In 2020, the death of one man by police officers sparked protest, riots and campaigns for defunding the police, at a time when the Pandemic threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and Americans debated whether or not limitations on their freedoms were acceptable to save their fellow citizens from dying.
Mediated pictures of returning corpses of American soldiers during the Vietnam War fueled the Anti-Vietnam War movement and at the same time brought about more sanitized versions of news reporting about the many American wars. Every single day reports on gun deaths, almost pandemic-like - cover the front pages of newspapers and their websites. What really came out of the March for our Lives (2018) against school shootings?
Death, rather than life, seems to be the key to understanding contemporary American culture where murders are committed, fictionalized as True Crime and some - as with the death penalty - authorized. Assassins have turned presidents into martyrs; drug overdoses have immortalized artists as stars. The Grim Reaper, sometimes feared, sometimes thought of as the great equalizer, has become a pop-cultural icon.
This discussion-based seminar will explore how American culture deals with life's indispensable part, death, and will thus help broaden our understanding of American society's complexity with topics ranging from death as patriotic duty (honored by countless memorials) to the contemporary dispute over abortion rights and all the way to recycling corpses for a greener future of the survivors.
- Dozent/in: Anette Brauer