. On this basis, it enlists literary texts to critically reexamine the ways in which race is deployed or ignored for constructing U.S. and Canadian national identity.

Poetics of Hip Hop

This collaborative research project examines how one of the globally most influential art forms of our time—hip hop—shapes ideas and identities around the world. We examine rap lyrics from different linguistic and cultural contexts to identify how they deploy formal devices to negotiate social issues. Key interests of the project include metapoetic reflection in rap lyrics and the migrant dimensions of hip hop poetics.

The Realities of Race: Black and White in the American Novel Since the Millennium

Eva Gruber's ongoing research project examines the ways in which American novels of the last two decades negotiate the simultaneous deconstruction of race as a scientifically valid concept and its continued palpable manifestations and repercussions in the real world. Texts by both African-American and white writers are read as critically testing the limits of constructivist notions of race and identity through, among other strategies, a renewed emphasis on referentiality.

Hip Hop Ecologies

A field-defining workshop on hip hop ecologies convened online in February 2021. The results will be published a as a special issue of Ecozon@, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand and Timo Müller, in 2022.