DFG Project Manifesto
As part of the project "The Upsurge of the Manifesto in Contemporary Debates on Diversity in the United States," we examine a broad range of contemporary manifestos to explore their strategies of formalization and their functions.
The high number of sociopolitical manifestos published in recent years in the United States - as well as on the international stage - covers a broad spectrum of sociopolitical and cultural-critical voices. This group of thematically diverse texts ranges from Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto (2019) by Cinzia Arruzza et al. through L. H. Stallings's A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (2020) to Charles M. Blow's The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto (2021) and Cynthia Cruz's The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021). These texts express the highly dynamic public engagement of their authors, their advocacy for fundamental sociopolitical change, and their often controversial demands.
The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and has been running since October 2022. Its goal is to answer research questions about the themes, modes of formalization , and the strategies of the (identity-)political and discursive positioning of their speakers, as well as to link this research to the study of plural societies. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a better understanding of how subjects and groups position themselves in debates about diversity through the strategic use of a genre, as well as to genre theory that takes historical specificities and structural and discursive power relations seriously.
Project publications thus far:
Handl, Laura, and Carsten Junker. “Gaga Meta-manifestos.” Activist Writing: History, Politics, Rhetoric, edited by Pierre-Héli Monot, David Bebnowski, and Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier, intercom, 2024, pp. 173–184, www.intercom-mono.com/160/Activist_Writing.
Junker, Carsten. “Traversing Time: Dialectical Temporal Gestures in the Blended Genre of the Essay Manifesto.“ The Time of the Essay, special issue of CounterText, edited by Mario Aquilina, vol. 9, no. 3, 2023, pp. 373–89, doi.org/10.3366/count.2023.0321.
Junker, Carsten. “Claiming Class: The Manifesto between Categorical Disruption and Stabilization.” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 63, nos. 2–3, 2023, pp. 189–205, doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2023.2214860.
Junker, Carsten. “Innovation and Iteration: Queer Machines and the Tension between Manifesto and Manifestor.” Queer Reflections on AI: Uncertain Intelligences, edited by Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, Routledge, 2023, pp. 145-61, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003357957.
Junker, Carsten. “Innovation und Iteration: Queere Maschinen und das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Manifest und Manifestor*in.” Queere KI: Zum Coming-out smarter Maschinen, edited by Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, transcript, 2022, pp. 217-36, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839461891-013.
Junker, Carsten. “The Recent Upsurge of the Manifesto, or: Who Owns the Means of Disruption?” America and Ownership: Territory, Slavery, Jubilee, edited by Gesa Mackenthun. Winter, expected 2025.
Handl, Laura. “Politics of Anger and Trauma Disclosure in Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto (2020)”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, Aug. 2024, pp. 46-64, doi:10.5283/copas.387.
Handl, Laura. “’Be the red worm in the dirt. Be the honeysuckle on the vine’ - Queer Southern Place-making in A Dirty South Manifesto (2020).“ AmLit - American Literatures, vol. 4, no. 2, Oct. 2024, pp. 105-22.amlit.eu, https://doi.org/10.25364/27.4:2024.2.6.
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© Sven Ellger/TUD
Research Assistant
NameLaura Handl M.A.
Research and Teaching
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