Professor of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Moritz Ege will deliver the final seminar from the series “Identity Politics: migrants in the cultural field of megacities”. It will be devoted to the theme “Popular culture, masculinity, and ambiguity of the post-migrants visibility in modern Germany”. The event will be held at Russian Presidential Academy Medialoft on the 3rd of July.
Moritz Ege’s research areas include urban and youth subculture ethnography, popular culture anthropology, urban ethics, economic anthropology, and the history of cultural research and theory. He’s also covering the history of “aframericanаila” in modern Germany. He has written on the complexities of every-day symbolic border-drawing and -crossing in societies shaped by migration, racism, and social inequality, particularly in the context of youth subcultures („Ein Proll mit Klasse“. Mode, Popkultur und soziale Ungleichheiten unter jungen Männern in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2013), and on exoticism, solidarity, and sexuality (Schwarz werden. „Afroamerikanophilie“ in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, Bielefeld 2007). He was a member of the research network „Black Diaspora and Germany“ and is currently involved in the research group „Urban Ethics. Conflicts about ‚good’ conduct of life in 20th and 21st Century Cities“.
The coming seminar will be devoted to the theme “Popular culture, masculinity, and ambiguity of the post-migrants visibility in modern Germany”
The social tension induced by the migration flow in Europe is mostly caused by the prevalence of the profiles of the dangerous “non-white” young people. Popular culture and primarily gangsta rap is the point of dense concentration of such profiles. To a strong disappointment of the German liberal-left groups, rap artists coming from the migrants often facilitate reproduction of the negative stereotypes regarding the communities which they used to be associated with. These stereotypes ascend to the ethos of masculinity, brute force, and law violations.
At the very same time, migrant rappers inherit these patterns straight from the American popular culture. Gangsta rap esthetics claims hard realism but at the very same time refers to the genre gaming element. It meanwhile attracts and repulses combining fears and wishes, not corresponding to the civil publicity rules.
Moritz Ege will reveal the genealogy of the progressive academic critics of the given representations of migrants and of those culture industries into which they are incorporated. The report will discover the key contradictions of the post-migrant visibility in the contemporary German popular culture. Ege’s approach is grounded on investigating the presence of migrants in the public fields of contemporary social practices in Germany using two optics – culture representations meant above and the ethnography of everyday interactions that comment and dispute these representations.
The language of instruction is English. Please, register to be included in the list of listeners.
The seminar will start on July, 3, at 7 p.m. Room 22 in the 1st building of the RANEPA Medialoft (Prechistenskaya Naberezhnaya, 11).
