In recent decades Toni Negri and Giorgio Agamben have developed a thinking of potentiality, with which they oppose the effects of imperial sovereignty and biopolitical discipline in radically different ways. At the same time, both authors work with theoretical reductions that block their promise to develop a new way of thinking the political.

As a global working class, the working class of today is just as subaltern as the Italian peasants of the south in former times. Yet how can the people who are set in a transnational relation to one another by the flexible production chain of contemporary capitalism articulate their relationship to one another?

Critical Whiteness Studies are a flourishing project – both within the academy and beyond. Drawing on current publications in this field in German, and focusing on the notions of whiteness and of white privilege which are employed here, Ina points to some of the particular strenghts, as well as to current limits of the whiteness debate.

Beim Versuch, aktuelle Entwicklungen der Migration anschaulich und die darauf reagierende Politik plausibel zu machen, spielen Karten und Diagramme eine entscheidende Rolle. In der Forschung, in politischen Aushandlungssprozessen und in der medialen Berichterstattung dienen sie der Repräsentation angeblich objektiver Verhältnisse. Im Rahmen des Projektes MigMap wurden gängige Kartierungsverfahren kritisch reflektiert und ein eigenes Mapping des aktuellen Europäischen Migrationsregimes entwickelt.

The official scripting of the Northern Irish conflict in recent years has worked to define and accentuate ethnic and linguistic difference, suggesting that only officially mediated processes of cultural translation can bridge those ‘inherent communal divides’. This produces not only absolute, reified identities, but also works against initiatives that seek to address questions of history, power and democracy. Thus, the peace process has largely continued the management of conflict without addressing the aporia of the border.

Ein zentrales Thema der Kritischen Weißseinsforschung ist die Problematisierung von Privilegien. Doch in ihrer auf Normen fokussierten Analyse inthronisiert sie nicht selten erneut ein weißes Subjekt zur eigenen Immunisierung.

There is a recurring debate within and outside Babels, the international network that provides volunteer interpretation in the Social Forums: is Babels a service provider whose major concern should be quality in interpretation or a political actor that helps mobilize people through its choices and practices? The answer is relevant to the nature of the Social Forums.

What are the consequences of a “discursive colonization” of subalternity by metropolitan postcolonialism? Is there a conflict of interest between migrant hybridism located in the “first world” and the indigenous subaltern woman in the rural “third world”. What is the postcolonial feminist to do in the face of her complicity in the failure of decolonisation? These are challenging questions that need to be addressed in the German-speaking context.

Contrary to widespread condemnation in the German mainstream press, the term precariat does not designate a dissociated lower class (“abgehängte Unterschicht”), but rather a striving for new forms of organizing in dispersion. Precariat is neither a state that empirically describes a class, nor a function of the teleology of a class in itself. Instead it is a becoming, a struggle, a question.

Da das digitale globale Gemeinsame nicht für alle erreichbar oder gleich bedeutend ist, also nicht von einer globalen Gesellschaft genutzt werden kann, weil das angebotene Wissen etwa nie für alle von Interesse ist, von allen verstanden werden kann und schlicht und einfach für einen Großteil nicht zugänglich ist, bleibt es ein uneingelöstes Versprechen.

There is a linguistic code peculiar to the housing estates of the French banlieue. Within this code, which defies the long-established authority of the written language, oral exercises displaying a high degree of verbal artistry are stimulating the rediscovery of oral culture. People engage in “digs”, “verbal jousting” and “slamming”, word games that trace elegant and rugged metaphorical arabesques whose fury is akin to the fury expressed in graffiti, rap or even riots. With uncompromising frankness and biting wit, language works on the misunderstandings that arise from ordinary encounters and life in the suburban housing estates.

A current analysis of the conjunctures of racism today must understand the shifts in its forms of organisation and its articulations. Therefore we need to develop a relational theory of racism, which takes as its base the struggles against it, and not the subjects that have been constructed by racism.

The initially apparently trivial story – the conflict over bilingual signposts in southern Carinthia – holds an abundance of chasms at a closer look, which inevitably link this story with larger historical and political contexts.

Welche Perspektiven ergeben sich aus den Re-Präsenzen der Kolonialgeschichte in der Migration? „Note d’intention“ zu einem Videoprojekt von Brigitta Kuster und Moise Merlin Mabouna.

"Culture," wrote Raymond Williams in 1976, "is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts." Williams' remark holds a valuable suggestion for a critical examination of the concept of culture, specifically where he refers to the "use" of the term culture "for important concepts": it points to the operative character of this term.

Appearing as a convenient category in describing cultural mixture where the diasporized meets the host in the scene of migration, the notion of hybridity and its career as a new cultural politics should be examined carefully.

Can culture be translated? It is not often that we are confronted with a question that becomes all the more difficult, the easier it is to answer: no.

The debate on cultural globalization also often involves so-called postcolonial theory. What does this encompass?

On language, nationalism, federalism and postcolonialism in Belgium: the recovery of anti-colonialist discursive material devices in behalf of the federal (re)formation of the state.