“Stories one tells in dark times”: Fabulation, fugitivity, and futurity in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst

This article engages with aesthetic acts of experimentation in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst . Building on recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics in Wenzel's text, I argue that these experiments are intertwined with key themes in the book, particularly issues of racializ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe German quarterly Vol. 97; no. 1; pp. 75 - 92
Main Author Roca Lizarazu, Maria
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cherry Hill American Association of Teachers of German, Inc 01.01.2024
Subjects
Aesthetics
Cultural Context
Experiments
Futures
German literature
Historiography
Literary criticism
Novels
Politics
Subjectivity
Trauma
Violence
Wenzel, Olivia
World History
Germany
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Summary:This article engages with aesthetic acts of experimentation in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst . Building on recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics in Wenzel's text, I argue that these experiments are intertwined with key themes in the book, particularly issues of racialization and of Black (im‐)possibility in present‐day Germany. In this context, my article focuses on a largely overlooked aspect of Wenzel's text, namely its surreal, fantastical, and speculative elements. Drawing on Tavia Nyong'o and Saidiya Hartman's notion of “(critical) fabulation,” I propose that Wenzel's writing mobilizes fantastic, imaginative, and speculative elements to unsettle oppressive realities and realisms in favor of alternative modes of world‐ and future‐making. Inspired by Tina M. Campt's work, I conceptualize these re‐makings as “fugitive” and quotidian strategies, developed in response to a broken world, which still have the potential to generate new infrastructures for relationality and futurity.
ISSN:0016-8831
1756-1183
DOI:10.1111/gequ.12418