Monographs/Edited Volumes by Susanne Leikam
Framing Spaces in Motion explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the r... more Framing Spaces in Motion explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the risk of their recurrences and how these moments of physical and ideological rupture emerge as sites of negotiation for preexisting cultural, political, and economic conflicts. From an in-depth examination of the early modern European textual and visual repertoires of making sense of earthquakes, Framing Spaces in Motion traces the development of earthquake discourses and framing patterns into the nineteenth-century United States. A profound discussion of the historical protocols of disaster discourses in the San Francisco Bay Area paves the ground for an extensive analysis of the earthquake framings of one of the most prolifically visualized events at the turn of the century, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Framing Spaces in Motion is the first comprehensive study to investigate the rhetorical and pictorial conventions of framing earthquakes from a transnational perspective and also one of the first to devote ample attention to the visual culture of natural disasters by assessing earthquake pictures in their interpictorial relationships, (in)visibilities, and strategic manipulations. In addition to its grounding in Transnational American Studies, the analysis is located at the intersection of visual culture studies, disaster studies, ecocriticism, and memory studies.
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Iconographies of the Calamitous contributes to current visual culture research by exploring the i... more Iconographies of the Calamitous contributes to current visual culture research by exploring the interdisciplinary crossroads between the visual and the calamitous with a particular focus on pictorial repertoires, the visuals’ agency in (competing) American narratives, invisibilities, and the cultural embeddedness of the gaze. The research of (mediated) spectacles of calamity is of great importance not only because the twenty-first century seems to supply the technologies required for the ever increasing production, archiving, and conservation of images, but also because pictures of calamities have carried a particularly high cultural and political capital in the course of American history. The articles by Astrid Böger, Katrin Dauenhauer, Ingrid Gessner, Susanne Leikam, Miles Orvell, and Andrea Zittlau collected in this special issue testify to the fundamental political nature of the production, function, and resignification of visual representations of death, ruin, disease, violence, and destruction and point towards the formation of a formation of an iconography of the calamitous, which may serve as a tool to further explore the field of visual disease and disaster studies.
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Articles by Susanne Leikam
MatteRealities: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies, 2019
This article investigates the multifaceted roles that pictorial representations of the human body... more This article investigates the multifaceted roles that pictorial representations of the human body have played in earthquake visualizations. From the first conventional repertoires in early modern Europe to the photographic iconographies of the early-twentieth-century United States, human bodies have served as tangible proxies—human seismographs—visualizing not only the actual intensity of the seismic forces but also the severe disruption of contemporary cultural ideas, beliefs, and worldviews. As a general pictorial motif, the human body moreover allows viewers to emotionally identify and develop empathy, enhancing the pictures’ cultural efficacy. Drawing on samples from San Francisco’s earthquake of 1906, the study shows how the staging of bodies has stayed a central signifier of the cultural disruption even after seismology brought about the demystification of earthquakes. With the financialization of earthquakes and the shift of the public’s attention to the aftermath of earthquakes, human bodies became materialized ideology, strategically appropriated in order to promote political, economic, and ideological agendas. As such, the human body emerges as a juncture in the popular earthquake iconographies linking—but also complicating—competing categories such as, for instance, mind and matter, private and public, local and (trans)national, individual and collective.
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This article explores T.C. Boyle’s thirteenth novel When the Killing’s Done (2011) in regard to i... more This article explores T.C. Boyle’s thirteenth novel When the Killing’s Done (2011) in regard to its representation of ecological crisis and the ensuing environmental activism. In particular, it argues that the distinctly urban background and way of life of the two main protagonists, National Park Service staff member Alma Boyd Takesue and radical eco-hipster Dave LaJoy, foster environmental imaginations of the California Channel Islands that underestimate the centuries-long agricultural uses of the islands and romanticize the islands’ ecosystems as pristine ‘wilderness.’ While this perception in the tradition of the ‘American cult of wilderness’ prompts Alma and the National Park Service to reestablish a historical state of the islands’ ecosystems through the calculated extermination of invasive species, eco-activist Dave fiercely fights for the right of every non-human animal to live. Ultimately, the novel deconstructs both these endeavors to biodiversity and animal rights as highly flawed and environmentally as well as ethically inconsistent.
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The large-scale destruction of San Francisco after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire con... more The large-scale destruction of San Francisco after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire confronted the city with the unprecedented task of providing food and water for several hundred thousand survivors. The long bread lines stretching several blocks through the ruined city emerged as an iconic sight of the 1906 calamity and were readily taken up as popular motifs by the masses of amateur and professional photographers. This article explores various transmedial framings of the bread lines and pays particular attention to the pictorial repertoire, reoccurring patterns, and motifs as well as the cultural functions performed by these visual representations. It also delves into the questions of the ethics of gazing at destruction and destitution and considers the effect of the sensationalist and voyeuristic visuals on financial aid and charity. Through a close examination of the practices of disaster relief, this analysis also investigates the invisibilities and gaps in the visual bread line narratives. Thereby the ‘official’ narrative of the disaster—pushed by the city’s entrepreneurs (esp. the Real Estate Board and the major railroad company Southern Pacific) and politicians—depicting the bread lines as class-less spaces and icons of social cohesion as well as order is complicated, and the memorialization of the disaster as social equalizer is exposed as a perpetuation of the official narrative and as a turn to the silver linings of the 1906 disaster.
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Book Chapters by Susanne Leikam
This chapter analyzes the global media coverage of the 2013 floodings in southeastern Germany and... more This chapter analyzes the global media coverage of the 2013 floodings in southeastern Germany and Colorado and argues that, while the flood photographs and their rhetorical framing resonant strongly with crucial contemporary world-wide political, cultural, and economic developments and expose neoliberal ideologies, they fail to embed the high-water narratives in their complex and multifaceted local and cultural contexts. Recovering these idiosyncratic reference frameworks not only reveals the inherent problems of comparing extreme weather events, but also illustrates the global media coverage’s failure to convey cultural and historical subtexts and appropriations of the floods as projections screens for local and national disputes.
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Framing Spaces in Motion explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the r... more Framing Spaces in Motion explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the risk of their recurrences and how these moments of physical and ideological rupture emerge as sites of negotiation for preexisting cultural, political, and economic conflicts. From an in-depth examination of the early modern European textual and visual repertoires of making sense of earthquakes, Framing Spaces in Motion traces the development of earthquake discourses and framing patterns into the nineteenth-century United States. A profound discussion of the historical protocols of disaster discourses in the San Francisco Bay Area paves the ground for an extensive analysis of the earthquake framings of one of the most prolifically visualized events at the turn of the century, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Framing Spaces in Motion is the first comprehensive study to investigate the rhetorical and pictorial conventions of framing earthquakes from a transnational perspective and also one of the first to devote ample attention to the visual culture of natural disasters by assessing earthquake pictures in their interpictorial relationships, (in)visibilities, and strategic manipulations. In addition to its grounding in Transnational American Studies, the analysis is located at the intersection of visual culture studies, disaster studies, ecocriticism, and memory studies.
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Drafts by Susanne Leikam
In my paper, I will look at two examples—Barbara Kingsolver’s much-praised novel Flight Behavior ... more In my paper, I will look at two examples—Barbara Kingsolver’s much-praised novel Flight Behavior (2012) and Anthony C. Ferrante’s disaster film parody Sharknado (2013)—in terms of how masculinities are performed and constructed in regard to power and nature. The two texts might, at first glance, not seem to go well together—one a serious literary and didactic approach in the canonical form of the novel to species extinction and thus to the long-term impact of climate change, the other a spectacular, blatantly amateurish film parody of the paradigmatic shallow disaster blockbuster putting entertainment first. Yet, both go well together in this analysis since they—even if to different degrees—perform valuable environmental work by addressing one of the most pressing environmental concerns of the twenty-first century: anthropogenic climate change and its manifold effects. Furthermore, they show that extreme weather scenarios also tend to function as projection screens that negotiate more general cultural ideologies and normative trajectories, thereby either reinforcing or contesting particular cultural imaginaries about gender, race, or class, among others. The two works also demonstrate the need to look beyond the educational impulse and/or spectacular staging of extreme weather to uncover to the plethora of ideologies, gender imaginaries, and norms that often come in very subtle ways along with tales of extreme weather in order to see how a society entangles visions of environmental and social justice.
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Online Publications by Susanne Leikam
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Journal Articles by Susanne Leikam
Our editors' introduction, written by Susanne Leikam and me, for this extended forum on cli-fi, w... more Our editors' introduction, written by Susanne Leikam and me, for this extended forum on cli-fi, which includes contributions from Nassim Balestrini, Hannes Bergthaller, Pawel Frelik, and Alexa Weik von Mossner.
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Papers by Susanne Leikam
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2016
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In American popular culture, Susanne Leikham argues, there are many stories that feature extreme ... more In American popular culture, Susanne Leikham argues, there are many stories that feature extreme weather events. The extreme weather hero, a male heroic idol, often presents in these stories as a figure who knows how to control nature and reassert order. Using the popular culture film Sharknado (2013) as an example, Leikman explores and analyzes the underlying gendered assumptions of the extreme weather hero.
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by Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda Over the last two decades, the global landscape of cultural pro... more by Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda Over the last two decades, the global landscape of cultural production has been teeming with a cornucopia of fictional texts, in print, in live performance, and on the screen, engaging with the local and global impact of advanced human-induced climate change. In academia as well as in popular culture, this rapidly growing body of texts is now commonly referred to by the catchy linguistic portmanteau ‘cli-fi.’
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Our editors' introduction, written by Susanne Leikam and me, for this extended forum on c... more Our editors' introduction, written by Susanne Leikam and me, for this extended forum on cli-fi, which includes contributions from Nassim Balestrini, Hannes Bergthaller, Pawel Frelik, and Alexa Weik von Mossner.
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Monographs/Edited Volumes by Susanne Leikam
Articles by Susanne Leikam
Book Chapters by Susanne Leikam
Drafts by Susanne Leikam
Online Publications by Susanne Leikam
Journal Articles by Susanne Leikam
Papers by Susanne Leikam