Internationale wissenschaftliche Veranstaltung: ?Requisiten des Globalen. Dinge aus der Ferne als Medien der Weltvermittlung in literarischen und performativen Konstellationen“, Berlin, 02.11.2023 - 04.11.2023

How do things from afar contribute to thinking a global world? The proposed conference is dedicated to the significance of such things as props mediating globality in literary texts and performative constellations. The aim of the event is to re-evaluate things from afar, pointing beyond an attribution as exotisms. Rather, props of the global open up spaces of possibility in order to perpetuate one's own cultural contexts in appropriation and demarcation, and as elements for the constitution of cultural transfer and world community they contribute their share to an understanding of mediated globality.
By bearing the material traces of their origin, by telling of their journey, and by inviting us to engage with distance, objects from afar create an idea of global dimensions. Through their implementation in Western European contexts, they unfold a specific productivity, which the conference explores from two perspectives: First, it asks how things from afar constitute a global space in literary texts and theater performances. Props are involved in the constitution of spatiality as elements that occupy space, help to shape space, and are integrated into a spatial practice. On the other hand, the event sheds light on the community-generating dimension of props of the global. The aim is to investigate which forms of community are designed via these things or with these things.
Thus, the event perspectives things from afar not exclusively as exotisms, but as media of world production and mediation. The already widely researched exoticization of foreign things sets them in contrast to the 'own' of Western European societies and thus cements a relation of difference to the 'other' that excludes productive dynamics. The perception of things from afar as 'props of the global' should now broaden the view and ask to what extent these things point to the transnational interconnectedness of the world and to exchange relations with non-European spaces; to what extent they also tell of multiple border crossings and entanglements.