Inhaltsangabe
Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.
The stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.
Contributors:
Lieven Ameel, Juliane Borosch, Barbara Buchenau, Florian Deckers, Barbara Eckstein, Kornelia Freitag, Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Jens Martin Gurr, Elisabeth Haefs, Chris Katzenberg, Johannes Maria Krickl, Renee M. Moreno, Hanna Rodewald, Julia Sattler, Maria Sulimma, James A. Throgmorton, Michael Wala, Katharina Wood
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Barbara Buchenau is Professor of North American Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Jens Martin Gurr is Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Maria Sulimma is Junior Professor of North American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg.
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Have we come to a new era of narrating the city in Western democracies? And is narration an appropriate technique to influence powerful transformations? In a video statement announcing the United Nations Policy Brief “Covid-19 in an Urban World” in July 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres evoked stories of atomic wars and 9/11 alike when he described cities as “ground zero” of the global pandemic (United Nations). Like Guterres, many politicians, activists, scientists, and journalists framed the COVID-19 pandemic as a decidedly urban phenomenon, challenging their listeners to understand the spread of the virus as a fundamental threat to their cities. Urban dwellers, infrastructures, and lifestyles were registered by the media as the first and foremost victims. Simultaneously, public discourse and the professional fields of urban management and urban planning picked up on the added sense of opportunity and futurity that emerged from this multiauthored narrative documentation: The pandemic was seized as an incentive to rethink and restructure urban communities. Between 2020 and 2022, several factual as well as fictionalized narratives surrounding cities and pandemics surfaced in newspapers, statements of politicians, or social media posts from around the world. These texts contributed to the recrafting of the canonical and starkly racialized scripts of urban flight and deserted cities.
Urban flight, deserted cities: each a pas de deux that refers readers back to a contingent, albeit conspicuous, assemblage of narrative techniques, performing characters, medial frames, and figural interpretation. They recall past crises, sketch present urban isolation, and call for future urban action. They are especially familiar descriptors for transformational processes in so-called “legacy cities” adapting to major global shifts in the heavy industries. Most importantly for the volume at hand, they are scripts—consequential, but rather terse and stereotyping placemaking strategies at the intersections between textuality, urban space, mediality, performativity, and materiality. Drawing on mental schemata and conceptual models, scripts tend to renew outdated explanations of social transformations to pitch story arcs forward into the future. This new pandemic life given to two well-worn abbreviations of urban change is one example of city scripts as highly condensed, and yet expansive in scope, dynamic storytelling phenomena to be methodically analyzed in this book.
As the example of the compressed yet complex storytelling sparked by the rise of a pandemic demonstrates, factual and fictional stories affect how we imagine our cities and life within them. Two contrapuntal fields of urban practices equally depend on this ability to invent plausible stories of collective action, partial cohesion, and selective connectedness: political activism and urban planning. This volume suggests the city script as a methodological and conceptual framework to better analyze and understand such future-oriented storytelling. The conceptualization of scripts as much as the observation of material practices of scripting and the performative dimension of “scriptivity” permit innovative insights into the transgressive overlap and interdependence of fictional, factual, and real-life modes of urban and anti-urban imaginaries.
City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists such as Rita Felski in Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and Paula M. L. Moya in The Social Imperative (2016) to develop methods for a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things” by, for instance, allowing their readers to enter into emotionally and epistemically transformative “interracial friendship[s]” with literary characters and with the narrative progression that can and will “prompt a reader to question and then revise some of her assumptions about structures of racial and economic inequality.” We are particularly interested in how narratives take action in everyday life. This book will analyze polysemic assemblages of narrative, media, and poetics with their multiplying and contesting temporal, spatial, and material groundings.
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